Music with Motif: Locking In

The exam season has had me thinking about some of my favourite music to study to. Personally, I can only concentrate on my work to instrumental music, so that’s what I’m going to focus on.  

Anything from the krautrock band Neu! could be used as effective study music, as they combine ambient rock music with an itching rhythm that gets me into a flow of working. Their most popular track, ‘Hallogallo’, is a good place to start, known for its ‘motorik’ drums mechanically keeping the rhythm going with overlapping droning guitars, which emulate driving on an Autobahn. Their story is an interesting prelude to some of the electronic music I’ll recommend, as both starting members, Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, were on early Kraftwerk line-ups before they moved away from progressive rock to popularise electronic music.  

The album’s fluid scope is unmatched by its contemporaries and is a regular study jam for me

The electronic duo Global Communication were one of the acts influenced by Kraftwerk, only releasing one album together, 76:14, named after the runtime of the project, as each song was named after its respective runtime as well. Fortunately, it stands as a landmark in electronic music for its diverse sound collage. The 1994 album encompasses all the movements in ambient music up to that point, ranging from a psychedelic Sci-Fi sound on ‘14:31’, to more IDM on ‘7:30’, to the dubby ambient ‘8:07’. The album’s fluid scope is unmatched by its contemporaries and is a regular study jam for me. 

Driftwood was an ambient music record label active between 2000 and 2002, which has become online music folklore due to the remarkably high prices sellers were charging for their singles on the record-selling website Discogs. When I mean high, I mean hundreds to thousands of pounds for an EP. What makes it more ridiculous is that all the label’s music is on streaming, so there isn’t even an argument to buy the exclusivity of a lost recording. My favourites are ‘Dub Soda’ by Elias and ‘Healing Hands’ by Monsoon; both are definitive study music classics. Although it is worth noting, I wouldn’t have paid the combined fee for both. 

The soothing meditative quality of the composition is perfect for calm, library sessions

I wasn’t aware of Adrianna Lenker’s instrumental album (appropriately named instrumentals) until recently, during this exam season. The two instrumentals are a diaristic homage to Americana that speaks as personally as her sister album, fittingly named songs, from the same release. The soothing, meditative quality of the composition is perfect for calm, library sessions, with faint nature recordings of birds chirping on “mostly chimes” if you listen carefully enough. I find the genre mix of ambient music and nature recordings sometimes a bit dystopian and artificial, but with this track, they are thoughtfully incorporated to capture the reflective theme across both sister albums.