Living Room Music

Episode 180: Afrobeat Drift / Hardwell Return

This week’s episode of Living Room Music began earlier than expected. Morning pages turned into system architecture, which turned into opening Logic Pro X and chasing whatever sounds felt alive in the moment. Starting inside Apple’s new Afrobeat sound pack, the journey unfolded into warmer downtempo passages before accelerating into festival-scale energy, distorted textures, dubstep pressure, and Drum & Bass momentum. There are traces of Hardwell-style dynamics throughout this mix — tension, release, impact — but the set never stays in one place for too long. Rhythms dissolve into atmosphere, atmosphere collapses back into motion, and eventually the whole thing fades into something quieter and more reflective. This is driving music. Coding music. Late-night city lights through rain on the windshield music. Music for rebuilding systems in your head while the bassline keeps moving underneath everything else. Episode 180 is less about genre and more about momentum through changing emotional states. Start to finish, it follows the shape of a morning that accidentally became a journey.

Episode 179: Mystical Journey

Diving through the crates to pull out samples, I came across as bunch of interesting sonic backdrops to layer into the journey through a drifting meander through the Deep House sonic palette.

Episode 178 - Downtempo Drive Time

I always imagine my podcast is best listened to in a car going somewhere.

Episode 177: We Are Not Alone

I have been thinking about space a lot lately, and especially since the Artemis II rocket took off, but for years. I have also been thinking about philosophies about the many potential universes which are out there. So this week's episode, I present some psychedelic sounds which feel very spacey to me.

Episode 176: Seven Beats to Nowhere

Thirty minutes of handmade electronic music in 7/4 time at 150 BPM — a time signature that shouldn't work at this tempo, and that's exactly why it does. This session pulls from dubstep's weight, drum & bass wubs, and psytrance's hypnotic acid layering, but refuses the drop. Every transition is gradual, earned over bars rather than announced with a snare fill. The drums are hand-programmed with riddim tonality, and the textures — Dominator, Dark Edgy Lead, Slow Winding Acid Loop, Dark Gliding Bass, periodic Big Wide Reese — build a landscape that rises and falls like breathing. Free-form vocals float through the mix, half-buried, drifting between intelligibility and pure texture — pulling your ear sideways just when the repetition might take hold. The whole thing was rebuilt from scratch after a Logic Pro X crash wiped the first fifteen minutes, which means everything you hear was played with the memory of what was lost. Progressive psydub bass. You weren't looking for this genre because it didn't exist until today.