HEADPHONES in the office? But real, good music too distracting? These meticulous peddlers of dullness have created oeuvres with your eight-hour shift in mind:
Brian Eno
Eno’s perfect for bashing out a pitch deck like you’re in an airline lounge without any of the holiday thrill, having invented music for that exact purpose. Any of his ambient works will soothe the mind so thoroughly you’ll forget you ever had a life outside this office, this screen, these thankfully noise-cancelled colleagues.
Boards of Canada
Allusions to Satanism, Wicca, and childhood fireside memories could be interesting. But channelled through wordless instrumental trip-hop that’s wispy enough to make the office fan sound like a punk explosion? Even a manager’s verbal warning will feel like part of the duo’s hallucinatory sound collage, and equally unimportant.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor
Despite boasting a thousand members and radical politics, this band highlights global injustice in the most ironic way possible by boring you into numbness. ‘That last song was about Gaza?’ you’ll think. ‘Weird. I’m not interested in it any more.’
Grouper
There’s a real power to instrument-and-voice work unless the artist smears the crap out of the production to sound like disappointed post-sex sighs. Still, Liz Harris’ constant ticker-tape of acoustic strums make you pound away on your keboard, sounding impressive until your Q2 report is titled “on dreams I’m moving through heavy water” and you’re fired.
James Blake
Blake crying over a laptop becomes easy background noise when you are busy doing the same yourself. His balladic warbling about lost human connection may as well be a dreadful sales manager moaning about AI taking his job, which you’ve learned to tune out anyway by scrolling LinkedIn. Which Blake might as well be singing.
The xx
The office gym bunnies champion high BPM music for work and play, so when you want that but only a little bit, there’s these heroes of downbeat indie. Their promise of a thumping bassline that never arrives is a great accompaniment for a day of clock-watching where 5pm never seems to actually come.
