The Studio Mix

A place for art, architecture, and design students to find things to listen to during their endless hours working in the studio. Curated by Paul DeFazio and Will Ulmer

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Sviatoslav Richter plays Rachmaninov Concerto No. 2 Op. 18. This piece is a god among gods.

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This is Listener's album "Return to Struggleville" 

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A Tiny Desk Concert from Moon Hooch, Mike Wilbur and Wenzl Mcgowen, a pair of saxophones from the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music who got their start inciting raves in subway stations. They've since released two albums: Moon Hooch and This is Cave Music. Their technical skill allows them to play in a strange mix of dubstep and free jazz at their wild peaks. The title "This is Cave Music" is completely fitting. 

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Immensities is a selection of classical music, mostly impressionist, that creates blurry lines and implies vast spaces. These pieces move slowly through time and the infinities of aural space are exposed.

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A young Bob Dylan's serpentine interview with playboy. His answers to questions are roving and borderline philosophical, yet it's interesting how little he ends up saying. The "put on" in this conversation is also artistic. 

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Meet the composer is a podcast that showcases contemporary classical composers. This episode, featuring Andrew Norman, talks about composition inspired by architecture, the woes of being a child prodigy, and the plight of those of us creating in the wake of modernism. 

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Talk to plants is a mix of Japanese and Korean bossa nova. Most of this is tight, sweet, and relaxing, undulating between warm and cool, languorous bass and. Recovered classics like "La Vie En Rose" make it on the playlist, along with artists like Lisa Ono, a Japanese singer and guitarist born and raised in Brazil. Well worth a listen. 

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A contemplative under listened mix from Red Bull Music Academy. Soaring synths (to take full advantage of a cliche in its natural habitat) submersed in water sounds ebb and flow through most of the mix. The beats are sometimes light and pulsing, sometimes minimally glitchy. It's good for quiet work late at night. Click the source for the full mix. 

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Sapolsky's course: Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology at Stanford. This course is brilliantly taught. Sapolsky is a passionate biologist who's written several books about humans as animals, testosterone, and the time he's spent living with baboons. He recommends another text called "Chaos" which is a book on the difference between living and mechanical systems, and how that applies to thought about human behavior. 

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Toni Morrison's beautiful and core shaking Nobel Lecture on the death and rebirth of language, using her famous bird metaphor. No further introduction can give it more justice than simply listening to her speak.  

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"The moment God is figured out with nice neat lines and definitions, we are no longer dealing with God." -Rob Bell

That's the caption  GoldLink put as the description for his downtempo, X rated rap album: The God Complex. His sound cloud channel features a plethora of tripping downtempo rap (which he calls "Future Bounce"), overtop of artists like Kaytranada and Chet Faker. Check it out in the source

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THUMP is Vice's electronic music and culture channel, appropriately named. Their Soundcloud Channel (available in the source) features an eclectic mix of electronic styles, mostly compiled into hour long mix tapes. It's nice for sampling whatever's just hit the underground. 

The Slater/K3y is a bit house-y, somewhere between a party starter and relaxing downtempo electronic. 

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Adam Gopnick, storyteller for The Moth, writer for the New Yorker, and author of a range of pieces including Paris to the Moon and Winter, describes his experience learning how to classically draw to the students at the New York Academy. He eloquently dives into the psychological process of learning to draw and the relationships of classicism to the art world today.

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Houndstooth is a London based record label known for making remarkably cold tracks, and beat driven, snow speckled atmospherics, taking the British strain of post-dubstep to an interesting place that gets more and more avant grade. Hit up the source for their soundcloud.

"18+ have garnered acclaim with a trilogy of mixtapes, leading to commissions by Prada and the Venice Biennale. Blending lyrical themes of sexual ambiguity, anonymity, voyeurism and fantasy in the digital era with a minimal, yet catchy electronic hip-hop-meets-R&B aesthetic, their intrigue is deepened by how little is known about this US boy-girl duo. As 18+ prepare to emerge from the recesses of the internet, their first commercial release drops on Houndstooth."

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William S. Burroughs haunting short story "The Priest They Called Him" backed by guitar by Kurt Cobain, from one of the most creative (and sometimes appalling) imagists that stemmed from Allen Ginsberg.

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Lecture from Stanford Biologist Robert Sapolsky on depression.

"A recipient of the MacArthur genius grant, Sapolsky notes that depression — currently the 4th greatest cause of disability worldwide, and soon the 2nd — is deeply biological. Depression is rooted in biology, much as is, say, diabetes. As the lecture unfolds, you will see how depression changes the body. When depressed, our brains function differently while sleeping, our stress response goes way up 24/7, our biochemistry levels change, etc. You will see that biology is at work."

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"The Dazed Mix" from Tycho. The entire mix holds a tone of pulsing experimentation and sleepwalking, sampling a range of artists from Panda Bear to Todd Terje.

"Along the way, Birds tweet, voices coo and beats crunch, like a pink-tinged fever dream."