“Romanticize your life,” the TikTok girlies tell you, urging you to add whimsy to your breakfast routine, spritz perfume liberally, and practice gratitude. All fine suggestions, though I’ve found the simplest way to idealize the world is just to pay attention to it. Step outside in late November, when the cold air carries the smell of distant bonfires and the insides of strangers’ houses appear to burn with light, and you might feel yourself slip into a kind of rapture. Your fingers start to tingle, edges begin to blur; you romanticize the world by sublimating yourself into it.
Alternatively, you might look to the ocean. “On our watery planet, we return to the sea for a diagnosis of our current condition,” wrote the critic David Toop in 1995’s Ocean of Sound, a shape-shifting meditation on ambient music. “Submersion into deep and mysterious pools represents an intensely romantic desire for dispersion into nature, the unconscious, the womb, the chaotic stuff of which life is made.” We arrive, over and over, to the sea as metaphor—for the unconscious mind, vast networks of information, and music, which evokes the ocean’s formlessness, the way it moves, and how it makes us feel.
Essential Mixtape, a full-length collaboration between the French producer Malibu and the Swedish producer Merely, opens with nearby birdsong, the flick of a lighter or a tape recorder, and the sound of driving: fast air, tires on gravel, a turn signal’s metronome. We hear soft voices whispering about colors: “The purple sky... The ocean blue... The fire red...” A synth pad shimmers in the background, translucent as water, as the conversation continues: “Dawn blue... sun yellow...” “No, we don’t need more yellow.” A car window is lowered, and suddenly we hear the ocean crash against the earth—a split second of chaos, fading as the current ebbs from shore.
The two friends recorded the mixtape on a trip through southern Sweden: layering field recordings with samples, airy synths, clouds of reverb, and vocals stretched and slowed to sound like angels crying. In their respective solo work, both Malibu and Merely repurpose pop melodies into moody compositions that at a glance appear unstructured—songs that ache with romance and value feeling over form. There is an obvious kinship between the wistful edits Merely posts on Bandcamp and the sample-based euphoria of Malibu’s alter egos, from her dj lostboi project to her work as belmont girl, pairing quick edits with dreamy lo-fi footage of headlights on a rainy highway, city lights seen from a plane, or an abandoned beach house being pulled into the sea.
You could consider Essential Mixtape “ambient music,” but in its yearning melodies and melodramatic builds, it often sounds more like trance music heard from several rooms away. On “love hard,” heavenly vocals pour in like water, or light, anchored by sustained piano and a steady metronome. It’s hard to tell, throughout the project, what these angel voices are saying. (Words I’ve made out: “Come down...” “Across the city...” “Dream...” “Remember...”) But they communicate their message by the way the music feels—sad but hopeful, rapt with wonder, viscerally alive. Over the crunch of boots on snow and the rush of a nearby stream, the vocals on “hymn for drifters” seem to condense like warm breath in cold air, layered like a choir so their sighs become a song.
More than anything, it recalls the music of Burial, which shares with these songs a certain glow, like distant firelight. The stunning “idle citi” opens with the rumble of a storm, but far away. Soft synths and disembodied vocals blur together over a seagull’s cry. There are distinct movements to this formless, weightless song, a story you can understand if you listen to it closely. I believe it’s about being awake very late, or very early, and becoming part of your surroundings so that you lose yourself within it. (Burial described the feeling back in 2007: “It only happens to you when you’re out in the cold, when you’re down—this shiver attempts to warm you up, bring you back,” he said. “For a moment, you get this weird, eerie, distant feeling, like it’s just for you. You get taken out of yourself.”) Then the sounds diffuse like mist into the morning air, and a gust of cold wind carries it away.
