Terence Etc. shares a playlist of songs that inspired his debut album, V O R T E X

Welcome back to Selections, a series of artist-curated playlists from those in the know.

Today’s Selections offering comes from Terence Nance, a Dallas-born artist who excels in the art of storytelling. Whether he’s creating cinematic works – including his first feature film, 2012’s An Oversimplification of Her Beauty, along with the award-winning HBO series Random Acts of Flyness – or building worlds through sound on releases shared under his Terence Etc. moniker, Nance remains drawn to a particular kind of adventure. It’s the sort that involves a long journey inwards as he examines his own life, encounters and surroundings for inspiration and self-care purposes.

Last month, Nance released his debut album V O R T E X via Flying Lotus’ Brainfeeder imprint. The record featured friends and collaborators such as Nick Hakim, Solomon Dorsey and his brother, Nelson “Bandela” Nance. It saw Nance – Terence, that is –  distilling years of ideas, old recordings and demos and a renewed confidence in his own musicianship into 11 songs that floated across a bedrock of R&B, soul and jazz.

At the time, he described the record as a “sonic tool that I made so I can play it for myself and balance my energy between masculine and feminine; destructive and creative, domination and submission, right and left, sun and moon; day and night.” His Selections playlist, designed to showcase the songs and artists that inspired his process during the creation of V O R T E X, functions in a similar way.

There are plenty of sonic and thematic similarities to be drawn between the tracks here and the songs featured on V O R T E X. But, more notably, there’s a certain mood nurtured here among Nance’s picks, which range from early 2000s Outkast to James Blake’s tear-jerking cover of Joni Mitchell’s A Case of You via Blood Orange, Solange and Cleo Sol. Discover it for yourself below.