716 Playlists – Tom King from No Pain in Pop Playlist

I guess this would be in the same way you can equally glance across rooms in a gallery or transfix yourself to an individual picture and still personalise the experience.

It’s the steps between the two that now seem more prominent in popular music; they resonate with me most emotionally and suggest why acts such as Burial, Forest Swords, James Blake – music which ten years ago would be considered very inaccessible – are both popular and considered experimental. These tracks – beside Lee Scratch Perry, who’ll probably outlive us all – are from the last two decades and most are from the last.

I’d like to think to think the next ten years of contemporary music will continue to blur the lines between the inward, emotionally drawn sentiment most of them are symptomatic of and the continuing wider, freer consumption of music. The fact a band like the XX, and to some degree solo acts like Bon Iver or even Drake, can now connect to a truly global audience with such an introspective and withdrawn approach suggests to me that the palette of popular taste is in flux and that artists will always find another way to maintain relevancy to contemporary life, regardless of mutations of genre or style.”