Proximity to water has always shaped how I listen to music. While the fixed environment of a dance floor will always be crucial, some of my strongest musical memories are away from it: a gentle drive, windows down, salt in the air, an ice-cold vanilla Coke, and the faint screaming of cicadas and crashing ocean waves underscoring it all. That’s a texture certain records naturally tap into. When you get the combo right, it really doesn’t get any better.
Mixes can function as a kind of environmental design, creating a sense of climate or place even in motion. Basslines can feel dense and humid; a synth can open up like sunlight through broken clouds; reverb elongates distance over water; even silence and restraint feel expansive, like staring out at the ocean at dusk. Andras once said that music made in Australia sounds good here because it mimics the repetition of trees out in the bush. I’d like to think the ocean offers us another form of emotional geography to tap into.
A lot of the records in this mix orbit that feeling: balearic, ambient, dubby, spacious, and heavy on the reverb. They’re also just songs I love. I wanted it to feel like a day driving by the sea, starting soft and glassy, searing up through the middle, and ending on that beautiful melancholy of cruising from a bright blue day into a tangerine sunset. This is a soundtrack for the freedom of an unfixed space. Please enjoy.
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