A Retrospective

Year in Review • 2020–2021

Notes on Notes is turning one year old! Since our first post in June 2020 and our first official collaboration in July 2020, the series has grown to include 18 multi-talented participants, from artists, writers, oral historians, anthropologists, and sociologists to design + innovation professionals, musicians, organizers, and beyond. Pranathi and Josh will be taking the next few months off to pause, look back, and look ahead to where the series could go in the future. In the meantime, we wanted to share our reflections on the past 12 months of Notes on Notes!

Below, Pranathi shares her reflections on curation as an act of care, and explores how we express our care differently through the things we offer to close friends versus strangers versus longtime collaborators. Josh lists some of the collaborations, individual songs, and non-musical pairings that have made a notable impact on him over the past year. After that, you can check out the full list of collaborations/collaborators!

Look out for updates in October 2021 about the future of Notes on Notes!

Reflections from Pranathi

At the very start of the pandemic, I was already a rabid playlist-maker. But the isolation of lockdown encouraged me to lean deeply into this practice. In March 2020, I made a playlist called “Love In the Time of Corona,” and sharing this playlist on my Instagram brought many good things and people into my life at a time when I needed them most. This included Notes on Notes. When I sent Josh the link to my playlist, he texted me back a few hours later, planting the first seeds of an idea to embark on an experiment that would engage the playlist as the driver of creative and thoughtful exchange.

The art of playlist-making is not new. In my mind, the format of the playlist has always conjured up the notion of an exchange: not a transactional exchange, but rather a gift. Making a playlist is essentially a romantic endeavor, an endeavor that is as intimate, daring, and hopeful as writing a love letter to a loved one, a stranger, or even to one’s future self. With a playlist, shifting the focus of curation can result in starkly distinct listening experiences. If it is for a loved one, the playlist weaves a cocoon of nostalgia and familiarity that draws on shared experience. If the playlist is made for a stranger, it is an exercise in storytelling that can provide respite in a new sonic world; that can change or indulge moods; or that can provide context and coherence to a genre, artist, or musical experience. If the playlist is for oneself, then it serves as a marker of a moment in time, a repository for the future, a note of hope in a time of despair.

The art of consecrating a playlist with meaning rests crucially upon the act of curation, selecting tunes that flow into each other seamlessly or telling a story about our own listening histories and how we imagine ourselves in relation to a musical period or genre. At a time when we were all locked up in our own limited spaces and minds, a project that brought people together to curate—a word which literally stems from the Latin cura, ‘to care for’—seemed like an important exercise in cultivating an ethic of intentional care for a relative stranger, a recipient of care who receives no other communication of care except the playlist itself.

What we created with Notes on Notes was a dynamic space for these playlists to enter into the ears, minds, and lives of others who then struck up a dialogue with the story or perceived intention of this act of curation. In his podcast Object of Sound, essayist, poet, and writer Hanif Abdurraqib talks about this radical and thrilling possibility of discovering new music in the age of algorithmic playlists. He describes his relationship to the playlist in an interview:

For me, playlists is another type of storytelling, another type of book writing or essay writing really. A playlist for me is another form of a literary project that can serve people well. The art of the playlist itself varies depending on who’s making it and what vibes they’re going for. I’m always looking to catch a good emotional arc, and a good narrative arc.

Our Notes on Notes participants did exactly this. Two people who almost always knew little or nothing about each other’s musical tastes entered into a storytelling exchange, looking for meaning, discovery, and beauty in this space we created together. Every second Friday of the month, to me, was an opportunity to peek into the minds that curated a musical pasture for someone else to briefly inhabit. And those who did made beautiful, thoughtful, and incredible things in response. The whole project was about making art (the playlist), then making more art in response (images, cocktails, paintings, words, films, texts, YouTube comments, scores, maps), and then this entire exchange became art through the very process of collaborative creation. Each “pairing” of a playlist with a non-musical, creative response not only constructed a bridge between two people who barely knew each other beyond being thrust into this exchange by their friends, but also invited others to traverse this space.

And so as curators of this experiment, this is the fundamental question we are left with a year later: who is this project for? It emerged from a sense of loneliness and isolation that I sought to heal with music. But it also came from a hope that others would find participating, witnessing, and experiencing these exchanges as comforting as Josh and I did. As a playlist-maker in some of these exchanges, I hoped to curate experiences of escape at a time when we could not leave our homes (“Take Me To The Sea”) or snapshots of my own journey back home that I thought others who felt displaced and journeyed to rediscover homes would find relatable (“Going Back Home”). Eléonore Rimbault responded with gorgeous mixed-media paintings that were also contextualized by her own experiences of finding a way back home and our conversations about this experience.

Other playlist-makers, like Cameron Witbeck in “Blackness at the Disjuncture,” refused escape, rooting their musical curation in a reflection of the Black experience at a time when an anti-racist uprising was taking place in the streets of the U.S. Similarly rooted in reality, but imagining new futures in the wake of vaccines’ growing availability, Michael Galperin and Bindu Poroori relayed their hopes for “An Opening.” As friends in real life, this exchange felt intimate yet resonant, achieving what, to me, is the highest ideal of artistic exchange. What surprised me was how a similar intimacy appeared even between two complete strangers, as in the case of “Platform 9 ¾,” an exchange between Claire Boylan (my internet music friend who I have never met in real life) and Annis Saniee (a friend of a friend who I have also never met in person). In answering this question of who this project was for, I cannot escape the fact that this little experiment has affirmed my conviction in our abilities to pour endless care into the things we give each other, regardless of how close or distant we may seem.

Notes on Notes was created for me and for Josh, because we were curious and loved the promise of bringing strangers into an artistic space of collaboration. Notes on Notes was created for our collaborators, who invariably messaged us after the posts went up to express their surprise, gratitude, and excitement at what had just been virtually created with just the playlist as an interface. I hope that Notes on Notes was and will be meaningful for you, if you are someone who loves music, art, and the possibility of being swept away into the spaces afforded by this musical and creative expedition.

As I reflect on this long year of grief, anger, and disbelief, Notes on Notes has felt like a bright spot that grew to fold in a large set of people who were similarly looking to both care and be cared for. At the end of this year, I feel grateful to everyone who participated in the exchanges or read and listened along. Thank you for helping me discover new music, inhabit new worlds, and to see our own with a greater diversity of perspectives. Josh and I have decided to take a step back from Notes on Notes to think about where and how we want to take this project forward and how to bring people together in new ways. If you have ideas, reactions, or feedback please write to us at notesonnotesonnotes@gmail.com. In the meanwhile, I will be listening to some of my latest earworms, courtesy of Notes on Notes:

• “Light—Edit” by Michael Kiwanuka (from “And Everything In Between,” curated by Dipali Anumol)
• “Living for the City—1982 Musiquarium Version” by Stevie Wonder (from “Blackness at the Disjuncture,” curated by Cameron Witbeck)
• “Waterfall” by Laura Allan and Paul Horn (from “Platform 9 ¾,” curated by Claire Boylan)
• “Poly Blue” by Jessica Pratt (from “to retrace your yearnings is to cope,” curated by Rhys Ting)
• “Mehngai Daiyan” from “Peepli [Live]” film (from “Making Makers,” curated by Vithya Subramaniam)
• “Melodi Ya Lla” by Mahlathini & The Mahotella Queens (from “Mozwane,” curated by Siyanda Mohutsiwa)
• “Her Light” by Cleo Sol (from “An Opening,” curated by Michael Galperin)
• “What’s Wrong With Groovin’” by Letta Mbulu (from “Going Back Home,” curated by Pranathi Diwakar)

Reflections from Josh

It’s hard to believe that a year has passed since Pranathi and I first officially launched Notes on Notes. When we started this journey, we were both living outside Chicago, the city where we first met while working together as co-coordinators of the University of Chicago’s Urban Workshop (we wrote a bit about that experience in this book chapter!). We started this series while we were both doing fieldwork research: Pranathi was in Chennai and I was in Singapore. The idea for this listening exchange series was born when both cities went into lockdown (though technically, in Singapore this was called a “circuit breaker” or CB, not a “lockdown”). At the beginning, I found it a fun way to experiment with forms of writing, reading, and listening that weren’t focused narrowly on my dissertation—more a momentary escape than anything else. But as the series evolved, I found myself blown away, over and over and over again, by the depth of creative thinking, writing, curating, and counter-curating that Pranathi and all of the series’ curators and respondents put into the 12 collaborations.

In looking back at the list of collaborations, re-listening to many of the playlists, and revisiting the non-musical pairings, all I can say is: my heart is full. I could continue to wax poetic with my gratitude for and amazement at the brilliance of all our collaborators, but instead I’ll practice a bit of “show, don’t tell” and spend the rest of my reflections noting some memorable moments from the past 12 months, in no particular order.

Songs that now live in my head rent-free

I still listen to these pretty much weekly and/or find them stuck in my head on a more-or-less constant basis (in the best way).

• “Empini” by Kelly Khumalo (from “Mozwane,” curated by Siyanda Mohutsiwa)
• “Jerrod” by Solange (from “to retrace your yearnings is to cope,” curated by Rhys Ting)
• “Gaddiye” by Asrar Shan and Attaullah Khan Esakhelvi (from “Making Makers,” curated by Vithya Subramaniam)
• “Easy Street” by Sarah Vaughan (from “City Sounds,” curated by Pranathi Diwakar)

Something that (often) keeps me up at night

Watching “Daddy Lessons” live by Beyoncé ft. The Chicks (from “Banjoes and Line Dances,” curated by Matthew Knisley) profoundly disturbed me. The lyrics were always dark, and out of all the tracks on Lemonade, this was never a particular favorite for me—even before the infamous Country Music Awards performance. But watching a group of white women performing in a country-music genre, singing “my daddy said shoot” to a predominantly white audience also put the realities of anti-Blackness and white supremacy in stark relief, and left me unsettled, to borrow a description from Eunike Setiadarma, who offered a barbed (yet playful) response to the playlist.

Collaborations that truly surprised me

• “Blackness at the Disjuncture,” curated by Cameron Witbeck, was pure genius on its own, but together with the response from Kenzell Huggins, this collaboration blew my mind. The Loony Tunes background images that Kenzell provided as non-musical pairings reframed the whole thing in a way that made me both look and listen differently in ways that have gone far beyond the collaboration itself.
• “Platform 9 ¾” by Claire Boylan was magic in its own right, each track both a whole world unto itself and a single stop on an extended itinerary. Yet Annis Saniee’s response added new layers and unexpected, angular textures that also transformed my experience of listening, looking, and imagining. I love maps, especially maps of fictional or nonexistent places, but these maps and snippets of text with this playlist gave me that consciousness-expanding feeling that I rarely manage to experience while fully sober.
• “An Opening,” curated by Michael Galperin, was a delightful journey to begin with, balancing multidimensional variety, breadth, and depth—in sounds, styles, sources, and genres—against a seamless through-line that united my listening experience. But together with Bindu Poroori’s response (which took the form of a “performance score” for both listening to the playlist, and exploring and battling our hopes for the future), this collaboration literally made my heart race.

“Non-musical pairings that changed my life” check

• Eléonore Rimbault’s original artworks, created in response to “Going Back Home” (by Pranathi Diwakar) are all witty, wistful, and dreamily uncanny, but “dream of a dog” especially spoke to me. I hope to one day have it in my home (step one: get a home).
• Among other things, Shining Li paired a sorted-stream graph from Robin Weis’ 2016 crying project in response to “And Everything In Between” (by Dipali Anumol). This particular graph represents all the reasons that Weis cried in the previous year. I don’t know why, but I still think about this graph a lot. I almost put this in the “things that (often) keep me up at night” section, above. I’m still not sure I made the right choice.
• Dipali Anumol paired World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (2020) by Aimee Nezhukumatathil as part of her response to “Making Makers” (by Vithya Subramaniam) The literary collection is stunning, and beautifully shares the author’s experiences of joy and wonder at encountering the world’s other-than-human inhabitants without downplaying the hostility and alienation that also ensues from these encounters. 10/10 would recommend.
• Scott Jung included a surrealist claymation film, OPAL (2020) by Jack Stauber in response to “to retrace our longings is to cope” (by Rhys Ting). I’ll say it again so you can hear me at the back: Surrealist. Claymation. Short. Film. That is all.

2020–2021 Notes on Notes Collaborations

12 June 2020

Introducing: Notes on Notes
+ Bonus Collab: Love in the Time of Corona • Listen at spoti.fi/2zraS5T
Playlist curator: Pranathi Diwakar
Respondent: Josh Babcock

10 July 2020

Collab 1: Take Me To the Sea
Listen at spoti.fi/37nU7Fb
Playlist curator: Pranathi Diwakar
Respondent: Josh Babcock

14 August 2020

Collab 2: Making Makers
Links in story
Playlist curator: Vithya Subramaniam
Respondent: Dipali Anumol

11 September 2020

Collab 3: Mystery
Listen at spoti.fi/2XzLjIA
Playlist curator: Pranathi Diwakar
Respondent: Josh Babcock

9 October 2020

Collab 4: City Sounds
Listen at spoti.fi/36kDHz1
Playlist curator: Pranathi Diwakar
Respondent: Josh Babcock

13 November 2020

Collab 5: Going Back Home
Listen at spoti.fi/2GQBP6z
Playlist curator: Pranathi Diwakar
Respondent: Eléonore Rimbault

11 December 2020

Collab 6: And Everything In Between
Listen at spoti.fi/2VNoHmN
Playlist curator: Dipali Anumol
Respondent: Shining Li

8 January 2021

Collab 7: Mozwane
Listen at spoti.fi/2Lw2HLj
Playlist curator: Siyanda Mohutsiwa
Respondents: Josh Babcock and Sam Robson

12 February 2021

Collab 8: Blackness at the Disjuncture
Listen at spoti.fi/36YAW5F
Playlist curator: Cameron Witbeck
Respondent: Kenzell Huggins

12 March 2021

Collab 9: to retrace your yearnings is to cope
Listen at spoti.fi/30uk4jB
Playlist curator: Rhys Ting
Respondent: Scott Jung

9 April 2021

Collab 10: An Opening
Listen at spoti.fi/30uk4jB
Playlist curator: Michael Galperin
Respondent: Bindu Poroori

14 May 2021

Collab 11: Banjoes and Line Dances
Links in story
Playlist curator: Matthew Knisley
Respondent: Eunike G. Setiadarma

11 June 2021

Collab 12: Platform 9 ¾
Listen at spoti.fi/3vcH8jQ
Playlist curator: Claire Boylan
Respondent: Annis Saniee