Per usual, this playlist is 50% vibes and 50% song titles. Its almost 2025 and I wanted a collection of songs that were pensive and heavy mixed with songs that had forward motion. I started with The Books’ Take Time and worked the theme outward.

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1. Take Time by The Books. Album: The Lemon of Pink This band no longer performs, but you can find on of the original member’s music, Nick Zammuto, here. The Books were the “found sound” darlings of the early 2000s and they are still very near and dear to my ears.
2. Light Moving by David Lang. Album: In 27 Pieces: The Hilary Hahn Encores (you can buy the sheet music here) I love David Lang’s music. He is one of the founders (alongside Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon) of Bang on a Can, and still serves as co-artistic director. I’m a Bang on a Can Summer Festival alumni, but I don’t think this makes me biased because he really is that good.
3. Bring Time by Reganbogen. Album: wind moon bird sage It took some casual internet sleuthing to find out that Reganbogen is Regan Heckscher, the vibraphonist and vocalist for the Louisville, TN band Future Killer.
4. Time to Go by Laurie Anderson. Album: Women in Electronic Music 1977 Laurie Anderson towers above most when it comes to the electronic and experimental music scene in the late 1900s to present. She works as a composer, poet, visual artist, film maker, and much more.
5. City Life: III: It’s Been a Honeymoon by Steve Reich performed by The Steve Reich Ensemble. Album: City Life / Proverb / Nagoya Marimbas I chose this piece because the title and attitude of the piece is how I feel about 2024. Most of the samples heard in this work were recorded by Reich in New York City. During the performance, the samples are played on two keyboards – there is no tape or track used. From a Sound on Sound interview, “Reich explains that this is his piece of reckoning with New York City, his home for many years, and a place he finds increasingly intolerable to the degree that “I’m reaching the point where I want to get the hell out of New York and move to Vermont, where I normally only spend my summers. I go out on the streets with ear plugs now, because the street noises are so loud that I feel that my hearing is adversely affected by them. With all that going on, I thought, ‘hang on, why not bring it into a piece of music?’.”
6. Persist by Allison Loggins-Hull performed by the Ethel. Album: Persist There was a lot that happened in 2024, and the title of this track is a reminder for 2025.
7. Quartet for the End of Time VI: Dance of fury, for the seven trumpets (Quatuor pour la fin du Temps VI: Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes) by Olivier Messiaen performed by Martin Fröst (clarinet), Lucas Debargue (piano), Janine Jansen (violin), Torlief Thedeen (cello). Album: Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps Even tough this album is currently 83 years old, it always feels like it was written yesterday. Messiaen was imprisoned for 9 months in a Nazi prisoner of war camp, where he wrote this work.
8. An Atlas of Deep Time by John Luther Adams performed by the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra. Album: An Atlas of Deep Time From JLA’s program notes, “Like the geologic layers of rocks beneath our feet, the densities and textures, the instrumental and harmonic colors are always changing, yet somehow the substance always seem to be the same. The earth is 4 billion 570 million years old. An Atlas of Deep Time lasts roughly 46 minutes, which equates to about 100 million years per minute. At that tempo, the entire history of the human family is represented in the dying reverberations of the last 25 milliseconds of this music.”