Background Music is Important

Charlie Hansen was not unique is feeling that Background Music is unnecessary and unimportant.

Perhaps, to alphas like him...  Actually many "serious" audiophiles say that.  Another reason the Audiophile hobby is dying.

(To be fair, audiophiles in my local society are Post Judgemental for the most part.  There's little hectoring people over this or that "transgression," as I'd seen earlier in my life.  And though I'd certainly done it and perhaps even more in earlier years anyway, and even then I'd never heard anyone disparaging everything but "serious listening" except in print a few years ago.  It just wasn't a concern, people do what they do, audio "issues" identified by sighted listening were assumed to be always apparent regardless.)

Anyway, to most actual humans, and especially to people who live alone like me--if not all others, background music (or something) is nearly essential to sanity.

Nowadays "or something" has often become some flavor of "news" broadcast.  Those are often stressful, leaving you concerned about everything but connected to nothing, except the next day's broadcast, to feel on top of nothing much more.

I prefer to play music all the time, and most of the time music without words that allows me to just get on with things, but just thrilled slightly by the music.

So I have two icons for my automatic music playlist generator, either music without words (classical and much new age and jazz) and too much tension, and all the rest.

That's the way to do it.  It never seems to work that way on any music streaming service.  Even if you choose "Electronic" you'll eventually get some vocals.  And you'll often get music that's very stressful, like Oldfield (sometimes) or Ligettii.

I just heard about Oldfield for the first time yesterday, and I had to check him out, starting from his classic album "Tubular Bells."

Well starting from Side One was basically impossible as background music.  It's just too stressful.

In that regards, may I recommend myself, an Artist named Charles Peter Peterson, and my one album, Mythic Rocks.  It becomes slightly stressful in parts, but never enough to disqualify from being potential background music.  That's integral to my music "development" process, which is mostly background listening and weeding out the stuff that absolutely doesn't work.

The local Classical station KPAC and Jazz station KLRN generally work as background music too, as does KSYM when playing Musical Starstreams.

Anything Ambient from Eno works, of course.