PLAYLISTS
Gonzalo C. Garcia
We Are The End
THROUGH SCHOOL, I was always involved in bands. We always tried to make it. I wasn’t very good at much else. As a teenager, I loved screaming, and my band H.Y.A would practise every Friday in my room. During this time, I went through being a grunger, to a goth, to a stoner and then a depressive post-rock adept (still there to be honest). Most importantly, it was how I started writing. And even more, it was a way to perform writing.
So, since I am writing this, it is quite obvious I did not make it. But others did. Others that I know did. Kind of. In We Are The End, where the experience of loss informs a classic breakup plot-line, I decided I should include music which not only dealt with that theme in terms of content, but also music which brought me back to performing what I wrote. I organised playlists for the different moods in different scenes. At first it was mostly as an injection of feeling. Then, as a way of keeping my sentences tied to a rhythm which conveyed certain feelings tied to the content of a scene. But then, a familiar experience took over. I was connecting with the people in the novel through music. And it was this constant wavering between loss and love, a nostalgic dream of performance and the banality of the world in which these performances take place, that led me to experiment even further with music.
Here’s the playlist I ended up with (looping forever).
- Serge Gainsbourg – La Chanson de Prévert
- Igor Stravinsky – Elegy (solo viola)
- Fármacos – Abril
- Miss Garrison – Navegante
- Fármacos – Lento
- Caravana – Sigue sus Ojos
- Mogwai – Take me somewhere nice
- Max Richter – Infra 2
- Rhye – Last Dance
- My Bloody Valentine – Sometimes
- Inti-Illimani – Cueca De La Ausencia
- Max Richter – Still Dreaming, Still Travelling
- Max Richter – Sunlight
- Elliot Smith – Everything Means Nothing To Me
- Portishead – Nylon Smile
- Hungry Ghosts – Nothing Has To Happen
- Frankie Sparo – City As Might Have Been
- The National – Sorrow
- This Will Destroy You – Threads
- Interpol – Take You On A Cruise
- Deftones – Teenager
- Radiohead – Let Down
- Fármacos – Other
GONZALO C. GARCIA was born in Chile and spent his first years in the small town of San Fernando in Chile’s Colchagua Valley region, before moving to Switzerland and eventually to the University of Kent, where he studied for a PhD. He currently teaches creative writing at the University of Warwick. His first novel, We Are The End, will be published by Galley Beggar Press in September 2017.
To read the first chapter of We Are The End, click here.
To pre-order your copy, click here.