I’m not much of a list-maker, especially lists with “best” in the name. I do submit lists, at the end of the year, to The Wire and to Pitchfork, but I don’t take a lot of pleasure in compiling them. For each record I name, there are a dozen I could slot in, and a hundred I haven’t heard. I participate because it’s nice to be asked, and because I do want to root for albums that might not otherwise be noticed, and to add my voice in favor of those that have been, especially those only by a few other people. I find end-of-year lists are all the more interesting years later, when I might look back and spot things I no longer listen to, and gaps that seem canonical in retrospect but hadn’t, to me, at the time. In other words, they’re especially interesting in the ways I find them lacking, not necessarily for what they include.

Also, lists are also a cornerstone of all kinds of online activity. When in Listville, it can help to learn how to talk lists. By way of example I’ve been peeking around, lately, both Amaya Lim’s Turntable (see: turntable.amayalim.com; her newsletter is recordstore.substack.com) and record.club (which I mentioned this past weekend), two means of reinvigorating the social media aspect of listening to recorded music. I’m @disquiet on both, and both are focused on lists. To that end, I put a little list together of music that I habitually have playing during daylight hours — what I described, at record.club/disquiet, as “five albums to work to when you need music that can create the sonic equivalent of a wool-lined space in which to get stuff done.”

First and foremost on this list is Nils Frahm’s Music for Animals, which benefits from a combination of consistency and length, and how its ambient quality has a rhythmic pulse. Then comes Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon, which used to be my headphones-during-work go-to, until it became too familiar, and thus a little distracting. Considering that Thursday Afternoon came out in 1985 (and was one of the first CDs, if not the first, I ever bought), the thing took decades for me to penetrate it to the point where I could consider it familiar, let alone knowable. The three others on my work-listening list are Max Richter’s Sleep, which despite the title need not be thought of as somnolent, Éliane Radigue’s glacial Trilogie de la Mort, and that proto-ambient-jazz classic, Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way.