music: december 25
Happy New Year. May your year be filled with curiosity and discovery.
December felt long at first, then suddenly short. Now I'm starting 2026 with fresh energy – wanting to be more intentional, creative, and prolific.
I recently wondered whether it's worth creating something that has been created before, discussing a topic that's already been covered or writing about something others have previously addressed. If I can add a new insight, definitely; but even when I repeat what others have said, I think it's still valuable. I can add my own perspective, and that makes it new. As Ted Chiang puts it:
Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn't have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you're the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new.
Enjoy these tracks from December.
First snow
- Track: Other Joe – Flawless (warm ambient, IDMish, intricate drums, dreamy)
- Track: funcionário – o caminho da estrela (ambient, sparkly, going to change my alarm clock to this, very cosmic)
- Track: Telefon Tel Aviv - Fahrenheit Fair Enough (early 2000s IDM, intricate and romantic, downtempo structures, classical-electronic warmth)
- Track: AT-XYA – Dreamo (feat. James K) (shoegaze dream pop, synth textures, nostalgic futurism)
- Album: Moodymann – Black Mahagoni (holiday vibe, the closest to Christmas and NYE you can get, without stepping into the commercial vortex of Mariah Carey etc)
- Album: Jonny from Space – back then I didn't but now I do (downtempo dub, half-club half-ambient, soft breaks for late nights and early mornings, idm'y, also I love a cool, poetic album title)
- fav tracks: Hearing Colors, Slip, Run it
- Album: Various Artists – Virtual Dreams II: Ambient Explorations in the House & Techno Age, Japan 1993-1999 (Japanese listening techno, spiritual, meditative)
- Across the EU/UK, ambient techno emerged as a by-product of rave – chill-out rooms, comedown music. In Japan, "listening techno" was central to the scene from the start. Not a response, but a key part. This compilation captures that parallel evolution – meditative, headphone-friendly techno that was never secondary to the dancefloor.
Midnight sparks
- Track: Barker – Reframing (drifting ambient trance, harmonic motion, modular sound, night-time driving)
- Track: Davis Galvin – "Naming It" (dubby house, cloudy textures, late-night warmth)
- Album: Irini – lost in dreams (Traumprinz is back, finally had time to listen to those three hours of trance and dub snippets, nostalgic, hypnotic, dancefloor daydreaming)
- fav tracks: my father, gb3am, when somebody makes you sad, too lost in love, concaved, durch die nacht?, days of the cocoon?
- Album: Cousin & Priori – Fly in Amber (deep dub techno, hypnotic and alien, textured)
- Set: DJ Metatron aka Traumprinz - This Is Not (Giegling Mix 07) (Giegling-era deep house, warm sunrise soundtrack, coming back to this from time to time)
- Set: Luke Vibert at Waking Life 2025 (user comment: "can't believe they published the uk banger buffet", time machine back to Praia)
