Playlist: 2026.8 | Finding Beauty in the Chaos

This is W Department, translated into sound.

I disappeared in July.

Not intentionally. The month simply got away from me. Travel, work, life, too many things happening at once. And for the first time this year there wasn’t a playlist. So August feels less like the next installment and more like a return.

Maybe appropriately, I came back wanting to make something a little less orderly.

Spotify has continued to expand the tools inside its Mix feature, and this month I found myself playing with them more seriously: adjusting transitions, adding effects, extending and looping moments. The playlist became less about placing songs in an order and more about what happens between them.

And that changed the way I built it.

It is the same practice we follow with everything here, whether it is clothing, an object, a work of art, or a book. The meaning rarely lives in any single piece. It lives in the conversation between them.

This playlist follows the same instinct.

The first half moves through hip-hop, soul, psychedelia, French rap, old pop records, and things that don’t particularly belong beside one another on paper. The Beach Boys can find their way into Night Trains; MC Solaar can give way to Digable Planets; Khruangbin can somehow become the bridge between several different worlds. Instead of smoothing out those contradictions, I wanted to use them.

There is a kind of beauty in things rubbing against one another.

The mix gradually finds a pulse. Loose, warm, slightly dusty. And then it begins to open up. By the time we reach Fleetwood Mac, something has shifted. The rhythm that has carried most of the hour falls away almost completely.

The last few songs are a descent.

Trevor Hall slows everything down. James Blake leaves more space than sound. Karen Dalton brings us somewhere older, stranger, and more fragile. What began as a fairly restless collection of records ends somewhere quiet.

Maybe that’s what I was looking for without quite knowing it.

This summer has felt full: beautiful, complicated, occasionally overwhelming. I don’t think the answer is always to impose order on it. Sometimes it is enough to move through it, pay attention, and notice the unexpected moments when disparate things suddenly make sense together.

To find the beauty in the chaos.

It feels good to be back.

—Christopher Webster

Track List

  • Clean
    J.Lately, The Grouch
  • Darling
    Esbe
  • All I Wanna Do (Remastered 2009)
    The Beach Boys
  • Lovesick
    Night Trains
  • Grain Belt Beer
    Thes One
  • Fire for You
    Cannons
  • Lève-toi et rap
    MC Solaar
  • Where I’m From
    Digable Planets
  • So We Won’t Forget
    Khruangbin
  • B-Side
    Khruangbin, Leon Bridges
  • Love Me Not
    Ravyn Lenae
  • Dreams (2004 Remaster)
    Fleetwood Mac
  • blue sky mind
    Trevor Hall
  • Trying Times
    James Blake
  • Something On Your Mind
    Karen Dalton