The culling
FRIDAY 5 JUNE 2026
Today was the last monthly instalment of Listening Bar, my main Spotify playlist. Along with a few other things I don't entirely dislike and a few things I despise, I'm currently in the process of culling some activities temporarily, indefinitely or forever due to a lot of pressure that I've been putting on myself and the resultant stress from that, as well as the need to prioritise what's really important.
In terms of what falls within music under this project, I haven't had time to realise my 2026 goal to release two or three tracks. Although the Spotify playlist can sometimes be satisfying, it can also be suprisingly exhausting. Each month I've tried to include a lot of less popular, or rather, less seen/heard tracks and avoid ghost-written or AI music (as much as can be avoided), while having a varied yet blending mixture of genres. Podcasts, Beatport, dozens of Spotify playlists, social media and Shazaming (yeah, still a thing) untagged/unlisted tracks on Instagram weren't enough to reach even 30 tracks many months. Maybe my constraints were too harsh, maybe I'm too picky? Either way, those hours would be better spent on actually making music, especially since I bin a lot of my own music too. So, the full playlist update every month has been culled, permanently.
The culling isn't just about this project, of course. It came about from having way too many things to do and music - actually everything about this project - always being deprioritised to the absolute bottom of my list. Without going into too much boring detail, that list includes a demanding developer/cofounder/do-anything/do-everything role, a part-time Master for updating/refreshing/insurance, random tasks that link to more positive and likely outcomes (unlike this project) and trying to work on my sleep, which often means being wide awake during the wrong hours and catching up during ideal or optimal hours, and then having less hours in the day overall. 🤯
For now, June has been updated (and worth listening to ;)). Best played from start to finish to experience the journey from more chilled progressive through to the fast and distorted hard techno/schranz. From July, I'm going to update the playlist with some all-time faves, current faves and then add single tracks whenever I please. The archive, Listening Bar Record Boxes, will still be up and I'll continue to use it to store tracks that come off the main playlist. Doing this will also hopefully result in finally getting on to finalising a vlog that has so much footage building up, but more importantly, getting a track I would like to release finally done. 🥵 Let's see if the culling works...