Guest Night Tales 2018: The Revival

Cleaning up my HDD this week I found some remnants of art I did for the 'Guest Night Tales' series I did back in 2013. +I still really adore the idea behind it, it's shamelessly ripping off the actual real Late Night Tales compilations but still I like peering into other people's listening, and ultimately their different approaches to the same prompt: "What's your perfect late night playlist?"

So back then I ended up with a bunch of grooveshark playlists that I asked friends to contribute some art and a track-list to. Grooveshark kicked the bucket in 2015 and since then the posts have just consisted of a list of the few songs I could salvage from Grooveshark's recovery option at the time. Until now. I've decided to give them a new lease of life as spotify playlists this time. Now there are some downsides, some tunes straight up aren't on spotify so some of the playlists re missing anything from one or two songs to whole chunks in some cases. Still, it's nice to have them back and functional again.

Starting with my contribution, 2015 me helpfully didn't list the entire playlist when GS died, so I rebuilt most of it and added even more songs to it, it made sense to given the time that's passed anyway. Some alterations were made: I swapped out the Plaid Mix of All Is Full Of Love for the Guy Sigsworth one, and one of the linchpins of the ambient section, The KLF's Madrugada Eterna is missing but overall I'm still happy with how it came out.



I tried to really capture my listening progression over the playlists runtime, starting with a little bit of 80's stuff, slowly changing into the electropop block by way of Chromeo, which gives way to more of a downtempo / electropop combination with The Knife and friends before going full on trip / hip hop with a little help from the likes of Nightmares On Wax and Blockhead before finally beginning to wind down with the more ambient block featuring the likes of Boards Of Canada, culminating in the rhythmic ambience of Charlotte's Mouth and Nightvision.

Nothing too surprising for longtime readers, but stay tuned in the coming weeks as I resurrect the other playlists in the series and add a few more to the stock. It's gonna be a good time. If anyone reading would like to make their own Guest Night Tales list, please feel free to do so! Whether you make it and send me the link or just give me a tracklist to work with I'd love to have it featured here.

-Claude Van Foxbat