My kid laughed at me when, upon climbing into our vehicle to get ready to drive to her class one evening, my phone connected to the car stereo and the last song began to automagically play. It was a lo-fi track I’d downloaded from the web and stored locally on my device so that I could reference it as raw background noise as I worked, wrote, drew sometimes, often and occasionally in spaces with limited wi-fi.

If you have yet to discover lo-fi, which has very little to do with wi-fi, it can best be described as “music to work by” or as flow music. Instrumental and chill, low tempo background synth often based off familiar scores from film or video games, or perhaps algorithmically generated by quasi-ai blackboxes in the cloud, I am never quite sure where they have come from. Yet they ripple out through my headphones and here in the twenty-twenties I treat the music the same way I treated noise generators back in my younger days, as a mental salve to wash away the world as my fingers dance over the keyboard.

The best hack I’ve discovered for myself was to create an offline playlist of this eclectic mix of titles and then a home screen shortcut to that playlist. There are numerous tutorials online for your flavour of mobile operating system, so I won’t repeat that here, but needless to say following one of them might just result in an app-like icon that you can click to summon forth the work-zone and tune out the background noise of a busy cafe or disrupt the eerie quiet of your own home office. I’m listening to a chill pan-pipe rendition of the Mario theme as I write these words, and my mind is as flow as it gets.