Drawing Maps 32: PALISADE Playlist

Transcriber: #Daneran6021

AUSTIN:         Hey everybody. It is Austin here again, with another Pre-PALISADE quick update. Except this one is patrons only! You know, it's it's patrons only because you're hearing me on the patreon feed: but the link I'm sending you is something that obviously I cannot stop you from sending to other people! It is the link to my personal PALISADE Spotify playlist.

Obviously, I should say up top that I do my best to purchase the music that I love. I'm a real big album buyer. Bandcamp Fridays are days when I spend a lot of music money on music often. But for something like this it's really convenient to be able to quickly throw together a playlist to share with some friends… the mood and tone— I think of it a lot as a mood board. A sort of musical mood board. I end up sharing things like— I share this with the whole cast of the show and also it often reflects a lot of conversations I have with Jack. Not necessarily about particular musical influences for a season… You know, BabyTron is on this… this playlist. I don't expect Jack to make a BabyTron song… But there is something about the… attitude and the tone and the shape of a season's musical character that I like to try to capture a little bit in a playlist like this. And the kind of two modes that I realized I wanted to kind of chase emotionally this season a little bit…

Two things. One, and I said this in — I want to say — Road to PALISADE game: this is about as clear of, like, the good guys we're going to have in a season, maybe ever. You know, I think the Heiron characters do some heroic things. Uhm. I think, you know, at the beginning of… you know… Twilight Mirage we have characters who are committed to Big Good Ideas but are in a… a utopia that's falling apart and are kind of compromised in ways very similar to what the Twilight Mirage is right away. And the Divine Fleet. They come to address some of that compromised position in some ways. In other ways they don't. In PARTIZAN we had characters who are explicitly eyes closed in some ways. You know, like, to the— They knew the world was not necessarily a fair place but they were kind of lowercase f or lowercase u unfair, not inequal not… not unjust not… fundamentally flawed and broken and oppressive and hegemonic and all these other things.

This is a season where our characters begin as freedom fighters in— I don't feel any sort of cringy irony in saying that. Right? They have joined up with a group that is being colonized by a galactic imperial power. They have… they're not necessarily perfect people [chuckles lightly], certainly not! But they are fighting a fight that I think is pretty open-endedly positive. They are fighting against the Bilateral Intercession and the Divine Principality’s attempt to colonize a world; to take away the freedom and the agency of the people who live on that world; to destroy what's been built there… A place that's already dealing with, in some places, issues of slavery, issues of occupation… Although, not all of Palisade had been occupied by some of the forces like the… Sorry, we just recorded for, like, six hours. Like, five hours. So I'm a little burnt. The… Duchy. The Fabreal Duchy. Some of the places had not been kind of put under the thumb until… more recently. Um…

So, you know, the heroes are heroes in this at the beginning of the story in a way that I'm a little more open about saying that — or feeling that. That's an attitude I want to take. They might fall! They might not live up to our expectations! They might fuck up. But the posture — they’re allowed to be a little more… righteously angry, than maybe in the past. That's one of the tones we might catch in a playlist like this.

But something else important is, like— I think we're in a really melancholy position, right? We've lost characters that mean a lot to us at the end of PARTIZAN. (I don't need to spoil that. Like, towards the end of PARTIZAN, and in the very end of PARTIZAN, We don't need to get the specifics.) But characters are very… this season very interested in… change… trying to become a version of themselves they're happy about. There's lots of… kind of moving from this sort of, like: “hey, I believe in this mission deeply. I feel it in my soul.” But also, a sort of like… legs dangling, you know, off the edge of the curb— or at the, you know, you're kind of sitting and looking at the vista and feeling some sort of a way about the people who aren't there with you. About the relationships you— that could have shaken out better. About the people who you're still with. Who you don't necessarily have the best terms with anymore.

And so there's a sort of, like, the two vibes I think that pop up here, across this playlist are… a sort of melancholy shoegazy… in your own head vibe; and to sort of, you know… righteous, rebellious, playful, graffiti anger. You know, that vibe. And we've had bits of that here and there before, right? Millennium Break gets there. But they're not there at the beginning. You know, I think it's funny that I think— I think two different… [the] pillows songs from Fooly Cooly show up here, and it is very much: one of them is the long pining guitar “Bran-New Lovesong”; and the other one is — I don't think it's “I think I can,” I think it's — “Last Dinosaur,” which is this, like, incredibly optimistic sounding cool guitar song. There's also some stuff on here from hip-hop artists like Dälek and Injury Reserve that, again, blend some of that, like, what if hip-hop could do shoegaze. I mean Dälek literally is— those are shoegaze tracks. Do you know what I mean? Um… And a bunch of other stuff, right?

Also, some stuff that is, like, truly… you know, “Start a Riot” from the Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack is on here… and it's corny to put something from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse — like, they talk about web slinging in that song. It's a corny song! And also it's exactly what the energy of being in Millennium Breaks should kind of feel like a little bit? Right? Like: “we are right— Who in here want to start a riot?” Like, that is… That is the energy that Millennium Break has in this moment. And… it's almost like we're allowed to be a little corny this season, because we don't have to be cynical about who… what “the mission,” so to speak, is. I think this is also true for songs like “Chaos Space Marine” by… Black Country, New Road.

There's a… There is a glass beach song “cold weather” on here that is, again, I think very… sincere. I like that song a lot. I like that album a lot. But even— But it can often overwhelm me with a sort of, like… not just sincerity but like open-hearted… I don't want to say performative vulnerability, right? But, like, there is a degree of “here is my whole soul,” that I don't often vibe with in that sort of mode. There are versions of it that I really do vibe with. People know of course that I'm, like, the world's— probably not the world's biggest Mount Eerie fan, but, like, I find that the stuff that Phil Elverum does — which, none of which is on this this playlist, for once — often is incredibly vulnerable, but does not come from a similar place of, like, you know… There isn't the shouting it from the rooftops: it's more of, like, quietly spoken truths that are deeply depressing.

And then there's a lot of stuff here that is just here for sound, or for vibe. You know. Um… again, there's a BabyTron song on here that is about vibe, that is about energy. That goes into a Siouxsie and the Banshees song that is about vibe and energy. You know, it's it's sort of in the similar space. You can kind of pull the new wave–shoegaze connection there. But it's not— It's not, like: “this is a particular thing.” But it is a… There's an energy. Right? There's a great Katie Dey song in here.

I like this playlist a lot. It is… It is some new songs, it's some old songs. I wanna… There's a great song that— One of my favorite songs on this record is something that, like, I don't think has had any plays in the last… Is a band called Blank Ritual. I think they're out of Australia. There's a song called “Telex,” that I think is just, like, so-so good! And I don't… If I click on them on Spotify I feel like they're gonna have no plays. Which is absolutely— Five monthly listeners. Go buy this record! It's good.

So yeah. That's what this is. I hope people enjoy it. You can follow the link. I would love, if someone^[1] who had more time than me remade this playlist on, like, Apple Music and linked it in the comments. If that happens^[2] and I see it I will add it to the post. You can hear my voice failing me, because, again, the last pair of recordings I did were very long. [chuckles softly] So.

I hope everyone has a great remainder of your day and if you're hearing this on Monday I hope your week is good. I mean, it's Sunday, so your week starts today anyway, right? Technically, that's how that— That's how that goes. Alright! 10 minutes! That's not so bad. Talk to everybody soon! Bye, bye, bye.