Work is so never-ending, Rihanna had to repeat it five times in a row just to make her point. Chances are, you’re really feeling this right now. Maybe you’ve recently gone back to school, or you’re slowly accepting the fact that summer is over and thus a slightly more languid pace is no longer tolerated at work. Music can’t give you more hours in a day, but it can propel you to do more with what you have. But it’s tricky.
Across our staff (with a few dissenters, of course), we tend to agree that music with lyrics is not ideal when your work involves stringing together words in any capacity, as many office jobs do. (That is, unless you have memorized the lyrics to the point where you can ignore them so they simply blend into the sound as a whole.) That’s the main way, for most of us, that soundtracks to computer-based work vary from workout jams or albums for cleaning the house, just so we’re clear on what “getting shit done” entails exactly. With that quick note out of the way, we leave you with the albums that have helped us, on a personal level, produce Pitchfork day in and day out.
Ryan Dombal: Fennesz — Black Sea
On July 15, 2008, I watched Christian Fennesz send drones and static and melody through the Winter Garden Atrium in lower Manhattan, a glass-encased hall across the street from where the Twin Towers once stood. At that time, One World Trade Center—the gleaming symbol of American ingenuity, hubris, and perseverance—was mostly still a blueprint. The construction had just reached ground level, and I remember seeing cranes and spotlights dotting the stricken site as Fennesz’s ambience enveloped my ears and thoughts. The washes of noise seemed to cleanse, to suggest upward movement while never forgetting the earth below; they humbly paid reverence to the space, what had been, what was to come.
Eight years later, One World Trade Center is complete, and I find myself working in it five days a week. From Pitchfork’s perch on the 40th floor, I can now look down into the Winter Garden Atrium, which has evolved into a luxury mall where I eat salads during lunchtime. When I’m untangling words on my computer, with the kind of panoramic view people pay tens of millions of dollars for behind me, I often turn to Fennesz’s 2008 album Black Sea. Its undulations tune out distractions while focusing brainwaves. It’s also quietly grand, making the work at hand feel important, but not too important. These carefully placed noises rise and fall, smearing time and space. They uphold the ecstasy of great heights from somewhere even higher.
Jillian Mapes: Daft Punk — Alive 2007
My biggest flaw, as a worker, is that when I’m truly overwhelmed, I’m momentarily paralyzed. I don’t know where to start. A victim of digital multitasking, I just flit between tabs until one task—any task—sticks. To expedite this process, I listen to the souped-up version of “Technologic” that appears on Daft Punk’s second live album and try to remember the basics. These are sounds of my job:
Snap it, work it, quick — erase it
Write it, cut it, paste it, save it
Load it, check it, quick — rewrite it
Plug it, play it, burn it, rip it
Drag and drop it, zip — unzip it
When the beat re-drops around 3:40, my brain feels like it’s blasting off. This is the second track, so the rest of the album basically serves as rocket fuel for a long, funky ride towards productivity. Alive 2007 has worked in this way for me since the week it was released in 2007; I pray it never stops working, like Adderall has for friends who’ve long abused it in dire crushes of to-do list madness. I need the robots to help me work like one.
Mark Richardson: Rhythm & Sound — The Versions
Rhythm & Sound is an offshoot of Basic Channel, the legendary dub techno project of Berlin producers Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus. While Basic Channel proper puts a dub spin on all sorts of harsh and noisy 4/4 music, Rhythm & Sound more leans toward reggae proper. The 2003 compilation With the Artists found the duo teaming with vocalists includingPaul St. Hilaire andJah Batta, but it’s the accompanying release, The Versions, containing the mostly instrumental dubs of those sides, that has accompanied me for many hours of work over the years. This is music with vast chasms of space, where every cymbal brush and echoing percussion tap and yearning syllable of voice is framed by silence. But it also has an uncanny feeling of forward motion, despite the languid tempos. Something about the combination of small sonic details and a gentle by insistent rhythmic drive makes it the ideal work music, ready to stimulate me when I need ideas and keeping me moving when I have to motor through a mindless task.
Jenn Pelly: Jefre Cantu-Ledesma — A Year With 13 Moons
I have never taken Adderall. But I can’t imagine being more focused than I am when Jefre Cantu-Ledesma’s A Year With 13 Moons is occupying space in my life. It forms a gate around me—with elegantly ripped shoegaze guitars and blistering LinnDrum beats—and there is nothing that exists in the world other than the record and my mind. Cantu-Ledesma pushes the music so far into the red and imbues it with so much pummeling light, it arrives at pastel shades that color the album’s meditative drama. The songs are wordless, but titles like “The Last Time I Saw Your Face” and “A Portrait of You at Nico’s Grave” give an idea of the poetry they contain. A Year With 13 Moons is an elixir of shimmer and noise so searingly intense that it amplifies whatever you’re doing. Cantu-Ledesma has cited Eno’s concept of “holographic music” as an inspiration, in which “any brief section of the music is representative of the whole… [lending] a consistent mood to the environments in which they are heard.”
It’s not that 13 Moons is just a buffer to engulf you from distraction. From second to second, it sounds like it is on the brink of something new—and what is work if not a constant process of discovery? Cantu-Ledesma has said that he made the record in the wake of a “disorienting” divorce (it follows 2010’s gorgeous Love Is a Stream), and this atmospheric music cuts straight to some essence of heartbreak and regeneration. It brims with the euphoria of being deep in thought, whether that’s romantic infatuation or a kind of solitary psychic ecstasy. A Year With 13 Moons sounds less like a break-up and more like a breakthrough.
Evan Minsker: Frank Ocean — Endless
Contrary to others here, finding my focus music doesn’t usually mean picking an instrumental album that my co-workers all agree on. Jazz, classical, and ambient music are seemingly tailored for thoughtful writing, but I find them oddly distracting—I’m usually sent down a Wiki rabbit hole spurred by the musician in question. So while it’s probably counterintuitive to prefer listening to music with words while writing, I’m at my most focused while listening to quieter, longer songs with lyrics and momentum. (I knocked out a couple final papers to Joanna Newsom’s Ys.) In the past month, Frank Ocean’s Endless has been fitting the bill quite nicely. There are words, but there’s also echoing, ambient breathing room. There’s a beat and movement. Blonde is a vibrant headphones experience, but Endless is framed as background music—peaceful and seemingly distant. Then there’s the fact that it’s an uninterrupted visual album. There’s no skip button shortcut to jump to the next song—it’s all or nothing. It probably helps, too, that it’s literally presented as a work album—the music all those warehouse-dwelling Franks listen to while building theirTom Sachs stairway to heaven.
Matthew Schnipper: Charlemagne Palestine — “Strumming Music”
“Strumming Music,” from 1974, is a nearly hour-long piece of solo piano work by Charlemagne Palestine. The use of ‘strumming’ here seems to be more in a loving spirit than a literal one—a reference to the caress Palestine gives the Bosendorfer. But perhaps it should in reference to what the music does to your ears. It’s not droning in a traditional sense, in that Palestine often plays quite quickly, even nervously, but the piece does have an underlying long tone, bridging the worlds between Steve Reich and Terry Riley. I could listen to this music forever. In fact, I often do.
I enjoy listening to the same piece of music repeatedly, and often find that the music I love the most is itself repetitive. “Strumming Music” is a one long blob of song, hard piano playing reaching for the sun and then back down into my soul. It serves many purposes. If you want to cry listening to music, this would be a good choice. If you want to ascend to heaven, jog in the winter gazing around at this beautiful world while listening to “Strumming Music.” If you want to have your unconscious self know that blood pumps through your veins while your conscious self just gets some shit done, this can also accommodate that. I find it extremely difficult to complete tasks involving words (talking, emailing) while listening to music with words, and I find “Strumming Music” to be simultaneously serene and motivational, a winning combination for harmonic grinding, which is the kind of spirit I think you need at my age, with an unquestionable 30+ more years of a nine-to-five.
Philip Sherburne: Merzbow – Rainbow Electronics 2
One of the downsides of being a music critic, at least in my experience, is that you don't really get to listen to music while you work. Not, in any case, for pleasure. Whatever I am writing about, that is what I am listening to, and I’m generally listening intently. There’s very little background listening going on, unless I’m zoning out, scrolling Twitter, washing dishes—all the things I do to, you know, avoid writing.
Once upon a time, though, when I was required to stay up all night grading undergrad papers as an English lit grad student, I discovered that nothing helped me focus quite like Merzbow’s Rainbow Electronics 2, a 1996 album that Jim O'Rourke put out on his Dexter’s Cigar label. This might seem surprising, given that it is, after all, a noise record. And not just any noise, but some of the most ear-splitting, brain-scouring, eyelid-peeling noise I can conceive of, like some ungodly combination of broken radio and trepanning drill—the kind of thing that could make Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music seem kinda chill in comparison. Metal Machine Music, at least, is more or less constant, like a babbling brook of overtones, whereas the untitled tracks on Rainbow Electronics 2—created using, among other things, “bowed instrumentals, electronic shavers, [and] various metals”—unfold in ungainly bursts, like Frankenstein’s monster shuddering beneath jumper cables. And yet! Somehow the overriding awfulness of it was exactly what I needed to turn off the rest of my brain and focus on the task at hand: marking my way through 20 essays on the 18th-century novel at three in the morning as the umpteenth pot of coffee clawed its acidic way up the back of my throat. Merzbow put me in the zone, and the red ink flowed like a river swollen with the blood of the vanquished.
Quinn Moreland: Ought — Sun Coming Down
When I feel like curling up on Pitchfork’s shockingly pristine white leather couch and passing out, I put on Sun Coming Down and set my mental GPS to productivity. I have no idea how the Montreal foursome’s sophomore album became my sole concentration music. Perhaps the churning trek of an opener, “Men for Miles,” is to blame, with its relentless pace that forces you to zero in on whatever’s in front of you. While there’s that initial shot of adrenaline and the ensuing post-punk chug-chug-chug, there’s also the alternatingly sultry/sharp phrasing of vocalist/guitarist Tim Darcy’s mantras, which have become tiny yet comforting markers that encourage me to keep going. My Sun Coming Down work compulsion extends beyond the album: On writing days, I must listen to Ought’s absolutely fantastic KEXPsession at least five times. The energy of the album is pushed to extremes and thus, so is my productivity.
Kevin Lozano: Masayoshi Fujita — Apologues
Robert Propst, the inventor of the office cubicle, had a simple philosophy: To work your best, you needed some sense of control over your own space. A billion dreadful cubicles later, designers are still trying to figure out how to make American office buildings the kind of spaces that invite beauty. As such, when I work I need something overwhelmingly gorgeous to almost bludgeon me with grace and candor. The vibraphone is perfect for this kind of thing—it can render ordinary scenes in bright globs of paint. Masayoshi Fujita is a career vibraphonist, and his work has constantly tried to elevate the instrument beyond whimsical garnish or novelty act. On his 2015 album Apologues, Fujita’s use of vibraphone isn’t so much like a painter and his palette but more like a gardener equipped with a bag of fertilizer, water, tools, and limitless amounts of soil. There’s all this potential—sounds bloom, burst, fragment and meander in such fascinating ways. When I sit at my desk listening to these sounds, I feel—cubicle or not—like I’m living in some lush echo chamber of my own design.
Sam Sodomsky: The Grateful Dead — Spring 1990
The majority of the work I am qualified to do involves staring at a laptop, so I often reach for music that’s specifically designed to take me elsewhere. No band is more focused on transporting their listeners than the Grateful Dead. Lyrically, many of the Dead’s great songs find them choogling through bucolic locales—caves up in the hills, mountains of the moon, paradise waiting on the crest of a wave. Musically, their brand of boundless Americana has its own escapist qualities. At their best, the Dead can be a wild, transcendent force of nature.
Rife with tragedy and change, the ’90s were a troubled time for the band, but these spring 1990 shows were a peak. Keyboardist Brent Mydland, playing his final shows with the group before his death that summer, provided an element of propulsive heartland rock with full-throated epics like “Blow Away.” Jerry, meanwhile, was momentarily obsessed with his MIDI pedal, a device that gave his solos a blissed-out New Age tranquility. Plus, at 18 discs, this set has enough jams to get you through an entire dragging week—and beyond! (sorry, had to).