Whenever I’m in Geisel, I’m in it for the long haul. Whether it’s midterms, finals, or just a particularly busy week spurred by my chronic procrastination, a trip to Geisel is always at least a half-day affair. Having an ample supply of music on hand is the only way I can bear the weight of these difficult days.
But sometimes choosing music results in further procrastination: an endless scroll through every Spotify playlist looking for that one song with the perfect mood to finish off whatever assignment you’re stuck on. Don’t worry, I’ve done the legwork for you. Here are eight study albums, one for every floor of Geisel.
Floor One: Anodyne 2: Return to Dust Original Soundtrack – Melos Han-Tani
I could just melt into the title screen that greets you when you boot up Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, the third game from independent game studio Analgesic Productions. On the start-up screen, the song that plays over it—“Anodyne II”—is like a sunset on the shore, a lullaby, a mother’s lament. Like the orange egg protagonist Nova hatches out of at the beginning of the game. It is blissful yet foreboding, hinting at the heady themes of Anodyne 2: breaking from the constraints of a corrupt system and reclaiming individuality in the face of religious and societal powers.
Throughout the rest of the soundtrack, composer Melos Han-Tani treats you to cushioned synth pads, clicky percussions, and digital strings. The vast range of moods—including cheery, heavy, and fanciful—that populate the soundtrack mimics the hub-based structure of the game, transporting the listener to different worlds. The powerful imagery evoked by Anodyne 2’s soundtrack lends itself well to the nosiness of Geisel’s first floor. The eclectic set of songs allow your mind to wander just enough to distract from the chatter, but not enough to distract from your work.
Floor Two: The Mountain Record – Yuichiro Fujimoto
Geisel’s second floor is probably the most popular floor—definitely the loudest—and just as crusty as the first. While there may be a lived-in charm to the East wing’s caked-in carpet or the West’s human-powered sauna, the second floor is generally unpleasant. I find myself there when I’m too lazy to climb the stairs or take the elevator or if I just have a spare hour to kill between classes.
Yuichiro Fujimoto’s lovely album, The Mountain Record, will help drown out what noise-canceling headphones cannot. The album’s sonic palette—plucked guitar and whispered synths—is embellished with Fujimoto’s sentimental field recordings. In any of his songs, you may hear bird songs, fragments of children’s conversations, and crushed leaves beneath a boot. The Mountain Record invites you into the environment it was recorded in. Fujimoto’s liberal use of field recordings lends itself well to Geisel’s active study levels. Whatever seeps through your headphones may as well be a part of the music.
Floor Three: Coastal Erosion – Merzbow & Vanity Productions
No, you can’t study on Geisel’s third floor, but it still gets an album.
Merzbow, an alias of Masami Akita, is one of the most important projects in noise music. His expansive body of work includes over 400 albums, which only scratches the surface of his recorded and live work. Coastal Erosion—his hundred-something album and one of about a dozen released in 2019—is a hypnotic highlight of his discography. Where his noise classics, like 1996’s Pulse Demon, blast out with immediate and unrelenting walls of metallic fuzz, Coastal Erosion is more understated. Merzbow’s signature noise is subdued by ambient drones cranked high in the mix. Merzbow sounds like an approaching storm, visible on the horizon.
While seeming antithetical to the volume of noise music, it’s somehow easy to let Coastal Erosion slip into the background. It becomes white noise for steady focus, a loud and trance-inducing drone. While you can’t go to the third floor, Coastal Erosion’s intensity reminds me of Geisel’s Brutalist construction—all about texture, harsh angles, and concrete. The third floor, just a slab of reinforced rock, is particularly apt for Merzbow’s style.
Floor Four: Lost Tracks (2018-2019) – North Americans
I love the fourth floor. So peaceful. Quiet but not too quiet. It’s always a pleasant temperature, not too hot, and serves as a quiet ground between the lower and upper floors. Oh, and the bird’s nest! I love the bird’s nest.
North Americans’ rickety ambient-Americana on Lost Tracks (2018-2019) provides that off-kilter sense of familiarity. The album could honestly be the soundtrack to a camping trip if North Americans hadn’t glitched their guitars out, indulging in the sound of a corrupted audio file. It’s a little like walking your phone too far from the Bluetooth speaker, the music flickering and begging for a clear connection.
The second track “Cooking At Home” captures the burning cabin in the background of the cover with a thick layer of static; a constant mechanical flicker on “Frame” coats over the sound of someone playing piano downstairs. By the time you get to the final track, “Torn Apart,” you’ll have watched Library Walk’s tide of people roll in and out. The sun will be setting. The bird’s nest is abandoned. North Americans broke their Americana roots to soundtrack the disintegration of their home country.
Floor Five: Moenie and Kitchi – Gregory and the Hawk
Gregory and the Hawk’s Moenie and Kitchi is sweet enough to make you blush. The twee folk project of Meredith Godreau, Moenie and Kitchi is her most well-known album after a full album stream made rounds on the YouTube algorithm. And that incidental notoriety is deserved. The whole record’s a treat. Simple finger-picked guitar, occasional drums, and flourishes of synthesizer make for a sentimental cottage-core dream. Along with Godreau’s high, child-like voice, the album is tailor-made for anyone wishing they lived in My Neighbor Totoro or for people who aspire to garden and embroider but don’t have the time.
The view from the fifth floor isn’t too high. It’s just enough to see out at all the flora surrounding Geisel: the birch tree groves and flower patches. As you ponder away from your homework, Moenie and Kitchi provides the ideal accompaniment to the short-lived, cottage-core fantasies of a spaced-out mind.
Floor Six: Songs Before Bed – Pudding Club
I feel weird about the sixth floor. I often forget about it and I seldom go. It’s the uncomfortable middle of all the “quiet study” floors. It’s also the largest of the upper floors, which lends it a slight uncanniness, like a weird stretched out picture of its vertically aligned cousins.
Songs Before Bed, the latest album from Otto Benson, whose other aliases include OTTO and Memo Boy, coasts on a similarly subtle uncanniness, which it derives from its strange relationship with childhood. Per Benson, the album purports “to help listeners wind down and reach a more present and relaxed state before sleeping.” And largely, that’s right. I’ve been listening to it a lot before bed. Its soft guitars on the first side and clicky, head-boppable drum machines on the second wind you down like a restless kid after a big day. Then you see the cover: catlike creature atop a large-headed…man? In the background, a row of planes fly toward the sun. Benson’s sly sense of humor throughout his projects positions Songs Before Bed’s sense of childlike whimsy as equal parts nostalgic, playful, and psychedelic. It’s like twisting your ankle in the rabbit shit hole, drinking spiked Kool-Aid out of the looking glass.
Floor Seven: Barbie Horse Adventures: Blue Ribbon Race – “Main BGM Extended” – Tom Kingsley
I don’t remember much about the 7th floor. I think the bookshelves were accented magenta, but I can’t be sure. Maybe the AC was on, and I could hear it. It is not quite the highest, but it is still a chore to climb up to. When you’re on the 7th floor, you’ll probably want to be somewhere else. And where better than a Horse Adventure? The surprisingly charming title theme of Barbie Horse Adventures: Blue Ribbon Race is a perfect example of the Game Boy Advance’s crunchy 8-bit sound card. Thankfully, YouTube user Bippo Ernesti created an extended 30-minute version, which you can put on a loop with a simple right-click on the video screen. Go on, bliss out. Channel your inner equestrian.
Floor Eight: Space 1.8 – Nala Sinephro
I can’t think of a better album to end a long day’s work than Nala Sinephro’s ambient jazz masterpiece Space 1.8. It’s a gentle album full of swaying soundscapes. “Space 1” coasts on pensive synth tones and Sinephro’s masterful harp, which lend the song the aspect of a lullaby.
Even so, the album isn’t without its energetic bouts. Sinephro is quick to jet you into the cosmos on the bubbly “Space 3” and unafraid to indulge in free jazz improvisation on “Space 6.” Space 1.8’s thick contemplative mood and array of energies make it compulsively and repeatedly listenable. It shoots you into the stars, and by the end of its 20-minute closer, it quietly lands you back on Earth.
Finnegan Bly is an Arts and Culture Writer for The Triton.