The Living Music List #8: On Living at Ease

An uplifting, meditative track from me, with brief thoughts on floating through life. Plus, new music from James Bernard, Warmth, zakè & Angela Winter, & more.

Read the previous issue of The Living Music List:

The Living Music List #7: On Processing and Catharsis

Currently listening to: So Easily (Demo) by Melted Form

Reflection

Hello, friend.

I’ll keep things brief this week. I’ve had an absolutely crazy week at my day job and I already feel my eyes being tempted away toward the light at the end of this Friday tunnel.

It’s time for a recharge, and, as if by fate, I rediscovered this week’s demo track So Easily (see above) like a message to myself in a freshly uncovered time capsule.

I made So Easily toward the end of 2022 when I had been collaborating with a friend on a guided meditation project. Sadly, that project fizzled out around the time this track was made. The friendship fizzled the year following.

These things happen.

It’s comforting to rediscover our creative footprints later on, though, detached from the emotion of past endings and disconnections. It reminds me that, as long as our hard drives or cloud storage accounts endure, our pieces of art once condemned to the unseen ether can be given new life—if we take the time to go back and look for them.

I made this track in an attempt to represent an unaffected state of ease. After last week’s reflection about my anxiety, it feels like perfect comedic timing to acknowledge that most of my hours are spent feeling pretty damn at peace. And I’m grateful for that.

I feel like I hit my stride for long periods of time and can float through this life with ease, going through the motions, sitting in my routines, working on my habits. At least, in retrospect, when I zoom out, I notice that is actually the case.

In this track, I wanted to capture that reminder for myself. I didn’t overextend. I didn’t try to complicate things or muddy the sonic waters too much, like I often do in my musical experimentations. This was simple. Routine. Steady.

I hope you enjoy it and it puts you at ease, or compliments the ease you already know. Remember to take time to sit back and do very little. This may sound like the opposite of what most meditation teachers tell you, but… try taking a step back from the present moment to consider your past:

What can you subtract to live a little easier?

I’m going to share some *unedited* notes that I wrote when making this track and thinking about it in terms of the basis for a meditation. Maybe there’s some nuggets in here that can help. Or maybe it’s just another fun memento from this time capsule you can look back and laugh at with me.

Notes on Living Easily—November 12, 2022

•  Life is filled with challenges. These challenges are like road signs, reminding us to check in with ourselves. 

  • What are we going through? What have we gone through? What have we put ourselves through?

  • Why are we experiencing these road signs? Are they blocking our way, OR are they really helping to guide us forward?

  • There are many cliches like “Pressure makes diamonds” or “You have to sharpen the saw before you use it” - these really imply that challenge and hardship, grit and tenacity… these things are all serving us to improve our ability to handle even more difficult challenges in the future, while also making us carry a greater appreciation for the beautiful, easy, soothing sources of love and relaxation in our lives. 

• A mindset shift is necessary. It takes a certain perspective to align with embracing ease. 

  • It’s easy to feel like a victim when hardships challenge us, when it feels like things aren’t “going our way.”

  • A victim mentality is the opposite path that we want and need to choose, yet we often walk down that path because it’s “easier” IN THE SHORT TERM than accepting responsibility for how we handle the entropy that life throws at us. 

  • A key to avoiding the victim mentality is to break down your own ego and remember that nothing and no one in life is truly “out to get you.” We are born into circumstances we had no control over, but as we grow in age and experience, our ability to consciously observe, analyze and control our own reactions to external forces, as well as our own often subconscious desires and actions - our choices. We begin to make very conscious choices. 

  • One of the most important conscious choices we can make is to accept what happens to us without letting it even graze our feelings of self-worth, agency, and emotional control.

• Emotions play a major role in going through life with ease, regardless of what happenstance may bring.

  • It’s crucial to remember we may be overwhelmed by our own emotions - this is perfectly normal and a tenet of the human experience. It’s good to let ourselves feel the rushes of sadness, grief, anger, joy, love… feel ALL the things our bodies and our souls intend to feel for whatever reasons. 

  • It’s also crucial to remember that this emotional overwhelm, no matter how powerful, will always be temporary and controllable in the long term. Just because you may feel almost physiologically overwhelmed by grief for a day, or a week, or even a month or longer, you can take comfort knowing that other, more pleasant emotions will shine through if you let them. 

  • Grief is a good example of an emotion that can feel like it’s taking our self control away from us. Grief has a powerful ability to wrench itself between us and our motivation to do anything other than wallow in our grief. 

  • While we cannot offer a one-size-fits-all solution to this, the key to pulling oneself out of any negative emotional pit is to reach out for other, more powerful emotions. 

    • In the case of grief, love can help shine a light in the darkness. Whether it’s a reminder of a memory that fills you with joy, or the long and unjudging embrace of a loved one, or the pure purpose of hard work that satisfies one’s soul… there are many ways to lift oneself up out of grief (or sadness or anger or envy) and into a lighter place of ease. 

    • This does NOT mean you should look for “distractions” from a negative emotion. The point is, instead, to replace the negative feelings with positive ones through action. 

    • When motivation fails, one can find motivation simply by the impenetrable belief in the ever-flowing motion of time. “Time heals all” is a cliche that may sound insensitive or even flat out false. The truth is that many of our wounds can never be healed. Instead of healing and forgetting our wounds, we should instead recognize the role these wounds play in continually shaping us. 

      • A lost loved one can never be replaced, but their loss can be viewed as an inevitable part of life (as death is inevitable), and their death opened the door in our lives to something new. Something we may have needed and not realized. 

      • Major depressive episodes may cast us down to the rocks and come close to convincing us it’s easier to leave the experience of life behind. And yet, we’re still here. We still yearn for life. We know there are so many experiences, people, sensations that make us feel GOOD. 

  • THERE WILL ALWAYS BE BALANCE. 

    • This much I know to be true. Life balances itself out, always. This is most easily clear from examining what “good vs bad” even means. These are opposites. Everything in life has an inverse. It is purely logical. Which means that these opposites are always two equal parts, existing to serve each other, to hold each other in balance. To resolve the minor into a major.

    • Another cliche: “Too much of a good thing can be bad.” Excess, overwhelm… too much will always require a swing of the pendulum in the opposite direction to find balance again.

• Going through life with ease is, admittedly, not easy. It takes time and practice and commitment to constantly remind oneself that negatives will balance out with positives, that our harsher emotions do not control our lives, that we always remain in control… we just need to remember this in the bleakest of times.

• But if you desire a life of ease, know that it is absolutely obtainable. Because going through our challenging lives so easily is not about covering up the inevitable negativity that invades our consciousnesses, but knowing that you can react to it however you choose. And I hope you will choose to react with a calm resolve and an open heart, in recognition of your power to adapt to any situation, to any overstimulation, with certainty that there is a reason for everything. That reason may not be god-given or settled by the fates - that reason is something only we are able to witness. It is a reason we provide, because we have to, because it makes life worth living. 

• With all that in mind, why should any challenge upset us permanently, or take us off the course we’ve set for ourselves? It was always a part of the plan, or we can adapt our plans to it. It’s easy. We can live easily. So easily.

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Music Recommendations

Hello again, friend.

Thank you for reading today’s post. I hope you enjoyed the reflection and the track—let me know in the comments what you’re listening to and if you have any thoughts about how you best keep yourself at ease.

Now, let’s get into some incredible new releases. Seriously, the ambient list this week has some magic to it, and it felt almost silly to put subgenres beside each listing because most of them defy categorization.

One other note: If you have been using the Living Music List Google Sheet I share via every week, I apologize that I haven’t spent enough time updating it lately. I still need to add last week’s recs and this week’s list to it, plus fill in a ton of missing details on literally all of the listings. It’s beginning to feel a bit daunting, but I’ll dedicate some time to updating it soon.

Anyways… happy listening.

The Living Music List—Ambient

Note: All of the below ambient projects are available on Bandcamp.

1. Mid Sky by zakè & Angela Winter (EP / drone, field recordings)

2. Only Now by James Bernard (album / drone, electroacoustic)

3. Ocaso (Mix) by Warmth (album / drone, noise)

4. The Longing Daylight(Ri ́_blanda ð) by Lee Anthony Norris & Porya Hatami (album / experimental, dark ambient)

5. The Mount Hibiki Tapes by Mount Shrine (compilation / drone, dark ambient)

6. cloudburst by anthéne (album / drone, minimalist)

7. waterbound by Ishqamatics (album / electronica, experimental)

8. Music for Long Attention Spans Vol. 21 by d york (album / field recordings, experimental)

9. The Longest Time by Various Artists (compilation / drone, noise [don’t worry about the genres, this is 71 longform ambient tracks… nearly 20 hours of music!!!])

10. Collection 01 by Fodboldklub (album / berlin school, electronic)

The Living Music List—All Genres

Note: All of the below projects are available on major streaming services.

1. Instability of the Signal by Simon Fisher Turner (album / avant garde)

2. Mid Spiral by BADBADNOTGOOD (album / jazz)

3. FROMOTM011 and FRMOTM012 by Tim Reaper (EPs / jungle/drum’n’bass [double release])

4. One Day by Loidis (album / techno)

5. Spinning Stones by ddwy (EP / electronica)

6. OXI5 by Nadia Struiwigh (single / electronic)

7. Guess featuring Billie Eilish by Charli xcx & Billie Eilish (single / dance)

8. I LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR YOU by JPEGMAFIA (album / hip-hop/rap)

9. Sincere by Khalid (album / R&B/soul)

10. Sophcore by Moses Sumney (EP / R&B/soul)

11. This Could Be Everything by Caiola (album / alternative folk)

12. Intermission by Maren Morris (EP / pop)

13. Michael & The Mighty Midnight Revival, Songs for Sinners And Saints by Killer Mike (album / hip-hop/rap)

14. Elijah. by Elijah Blake (album / R&B/soul)

15. Deeper Well: Deeper into the Well by Kacey Musgraves (album / country)

16. Smoke & Fiction by X (album / punk)

17. Vega by Anberlin (album / alternative)

18. Resurrection by Los Lonely Boys (album / rock)

19. Can’t Stop Coming Around by The Shivas (album / alternative)

20. baby’s out of luck again by april june (album / alternative)

21. Lipstick On a Pig by COWBOY BOY (album / rock)

22. Still Willing by Personal Trainer (album / indie rock)

23. The Future Is Our Way Out by Brigitte Calls Me Baby (album / alternative)

24. Cellophane Memories by Chyrstabell & David Lynch (album / alternative)

25. DOG HEAD by Brevin Kim (EP / alternative)

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In the interest of getting this thing out while it’s still Friday, no “In the News” section this week. Sorry, y’all! I’ll include some extra articles next week.

Thanks again for reading. Until next time.

Your friend,

Melted Form

Remember to listen to the hum, buzz, & hiss of the world around you—there is music to be heard there.

Want to suggest music for me to listen to? Have questions? Leave a comment or email me at meltedform@gmail.com. You can also join my chat on Substack.