Today, I published a music playlist on Apple Music.

It is called 1am cruising at warp speed, and it’s a collection of chill retrowave / synthwave tracks.

Here’s what I was picturing when I was making it:

Someone flying an old spaceship like the Millenium Falcon, on their own, through the night. They’re flying through a nebula, it’s all calm and quiet, and absolutely beautiful outside. They put some music on, and keep drifting through this incredible scenery. They turn the volume up, slightly. Things feel right, but also melancholic. It doesn’t matter what happens tomorrow. It feels like one of those frozen in time moments. Like driving alone on the motorway, at night, but in space.

It has similar vibe to my track ‘Chewbacca Makes Synthwave’ (for more of my music, see this YouTube playlist).

Here’s the cover, kindly generated by Google’s AI overlord, Gemini:

For your entertainment, I also included one of the AI’s failed attempts at spelling the title, as a featured image for this blog post!

I Stopped Discovering New Music

I joined the music streaming service party quite late. I only subscribed to Apple Music about two years ago, in January 2023.

Before that, I was consuming music the old school way: I would buy an album, on iTunes¹ or as a vinyl, and I would listen to it from start to finish. I was really engaging with the music I owned, but I was rarely discovering anything new by accident.

And so I was stuck in an echo chamber of music I used to love, without any opportunities to get exposed to new stuff I might like.

As soon as I joined Apple Music, I started discovering new music. New artists, new styles I didn’t think I liked… The auto-play algorithm would start suggesting similar tracks once it reached the end of an album I knew, drifting further and further away from the original genre I had originally selected. The echo chamber became a vast open field with diverse musical biomes to explore.

And just like that, I started listening to music again.

A New Creative Outlet

I had two main inspirations² for doing this.

The first one is Asthenic, who makes mesmerising synthwave mixtapes. I discovered them on YouTube years ago, and I was immediately hooked by their cinematic vibes. I used some of them to fall asleep, for a while.

The second inspiration is writer-who-draws Austin Kleon. In 2024 he challenged himself to create an actual mixtape every month, recording over cassette tapes he bought for 99 cents at a record store. I think it’s such a cool side project! It’s creative, involves different mediums like music and crafting, and it gets you to use your hands!

This playlist started as a pinboard of new tracks and artists I stumbled upon, stuff I wanted to dig into later.

But it slowly turned into a curating exercise, a new form of creative outlet. Could I sequence the tracks to tell a story, evoke a specific mood, like a scene in a movie?

And so was born 1am cruising at warp speed, at the intersection of my love for synthwave, sci-fi shows like “Star Trek: The Next Generation”, cinematic photography, and a touch of melancholy.