2026-04 / LISTENING JOURNAL
LISTENING JOURNAL is a collection of playlists as journal entries, curated through embodied listening.1 Each entry offers a way to tap into a combination of my music taste, sounds I’m momentarily interested in, and different ways I’m building awareness of my participation in media culture through music.
The playlist for April is now updated in my [listening journal], a virtual page where these entries rotate. Through that page, you can listen to the current playlist, as well as check out any of the songs’ music videos.
This month’s journal entry is a special edition: a playlist highlighting music mixes I’ve discovered through doing film research. Each selection corresponds to a film screening I curated and hosted for Blacks of Are.na Cinema Club. My starting point for deepening connection to a film I’m researching is finding corresponding music to accompany my reading and writing sessions, which eventually become the music I use to open the screenings with. I’m glad to have this space to reflect on so much of the music I’ve come across specifically because of my work in film curation/programming.
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Below are the archived tracks from the previous journal entry.
2026-03:
Harrison. “Southwood.” ‘Quiet Miles’ EP, Last Gang/MNRK, 2026.
Vanessa Da Mata. “Não Me Deixe Só.” Vanessa Da Mata, Epic/Sony Music, 2003.
Erika de Casier. “You Can't Always Get What You Want.” Lifetime, Independent Jeep Music, 2025.
Soundpool. “Eurostar.” On High, Aloft Records, 2006.
★★★
Hope you encounter something that resonates with you,
Paris
Jenny Odell is a writer and artist who has theorized about doing or making ’nothing’ as a creative, resistive act. In her 2020 speech to Harvard School of Design graduate students (later published in print as Inhabiting the Negative Space), she gave the most accurate description I’ve heard thus far of the particular ‘listening’ that i’ve been journaling: “…being surprised by a song I liked for reasons I can’t actually explain… [When] something I don’t know feels like it’s talking to something else I don’t know, through me.” She mentions noticing this particular feeling while listening as a contrast to algorithmic music curation that uses data to constrict a person to a stable, marketable ‘brand’ of listener. ↩