Part 01 with introduction can be read here.

10. Asobi Seksu – Thursday

Like walking through a busy restaurant, I only catch the loud parts of this song’s sentences.

Thursday pounds a four-to-floor gallop in the low to mids, while intricate Fender Twin-vocalised guitar lines fly overhead, creating a wide, fast-moving soundscape. I like the understated way in which the vocals lilt over the cacophonous ending.

If there’s a theme to this list, it’s emerging as one of contrast: the timid and fragile held in tension with the grand and powerful, and this song exemplifies that best.

9. Four Tet – My Angel Rocks Back and Forth

This song is my first trip to Japan. It’s cherry blossom and don’t care tourism: watching a Buddhist festival held in a temple, ancient and timeless tradition brought to colour and life by bustling families and red paper lanterns.

The harp reminds me of my early twenties, of being less tired, less cynical and remembering a time like that is, in equal parts a sad and thing and a hopeful thing, because what once was might sometime come to be again.

8. Mono & World’s End Girlfriend – Part One

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After Ste gave me a copy of Mono’s masterful Japanese post-rock collaboration, Palmless Prayer, Mass Murder Refrain, I listened to it every day for a month. It is November to me now: winter without Christmas, pitch black commutes, teary pavements.

This is the album to end the world with, and Part One is how it begins.

7. Innocence Mission – Lakes of Canada

Just about as far from Mono as it’s possible to get in a single placing. The little girl voice is tempered by menace and tension in the occasional jangly acoustic overtone.

That and, ‘I feel that I could change’.

It’s just good songwriting, appearing as simplistic as a nursery rhyme but being built from ten thousand hard-earned lessons of experience.

6. James Newton-Howard – Carl’s Fishing Net

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Metal Gear Solid’s Hollywood composer delivers an icicle of a soundtrack. It’s one of my favourite movie scores (for ‘Snow Falling on Cedars’), wholly subtle, mixing brooding orchestral chord swells with the briefest echoes of electronica.

This, the soundtrack’s opening move, reminds me of driving across Dartmoor at night, but also of armchair fires and family. Film’s good too.

5. Philip Glass – Facades

Probably my favourite piece by modern composer Philip Glass. It reminds me a little of Aphex Twin, or vice-versa, probably, all rolling repetition and haunting restraint. How Harry Potter would have been scored had it been written by Ursula Le Guin.

4. Duo505 – Facing It

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Stay with it past the flickering beats until, at 00:46 the wail of a strangled synth high note calls out. Then at 1:07 all heaven breaks loose in the heavy plod of a dusty piano. Blips and pips and ivory have never spoken so deeply.

3. Jóhann Jóhannsson – Odi Et Amo.

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Icelandic composer Jóhannsson was commissioned to write the score to a play. It was, so the story goes, a horrifically violent production, full of darkness and horror.

Jóhannsson decided that the only way to approach such a play was to try and write the most beautiful music he could. Of course, this back story can’t be heard in the piece, but once you know it’s there, you can’t un-know it.

2. For the Widows in Paradise – Sufjan Stevens

If I’m honest this never made me cry. I welled up during Sufjan’s instrumental version of Once In Royal David’s City the first time I heard it at work a couple of years ago, but there’s no way I’m admitting to that.

1. John Williams – Theme from Schindler’s List

It’s a choice so utterly obvious and unsubtle – the trembling violin, the dark history, the unbearable sadness of its story – that it’s almost too worthy, too universal in its impact to warrant putting here.

But John Williams’ theme, while framing its subject matter perfectly, also transcends its narrative and, like the best classical music, can stand apart from that which it supports. It communicates through melody and chord so very much, establishing its time period and geography with subtlety and nuance.

Specifically, it’s the step from the seventh to the eight note in the principal melody that breaks my heart, but also the tenderness of Itzhak Perlman’s playing, the warmth of the oboe in the middle section and the squealed sustain at the end foreshadowing all that is to come.

It is sadness made music, a swansong for existence.

….

So those are my choices. Do you have any?