Artist Playlists: Mika Tajima / New Humans

For this new series, Dia invites artists to curate a playlist that brings together music that they are listening to right now or that has been meaningful to them during their life.

We had in mind a playlist for the type of communing we are experiencing now—sensing distant bodies, mutual urgencies, overlapping psychic spaces, and the hallucinatory passage of time. Thinking of how classical Indian ragas are meant to be played at different times of the day, we put together music that follows the contour of a compressed day, moving from morning to afternoon to twilight to late night. We also imagined how music can be like the fragrant slow-burning incense once used for time keeping, signaling the shift of moods and senses throughout a day. At home, we find ourselves listening to entirely different kinds of music every week. This collection represents what is playing in our speakers currently and the music that continually reminds us of the people with whom we experienced this music in the past, who are still on our minds now. The playlist ranges from ambient, devotional, techno, diagnostic, field recordings, commercials, dance, vocal, and improvisation—including some of our past collaborators. Emotion Commune assembles voices, sensations, and geographies to soundtrack our entangled present with the particularities of the artists who made the music.

—Mika Tajima / New Humans

Listen to Mika Tajima / New Human's playlist here.

Mika Tajima was born in Los Angeles in 1975. She lives in New York. Formed in 2003, New Humans is a moniker for Tajima's projects with Howie Chen and other artists, designers, and musicians.