Newletter Issue 27- 🕰 Running Up That Hill

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Hey there 👋

Happy sunny, joyful days to you! This past month has been all about momentum for me and I’m reminded time and time again of the power of consistency and what happens when you keep showing up. The long-term rewards you can achieve aren’t always in the way you might expect, but they will always find a way to surprise you—you just have to believe in it.

I’ve been curating these playlists and writing about them for years now, and every month it gets a little easier but I’m not going to lie, I still get a lot of imposter syndrome. Every time I send these newsletters out, the worrying thought of “how many subscribers am I going to lose this time for picking songs that are too out there?” still creeps in. At the end of the day, it still brings me an inexplicable amount of pride and joy, and that’s what keeps me going. So, if you are genuinely enjoying this issue, please don’t hesitate to share it with your friends, family, or colleagues. It will mean the world to me!

Theme of the month: 🕰Running Up That Hill

Illustration by Cheyne Gallarde

I recently finished binging the latest season of the Netflix show Stranger Things and have not been able to stop thinking about it ever since. One of the reasons I have so much love for this show is because of the significant influence it has had on my music taste. I still remember back in 2016 when the first season debuted, the moment the title sequence started playing, I immediately fell in love with the style and sound. That moment, paired with just fantastic music supervision for the entirety of the show, sent me on an excavation mission to find and understand this kind of music. You see, as a kid who grew up with classical instruments and mando-pop in Taiwan in the early 90s, the 80s synth-heavy music felt completely alien but intriguing to me. The most memorable, early exposures I had to these sounds were from watching the movies Blade Runner and Drive, but it was this show that ignited a deep curiosity in me that not only sent me on a long journey of discovering amazing genres and subgenres like synthwave, vaporwave, and synth-pop, but also influenced my early intentions of thoughtful curation and sharing of music.

This month’s playlist is all about sharing that love with all of you. It’s not just a love letter to the show, but to the synths that have helped shaped my life. (Here are some more past “love letters” to the sound: Eleven, Synth U Been Gone, In the Moog for Love, Trapped in a Video Game, Into The Setting Sun). For this month in particular, in addition to picking songs that are direct nods to Stranger Things, I also picked an assortment of styles to showcase how much the sound that sent me on rabbit chase over the years, can be found in so many types of music, even in mainstream pop today. If this isn’t your cup of tea, as your fellow internet music friend, I implore you to be open and listen to the playlist from beginning to end and try to discover the warmth and beauty behind the computer-generated notes, because I promise you that it will only get better in time. In the famous words of Eleven from the show, “Friends don’t lie.”

Song Highlight:

Track 1: Dawn FM - The Weeknd

I don’t often listen to a Top 40 artist’s album from beginning to end, but the news about Jim Carrey being featured in multiple tracks on The Weeknd’s most recent album drew me to it, and I was not disappointed. Pitchfork described it best: “It plays like listening to a kind of adult contemporary radio station as you sit in a traffic jam in the tunnel, only the tunnel is purgatory and the light at the end of the tunnel is death.” Sounds bleak, but it’s great. Don’t sleep on it.

Track 11: Eulogy - Kyle Dixon & Michael Stein

I’ve seen this duo perform live before and I can’t express how much beauty these long, dark, and sustained drone sounds convey when they fill up the room and your ear; a type of audio satisfaction that not even a full orchestra can deliver.

Track 14: Picture of Purple Skies - Memorex Memories

This Scottish musician is a recent addition to my arsenal of go-to synth-wave/vaporwave musicians and I love how this song takes you somewhere that feels out of this world.

Track 24: Keep on Running (from “in Search of Tomorrow”) - Waveshaper

Back in the day, studios would release albums of original or featured music prior to the theatrical release in order to market and build hype for some upcoming movies. This song definitely does it for me in terms of getting me psyched about an upcoming documentary on Sci-fi movies in the 80s (which is apparently going to be 4+ hours long!)

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