A Melancholic Focus

Music is never usually something I use as a tool for relaxation. My preferred genre is actually Hardstyle which is high-impact, hard thumping bass, energetic and bouncing electronic music. It gets my spirits up, my heart pumping and makes me alert!

I have some playlists that are mellower, but I never get any particular overwhelming feeling from them. They are only dreary lyrics with forgettable music, really not impactful. In the end a lot of slower tracks that people would usually listen to for relaxation or Zen would just turn into background sound that doesn’t hold my attention enough to stop my busy mind from running rampant.

There are only two exceptions to this, two tracks that deliver a unique experience for me.

1. Children of the Omnissiah- Warhammer 40,000: Mechanicus (Original Soundtrack)

I feel like a great dark presence surrounds me, a shadowy spiritual energy encircles me and takes over my senses. The drums thunder and ripple in echoes, the solemn choir is smooth, with a sweet childlike voice peeling out above the deep bass. The orchestral music is unsettling but grounding at the same time, it sends shivers down the spine. When the lights are off and I am surrounded by darkness it feels like I am in a cultish underground hall in a crowd swelling and moving with the industrial sounding organ and bass.

This is one of my go-to tracks for when I am writing my fictions. To escape reality and get into the focused headspace I need to continue my long-form story, I listen to this for hours on end. I mean that quite literally; there are hour loops of the track on YouTube. The track is only 1:47 long, but I could listen to it constantly. It holds a beauty and sweetness in its dark tones that are unmatched. I will save you the hour long extended mix, but the below Spotify preview is enough to see how amazing it is.

2. Guts - Berserk OST

The next song I also listen to for hours at a time even though it is only 3.35 in length. The tone is so unusual in the beginning, with high vocal pitches that don’t generally make any sense when strung together as a word or sentence. The subtle atmospheric synthetic music swirls with an aquatic quality in harmony with the piano and takes me along sweetly and gently, until half way through the track. At this point a voice pierces through with so much depth and rawness, almost sounding like a pleading expression of despair, grief or pain. With vocal tones and a voice that makes no particular words, I find I am feeling the emotion of the voice soothe my body and mind, not being distracted by any wordy stories the song is trying to tell. I am only a witness to the powerful emotions delivered and it pulls at the heart, stops the busy mind, and grounds me. It is a very sweet and beautiful song; I have to be honest, even though I also find it to be genuinely melancholy and mourning. The vocal arrangements are done in a way that even though it is repetitive it is never exhausting. It is emotionally impactful each time the vocals return. It is all-consuming when you listen to it and so it should be: it is the 1997 theme of the character Guts from the comic and anime Berserk and Vocal is not the place to describe the horrors of this character’s life. This reaction video of a music composer listening to the track says it all: it was an exact mimic of my own reaction.

Check out the Spotify preview here:

These tracks are not the traditional ideas of peaceful or soothing, they do not inspire a Zen feeling. They do not de-stress. Instead, they create a focused emotional tension in a unique way that I heavily rely upon to be able to write stories for hours on end. They are impactful in that they drag my wondering focus down to my computer screen and I get wrapped in the melancholic music and unsettling tones while I write my stories.