If your ideal writing music has no words to trip over, here are four instrumental and beat-driven artists to put on when you actually need to think.
A good friend of mine runs Talaarawan, a lovely little journaling site built around one thoughtful question a day. She recently wrote up the music she listens to while journaling — warm vocal jazz and soul, Diana Krall and Norah Jones and Amy Winehouse, the kind of lamplight sound that keeps you company while you turn a vague feeling into a sentence. Catloaf Records liked the idea enough to build a companion piece pairing her picks with vinyl. I loved the whole thing.
But here’s my confession: I don’t journal to voices. The second there are lyrics, some part of my brain stops writing and starts listening — and then I’m mouthing someone else’s words instead of finding my own. So consider this the instrumental B-side to my friend’s playlist: four artists who make music with barely a word in it, all of whom — conveniently — you can now find on vinyl over at Catloaf Records, and all of whom just got a home here in the database.
Here they are, roughly in the order I’d reach for them.
Nujabes — the one who basically invented the mood
Listen: Nujabes on the database · vinyl at Catloaf Records · find it on Amazon
If you have ever put on a “lofi beats to study/relax to” stream, you have heard Nujabes‘ children, grandchildren and imitators. The Tokyo producer Jun Seba fused dusty jazz samples with hip-hop drums so gracefully that a whole genre grew up in his shadow. Modal Soul is the one to start with: warm, unhurried, a little sad in the way that good afternoons are a little sad, and it never once demands your attention. It just makes the room better. It’s my desert-island focus record, and it’s the one Catloaf has on a 2LP reissue.
Interesting Trivia: If Nujabes sounds familiar even though you’ve never bought one of his records, it’s probably Samurai Champloo — the 2004 anime whose soundtrack he shaped, quietly introducing a generation of Western kids to jazzy Japanese hip-hop without them ever learning the producer’s name. He died in a car accident in 2010 at just 36; the lofi movement he seeded has only grown since.
Lofi Girl — the study window that became a record label
Listen: Lofi Girl on the database · vinyl at Catloaf Records · find it on Amazon
You know the girl. Headphones, pencil, cat, the endless rainy window. Lofi Girl started life as a French YouTube channel called ChilledCow and turned into the default background hum of studying for the entire internet. What I didn’t clock for a long time is that it’s also a genuine record label — and the compilations are properly good, low-stakes company for a work session that’s pretending the to-do list isn’t there. Catloaf stocks a stack of them on colored vinyl (Back to School, Get Some Rest, Parisian Romance), which is a very funny and very lovely object to own for music that was born as an infinite stream.
Interesting Trivia: In 2020 the Lofi Girl livestream got accidentally taken down by a copyright bot after running continuously for over two years, and enough people noticed that it briefly became actual news. That’s how far a wordless loop of beats had wormed its way into people’s daily routines.
ビクター MK II — the deep cut
Listen: ビクター MK II on the database · cassette at Catloaf Records
Every list needs one you can mention later to prove your taste runs past the algorithm, and this is mine. ビクター MK II (Victor MKII) is a Filipino beat maker who makes lo-fi hip-hop shaped by old-school hip-hop and a deep love of Japanese animation and culture. He calls what he does “instrumental short stories” — beats and melodies, sure, but threaded with ambient and conversational sounds until each track plays like a tiny scene you’ve wandered into. 春風 (Haru Kaze, “spring breeze”) is exactly what the title promises: soft, tape-warm, unbothered. Catloaf has it on cassette, which is the correct format for something this cozy. You won’t find this one on Amazon — that’s rather the point.
Kenny Beats — for when you want the beats to have a heartbeat
Listen: Kenny Beats on the database · vinyl at Catloaf Records · find it on Amazon
Kenny Beats is the odd one out here, and on purpose. He isn’t a lofi act — he’s one of the sharpest hip-hop producers of the last decade, the guy behind records for Vince Staples, Denzel Curry, Rico Nasty and half your favorite rappers. But in 2022 he made LOUIE, a solo album that is basically an instrumental beat tape with a lump in its throat: he built it as a tribute to his late father, and you can feel it. It’s the record for the part of the journaling session that stops being admin and starts being honest — more texture and warmth than pure background, but never words getting in the way.
Interesting Trivia: A lot of Kenny’s fanbase found him through The Cave, a YouTube series where a rapper would show up and he’d build them a beat from scratch, on camera, in an afternoon. Watching someone make instrumental music that fast is its own kind of focus fuel.
Put something on and get to it
That’s the instrumental half of the playlist. If you want the vocal, lamplit version, go read the music she listens to while journaling — and while you’re there, Talaarawan will hand you a question worth writing about. If you want to actually own any of this, the vinyl (and that one cassette) are waiting at Catloaf Records.
Now put something on, open the notebook, and let the beats do the talking. See you next time.
