Music has always played a big part in my writing. I started writing for a theoretical readership when I did a zine about punk and hardcore bands

in the mid-to-late-1990s, and my first freelance pieces were also about music. Music has inspired stories, served as a plot element for novels, and provided a backdrop for many a long writing session. I can remember spending nights finalizing one project listening to Phosphorescent’s deliriously beautiful albums Aw Come Aw Wry and Pride; and more recently, I’ve found that playing parts of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops can put my brain in the ideal space to write. Over the last year and a half, I’ve become more and more reliant on one album as a soundtrack to long sessions of writing and editing: Spaces, a collection of live recordings by the German composer Nils Frahm. It can be difficult to find the right balance in an album: too subdued and it might as well not be there, too propulsive or noisy and it can become distracting. I’ve lost hours by cueing up what I thought would be an ideal musical choice, only to find that its textures and dynamics leave me fixated on it rather than the text in front of me. Frahm’s work, and particularly this album, strike the perfect balance: The steadiness of the rhythm brings in an elusive charm, while never feeling too intrusive. It’s compelling in an almost contradictory way, which provides another aesthetic goal to strive for.
—Tobias Carroll, author of Transitory (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and Reel (Rare Bird Books, 2016)