#boring ecstasy

One morning I found myself rifling through my CD collection, trying to get my aging boombox to play an Elliott Smith CD. I got all the way to New Moon before it started working, and hearing ‘Angel in the Snow’ start to play was a relief on several levels. When I’m truly exhausted, too tired to sleep and too tired to truly function, I can always count on music to usher me out of consciousness.

This late night/early morning sleeplessness calls for a particular type of music. When I was young, Brian Eno was a regular feature in the ‘sleepytime’ playlist that my dad made on the family iPod. Now, I turn to slow pop.

I’ve heard a couple names for it, chamber pop being the most common. That slow, ambient noise with quiet vocals: the auditory equivalent of ripples in a pond. Perfume Genius, Foxes in Fiction, even some of Owen Pallett’s songs are the perfect soundtrack to the kind of hour that is too late to consider being very alive in.

If you’ve heard Foxes in Fiction then you’ll probably know that Warren Hildebrand, the mastermind behind it, started the record label Orchid Tapes in order to make physical copies of his last album. Now, Orchid Tapes hosts about 30 musicians, many with the same kind of sound. In 2014, fourteen of these artists contributed to a sampler of sorts: “Boring Ecstasy: the Bedroom Pop of Orchid Tapes.”

It’s a fairly slow-paced, too-sleepy-to-be-sensuous kind of album. There are exceptions: some tracks feature rhythms almost jarringly upbeat in comparison to the more bedroom-y of the other songs - The Sweater I Gave You’s song ‘Nobody’s Baby’ is an early example. There’s a slight but noticeable genre clash at times, as well - Infinity Crush’s ‘Spoiled’ feels more grunge than pop (depending on where you draw the lines for pop, I suppose). If you go in expecting another Foxes in Fiction album, you will almost certainly be disappointed. However, if you’re looking for an album to turn down low and strain to hear the words until you fall asleep, then you’re in luck.

Official recommendation: listen to during a sleepless cycle, if you want to be lulled into something, or write all the song titles down and pick one randomly to be the soundtrack for the scene in your new movie where character A drives through the night as character B falls asleep against the window. A very gentle album.