The Shadow Selects
See below to see some of the playlists and the Nucleus Story!
In 2019, I was exclusively listening to music from the electronic dance music label Monstercat. One day, a friend shared a Spotify playlist with EDM music outside of the label that they enjoyed from the week. I took inspiration from this and created The Shadow Selects: a playlist with tracks found in my Release Radar on Spotify that was a blend of Monstercat and non-Monstercat music. I updated the playlist weekly, hinting at what tracks I would be adding to it for friends to guess. I made a three-month anniversary playlist and started updates less regularly until reaching the one-year anniversary and sharing my absolute favorite tracks.
At this point, COVID started and I took a short break from updating the playlist. In August, I decided to create a special playlist by blending Monstercat music and my story for The Shadow, naming it Proton: The World of Shadow. The listener would experience the sounds of The Shadow's futuristic and electronic world through an untold story yet to be revealed.
I went back to the main playlist and updated it in the spring of 2021 and, in the summer, I created a special drum and bass playlist. Then I updated the main playlist with my favorite tracks from the year. In early 2022, I made one more update before recognizing a problem: I was starting to come across too many great tracks to share and it felt like too much for one playlist to handle at the time. So, to solve this dilemma, as well as planning a trailer video for The Shadow, I separated the music into three different playlists: Proton, Electron, and Neutron. Proton represents futuristic and cyberpunk music, Electron represents the "heavy hitters" and exciting bass music, and Neutron represents the emotional and melodic music as well as colorful and feel-good tracks. With an extended drum and bass playlist, these were specially released with a video of The Shadow that would become part of a larger story in 2024.
In addition, I learned how to make the playlists more sonically pleasing by using the Camelot wheel (a music mix tool) and Sort Your Music, a website that takes Spotify playlists and gives all the information including tempo, energy, and danceability ranges, and much more. By manually going through each track and finding the key of the song like Traktor, I would have a more accurate listing of each song's info and adjust the order of the tracks for a clean transitional playlist.
For 2023, I continued saving the music I enjoyed listening to and would fit one of the themes for the Shadow Selects project. I tried to find the best time to share the next playlists and the next part of The Shadow's story. As the year came and went, I was unsure of what to do with the project. As the snow finally hit my city in the first month of 2024, not only was I finally able to shoot the scene I had envisioned for The Shadow's story, but I outlined a new story based on the scene, and it would become the largest promotion of the project just in time for its five-year anniversary: the search for the lost city of Nucleus.
The goal was fairly simple: over the course of two months, I would share playlists of Proton, Electron, and Neutron by each season (from Fall 2022 to Winter 2023/24) as well as a combined yet curated playlist for each season. With each combined playlist, I would also share a portion of the Nucleus story with an image representing that part of the story. Originally there would be six parts (this became seven parts), and on April 19th, I would share the video as well as a special five-year anniversary playlist and/or mix.
This, however, didn't happen like this.
Once I reached the Summer 2023 playlists, I was still in the middle of manually sorting them past their initial release dates and ended up a week behind schedule into April. Towards the date, I decided to save the Winter 2023/24 playlists for after the anniversary, and before the date, an insane amount of stress took over me to the point where I had a dream that involved a bridge collapsing in front of me. The interpretation of the dream meant that I was struggling to reach my goals. I told myself that the only way to work around this was to inevitably push the release to the following week. This gave me the time to finish sharing the rest of the Nucleus story and images and finish working on the video and the five-year anniversary playlist.
I am so glad to finally share this with the world. I've listened to thousands of songs and have shared about 2,300 of them over the course of these five years. I have found new ways to help me create my vision for The Shadow and the world he lives in. I still put my personal touch on everything that has been shared and I used any basic ideas to help inspire me to make them even better. I'm grateful for the help from Underpass Productions in filming my vision of The Shadow's journey. I'm also grateful to those who inspired me, who created the music I listened to, and to those who listened and enjoyed this playlist project of mine. In truth, I believe that my goal from five years ago had succeeded; I branched out of my comfort zone of Monstercat-only music and reached into the unknown of the EDM realm with the help of Spotify's Release Radar and artists I came across on social media.
I still probably have more growing to do and more music to listen to, but I feel that after wrapping up the Winter and Spring playlists, my work has been completed. Whether I continue sharing music through these playlists is to be determined, but I am very glad for expressing myself and my vision in these playlists, the posts I've shared and the videos I've made. Thank you for reading, and enjoy the playlists and works I've made.