Songs For Refining Macrodata
Actually good elevator music inspired by the show "Severance".
For severed employees of Lumon Industries, the Severed Floor is meant to be out of time. Severance’s editing, directing, and ultra-styled production design bestow upon the viewer a similar liminal feeling. While the tech and auto manufacturing of Lumon seem to be stuck somewhere around the ‘80s, music supervisor George Drakoulias and the Severance team have made an equally clear stylistic choice for the show’s needle drops—a distinct era of its own, namely the late ‘50s and ‘60s.
Much of the business-as-usual music we hear in the Macrodata Refinement Office feels like “muzak”—a genre born with the purpose of participating in capitalism. In fact, the genre of muzak is literally trademarked, so if we wanted to be 100% accurate, we’d call it by its official name, “Muzak LLC.”
You may also know Muzak LLC as “elevator music.” In a YouTube video on Muzak made three years before the Severance premiere, the narrator, with some accidental foresight, refers to the genre as “music for elevators and lobotomies.”
Muzak LLC was music meant to be played at the department store while doing your patriotic duty, which at the time was shopping at Sears for appliances to put in your Beautiful American Kitchen. I don’t think Muzak LLC was meant to be actually good music, but its influences are undoubtable:
- Jazz
- Jazz fusion
- Bossa nova
- Latin
- An emphasis on horns and woodwinds over piano
- Electric organ
- Güiros
- Strings
- Drum brushes
You could also lump a lot of this into “lounge music”—another genre tied directly to the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. Lounge music, elevator music, Muzak LLC: You know it when you hear it.
So, what’s on this playlist? In Songs For Refining Macrodata, you get 28 songs that make me feel like I’m working in the Macrodata Refinement Office and my life’s main conflict hasn’t happened to me yet. (For Severance-heads: I imagine this is music that played during the Petey/Mark glory days of MDR.)
These are not just 28 songs I smushed together by searching “elevator music playlist,” “muzak playlist,” and selecting and dragging with no thought. Every song on this playlist already existed in my impossibly large list of “liked” songs. These are good songs I’ve already liked for quite some time. There are also a few classics in here you might recognize from movies or TV!
As per usual, the first song is free:
“Alone” - Don Ellis, The Don Ellis Orchestra (1967)
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Here’s a fun fact: Don Ellis is the guy who wrote “Whiplash,” the song Miles Teller is too fucking stupid to play correctly.
To hear the rest of Songs For Refining Macrodata, subscribe to Grace Spelman Music Project for just $5/month or $50/year!
Enjoy and, above all, Praise Kier!