Polyphony—the singing of two or more melodies at once, like the left and right hands of a piano player. The pleasure of hearing multiple melodies as they weave through one another is as voyeuristic as it is edifying, like overhearing the sublime grammar of a couple’s secret language.

Every new song we hear is a fresh batch of feeling. After weeks of Wyrms looking back to the past, here is a collection of new music we missed—with every note, the chance to remake a memory.

One afternoon three years ago, I was feeling that classic early-twenties feeling like I had never and would never do anything and everyone would hate me for it. I sat down and made a newsletter on a whim.

It's 2001: CDs are excessive. Packing 1.4 million bits into a single second of stereo? In reality, we need only 128,000—a mere twelfth the size of what we were sold.

From the lab: another microgenre discovered in the field. Pop songs that cruise around 150 bpm with a kick-kick-snare-kick that could snap off your heel.

The room is just as crucial to the music as the melody. Peripheral pieces of a song—separate from the pitch, the key, the tempo—can go unnoticed until they’re gone altogether, things like volume, echo, reverb, resonance.

As the warm weather comes, I lay my Soft Songs out in the sun. May this music brush you with the breeze of hope. There’s a reason Blake paired “The Tyger” with “The Lamb”—balance, balance. Everything is moderation. The hardest part is getting through the night.

I was fast approaching my deadline with nothing good to say, but yesterday there came a saving grace—a friend asked for an emergency playlist anticipating a break up. He gave me a mission: songs to scream on the drive home. "Something angsty and bittersweet. Emotionally vindicating but also tragic."

In 1991, Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine spent three years making their second record, held up by perfectionism and his visionary sound—thousands of pedals to make the guitars shimmer, a mirage of pitch-bent tremolo effects.

Surprise, comrades, it’s Gabriel Taka taking over the WyrmWaves this week. I’m here to play some jams, as always, but there’s a reason for those klaxons and spinning red lights—I gotta preach a bit first.

A storm is a manner of Earth's self-expression. Colliding pressures tear down barriers between potential and kinetic energies. Feelings caught turning themselves inside-out. A great storm has the same effect on me as a great piece of music—a mirror held up to my billowing feelings and thundering thoughts.

A lighthouse is built of two supreme comforts: the light divine and the house mundane. Stolid it sits amidst the clouds, until the night brings forth its flame. It remains, like a lover, both a beacon of safety and, at the same time, a siren of warning. It depends on the condition of each passing ship.

Whales sing. The theory is songs are their way to find love—the ocean is numbing in its lonely sprawl. Even when swimming miles apart, they'll change their tune to match the others. They follow some intrinsic pattern. Nobody knows why.

The first time I heard SOPHIE's "Hard," I felt like my car was going to fall apart. I was driving home from my night shift at the front desk of a tower dorm, using new music to stay awake as dawn blushed over Iowa City's east-side cobbled roads.

She and I stood face-to-face—cheeks rolling as we chewed in calculated fury—in a bathroom flooded so many times you could see from peeling paint the location of each waterline. Moments ago, we’d scoured the concrete for bright strips of green between the rippling sheet of the Mississippi River and the faded auditorium where we now conspired.

At 11:59 p.m. on the first day of 1971, families watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson witnessed the last ad for cigarettes ever broadcast on television. 60 seconds dedicated to Virginia Slims. Those who preferred CBS’s Merv Griffin saw the same but for a different pack—Marlboros. Dick Cavett fans got Benson & Hedges.

1961 was what MAD Magazine called an Upside-Up year. It’s strobogrammatic, rotationally symmetric—flip it upside-down while no one’s looking and the number appears to have remained the same. If 1969 is the year that changed everything, we ought to christen 1961 as the year the world flipped upside-down, unnoticed; no one seemed to be paying any attention.

There's no such thing as a year—this fact is self-evident. Right? No one can force you to cut off the limbs of life and tie them up in boxes with eager strings. We carry only the clocks in our ticking cells. Who made Gregory the master of time? By all rational accounts, my New Year started on the first of November.

Welcome to the Sixth Annual Year in Review Collaborative Playlist & Music Celebration. This project started in 2015 as a simple message asking my friends to add their Top 10 Favorite Songs of 2015 to a playlist so we all had something to listen to as we drove home on our holiday breaks.

We're here—I'll get right to it, but I want to say thank you for reading. Also, I've put them all into a playlist arranged from top to bottom, for whenever you have six hours to kill. Now, for the final leg of the tour: