It’s a Wednesday, and I’ve gotten used to Wednesday posts, so here’s one more.
If you’ve been paying attention, you know Peace Fire came out yesterday. You might also know that music is really important to me. And that’s why I can’t feel like I’ve done this whole endeavour justice without blatantly injecting some music into it.
When I write, I have soundtracks in my head (and usually on my speakers) that set the tone, and my first mental images of Peace Fire were more like music videos. I think music helped me build a sense of atmosphere, an idea of cool outside of what Hollywood tells me it is. Music, my own and others’, also helped me accept that a non-stop, butterfly-filled utopia isn’t actually the kind of place from which creations that connect with me tend to come. Not unless someone has at least been letting some moths in…
I wrote about music and how I write, specifically talking about the role of music in Peace Fire, in a guest post for someone else’s blog, so keep your eyes on my social media. I’ll post the link and you can read that post if this topic interests you. I’m not planning to duplicate information 😉
For this post, I’m keeping it kind of simple. After all, I’m still nursing a sugar hangover from yesterday’s book launch celebration. I haven’t been so reckless in my cupcake consumption since the horrifying “Valentine’s Cupcake Gorging†of 2015 for the Most Worlds blog. Which is why my most-practised form of moderation is abstinence. Ha!
Simple and musical? That means it’s playlist time!
My knee-jerk idea for this was to make a playlist of what the characters would listen to, but my characters are young and cool and live in the future. Any song I could put on a playlist is at least 34 years in their past, making it officially an oldie. The characters aren’t too cool for oldies, but let’s adjust focus for my sanity.
I thought of making a playlist of songs I listened to whilst writing, but that’s a lot of hours and multiple moods (each of which could have its own long playlist).
So, I present to you a playlist of songs that the main character’s grandmother would have made if you’d told her that her granddaughter was going to be a hacker. Consider this something like backstory on the grandmother…Seriously…
And consider this your “Mature Content†warning. This is not the Radio Edit playlist; some of these songs have the swears and the sexual themes. (The only editing of content here was the painful process of cutting it down from a 3 hour playlist to something closer to 90 minutes…y’know, as if Gran had made a mix tape…)
Oh, and probably another warning that I meant this to be quick and then spent way more time on it than I should have…And I still don’t have all the volume levels equalised between songs. Ugh. I’m so sorry. I hate that. If I get more time soon (cue hysterical laughter) I will totally replace this file with something where I’ve manually adjusted everything. Anyway…
Without further explanation or comment on the individual songs:
Hack the Playlist!
- Sound Clip (from Hackers): Hack the planet!
- The Cassandra Complex – Nice Work (If You Can Get It)
- Nitzer Ebb – Join in the Chant
- Welle:Erdball – Starfighter F-104G
- Sound Clip (Iggy Pop from Hardware): Good Morning Amerika
- Front 242 – Headhunter v1.0
- Front Line Assembly – Mindphaser (Single Mix)
- TheProdigy – Firestarter
- Eon – Fear: The Mind Killer (Altered Edit)
- Sound Clip (from Dune): It is by will alone I set my mind in motion
- Underworld – Cowgirl
- Varnish – Tied to my Chair
- Sigue Sigue Sputnik – 21st Century Boy
- Placebo – Infra-Red (Hotel Persona Remix)
- Sound Clip (from Max Headroom): This is the future: people translated as data.
- Orgy – Fiction (Dream in Digital)
- IAMX – Cold Red Light
- Tubeway Army – Are ‘Friends’ Electric?
- The Boomtown Rats – I Don’t Like Mondays
- Sound Clip (from Hardware): Everything. Is under. Control.
- Massive Attack – Future Proof
- Anne Clark – Sleeper in Metropolis
- Visage – Fade to Grey
- Shriekback – Faded Flowers
- Sound Clip (from Blade Runner): Roy’s “Tears in Rain†monologue
Only one of these tracks is mine. If you like what you hear, go buy the song or the film and own another piece of happiness.
