From A Cosmic Drift Through Higher Prairie: Exhibition Playlist

Music is a huge part of my practice as an artist, whether it’s the physical process of making sound works that could be often considered ‘music’ or simply music as a constant presence in my studio. I seldom make or write anything without music. The music selected for this playlist accompanying my exhibition From A Cosmic Drift Through Higher Prairie includes some of my all-time favourite bands and artists (13th Floor Elevators, The Red Krayola, Can, Popol Vuh, Stooges) alongside other music that I both greatly enjoy but more crucially feel has particular resonance with the nature and spirit of the exhibition. These tracks include psych-rock oddities from Stan Hubbs, These Trails, the more recent psychedelic explorations of Sunburned Hand of the Man and Sun Araw, outlier folk music from Księżyc, Svitlana Nianio and Kath Bloom, early electronic, ambient pieces by Laurie Spiegel and Emerald Web, and the avant-garde jazz of Don Cherry, Joe Henderson and Alice Coltrane, amongst many others.

The reasoning for the inclusion of the majority of tracks is that the music, for me at least and maybe you too, conjures particular feelings, images, and expressions of ritual, liturgy, worship, a happening beyond our reasonable comprehension. A lonely wonder, a journey that transports us from one existence to another. Richard Proffitt