The soft sounds of Pure Bathing Culture

In Spotify Essentials, the Daily Dot curates custom playlists created by some of our favorite artists and writers. In this installment, Pure Bathing Culture flips through its CD binder.

This playlist is mostly a bunch of music we’ve been listening to in the van. We’ve been on the road a lot in the last year and have had a lot of long drives to take down.

We don’t have an iPod hook-up in our van so we can only listen to CDs while we’re driving. It’s become a fun activity for us and almost an obsession to find CDs at thrift stores and truck stops. We try to keep the circle flowing (and the van de-cluttered) by re-donating CDs at thrift shops once they’ve run their course with us.

Generally, the two main genres we tend to get the most mileage out of are pop music from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, and new age instrumental music. It’s not uncommon for us to listen to an album like Ray Lynch’s Deep Breakfast for hours and hours and occasionally for an entire drive, just sort of bringing the volume up and down as we see fit. Another record that serves this purpose for us is the Dire Straits album Communique and a close third would be the Windham Hill Guitar Sampler. An interesting phenomenon that this process has created is that while it is all music that we really enjoy listening to, the albums become familial comforts and they have a way of serving as spirit anchors for us amidst the ever evolving chaos of being on the road. 

Pure Bathing Culture’s Moon Tides is out now on Partisan Records. You can catch the band during SXSW:

• Thursday, March 13, 9pm at Hype Hotel
• Friday, March 14, 2:15pm at Austin Convention Center, Exhibit Hall 4

Photo by Parker Fitzgerald