Marcel Winatschek

Summer on a Hard Drive

This year summer lasted maybe ten days. A heat wave, a couple of bare shoulders, one afternoon where the light felt exactly right—and then it folded back into grey permanence. What’s left is a playlist.

The mixtape is called Back to Summer, and it does exactly what it promises: Miike Snow’s particular brand of cold-synth warmth, The National doing that thing where melancholy sounds like architecture, Mark Ronson bridging the gap between them with enough style to make you believe the sun is still somewhere nearby. I’ve been playing it on loop against the dark.

There’s something almost absurd about a summer mixtape in late January. But that’s the point, I think. You know it won’t fix anything, but you go anyway—back into the sound, back into the feeling of heat you can’t quite reconstruct in your body anymore, only approximate with the right chord change.