Writing is often a solitary experience. This is a good thing. Still, there is a unique joy to working with others. This session is an experiment in writing and listening together to see what happens to our writing when we listen to music that is slightly abrasive rather than smoothed out for productivity.
We’ll write individually whilst listening to A.G. Cook’s Past, Present, Future mixes plus some loose picks from the P.C. Music archives. Think happy hardcore, 80s MIDI pop, spooky elevator music, trash-pop, and bubble-gum Grime rather than lo-fi cafe jazz.
Spaces are limited so please only sign up if you can make it. If you’re no longer able to come, please cancel your ticket so someone else can join.
House rules:
If you are looking for “accountability buddies” to finally finish that paper, regretfully, you might need to look elsewhere.
All welcome - whether you’re already working on something or not. You don't need to write about music. Maybe you’ll write a slightly too sincere letter to a lover. A birthday card for your nan. A strongly worded letter to the council.
The writing group will take place in a home so don’t expect roomy writing desks, flat whites, or any other WeWork-adjacent amenities but there will be coffee, sofas, and some humble desk space.
You will not be asked to share your writing but there will be time for us to discuss our experiments afterwards at a pub where you can still get a pint for £2.30. For those interested and not yet ready to think thoughts in silence, we can make our way to Suplex Round 2: The Peckham Piledriver for some slightly more serious dubs.
Background:
Music choices are increasingly curated by platform algorithms. Wellness culture sells us coloured noise to ‘optimise’ whatever you’re up to: white noise for sleep, blue noise for concentration, brown for creativity.
There is an entire genre of ‘focus’ soundscapes: ‘4K Cozy Coffee Shop with Smooth Piano Jazz Music for Relaxing, Studying and Working’ has 51m views; two hours of ‘Lo-fi Flow in a Green Tech World – Solarpunk Focus Music’ promise to help you stay grounded and sharp with a weird loop of NEOM inspired AI generated images; ‘☢️ 50-Minute Pomodoro — Post-Apocalyptic Concentration Shelter | Ambient Noise Focus 🔒’ wraps you in a subtle dystopian isolation to help you work - yes, there will still be time management and KPIs in the apocalypse.
This bland and diluted sound scape has roots in Fordist worker control. Muzak, or what we call elevator music, was designed for work environments to encourage productivity whilst creating just enough stimulus to keep workers engaged. This orchestrated softness reverberates through AI generated Spotify playlists and strange lo-fi simulations (Rekret, 2025). Still, as anyone who has grown increasingly furious whilst listening to hours of classical ‘hold music’ will know, plugging calm music into a furious brain doesn’t always have the desired effect.
There is more: the AI that crafts the lo-fi playlist is never that far away from the AI that shoots the gun, as Spotify CEO, Daniel Elk, invested €600 million in an AI defence company that puts ‘ethics at the core of defence technology development’. Many are now cancelling their subscriptions and looking for new ways to listen to music.
Against this backdrop of lo-fi uniformity, the valorisation of strange music is seeping into working life. It used to be that you would work a 9-5 and spend your weekends in clubs pretending you don’t have a bullshit job but being hungover on a Monday isn’t very conducive to neoliberal optimisation and productivity. There is a trend of corporate workers filming themselves at work whilst listening to techno or EDM in a move that’s intended to signify that there is an individual self behind the uniformity of everyday working life, yet this performance of individuality only reinforces the absorption of leisure into the field of work.
Still, music is important. It’s worth attending to. Can we listen differently? Can we listen weirder?
