If you've seen the "#mixtape" posts I make here once a week, they mirror daily posts I've been making on Mastodon for (as of Friday) two years now. I have to reboot the thread once a year to keep Mastodon from crashing, so as a recap, I've created a YouTube playlist containing every song I linked either here or on Mastodon for the last year:
(Video #1 has visuals by me, and contains flashing.)
This is completely pointless. This is the least practical way to listen to music possible. You'd be much better off browsing the Mastodon thread or my recap posts here, but even that would take about 38 hours. So on the assumption you don't have 38 hours but might have 43 minutes, here is a meta-mixtape of the seven most interesting songs, I think, from the set. Of course, all seven of these songs were previously linked on Cohost, so this too is in its way pointless. Nothing is accomplished by hearing a piece of music. Nothing is accomplished by playing a piece of music. Our ears are now in excellent condition
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A man lays down a rug, a looper, a vintage Juno 106 synthesizer, and various toy instruments in a public park in Berlin, and as a crowd gathers he begins playing first chill techno and then dance rave music. Dancing ensues. Every person in this video is beautiful and it makes me happy just to know that this moment in space and time existed
- "Flowing Water", Chu-Tong Zhou
This is a piece of classical Chinese music, whose score was first written down around 1350 CE, though according to various sources on Google it existed in some form as far back as 500 BCE (and according to the YouTube summary here the most recent "paragraph" was added around 1850 CE)¹. Here it's performed on the guqin with a devastating gentleness, each of the five(?) sections keeping a distinct and sharp emotional tenor.
- "CZ-3000.mpeg", Grégoire Blanc
For a period in the 80s Casio produced a high-end "CZ" line, which used a unique synthesis method called "phase distortion"; it's like FM, but way cooler.
Grégoire Blanc is a professional concert thereminist. The video description explains he found his old CZ-3000 in the attic and the wave of memories inspired him to compose this.
This is… beautiful, actually, and deeply enigmatic. What is the emotion of this piece?
- "Gaia floating in me", Cube
80s samplers had inherently limited resolution— 12 bit DACs, short sample memory. Early hip hop leaned into this, finding low sample rates gave drums a pleasant crunchy feel. This 2008 jam makes great use of the similar limitations of an old MS-DOS tracker, especially at the start where the sample resolution goes so low it's like a bitcrush effect. Actually, this entire track is incredibly sick. It sounds like a rave in Donkey Kong Country.
- "Herr Mannelig (with personal variations)", Ebanisteria Musicale C.M. Ferrari
The woman in this video runs a small woodworking studio in Sassuolo, Italy, where she handmakes musical instruments (the name is Italian for "Musical Cabinet-Making"). She has a YouTube channel where she posts examples of her work. Here she does a complete multi-instrumental performance on traditional folk instruments in which she performs, and apparently built the instruments for, each part. Really compelling stuff, makes me think of Dead Can Dance or Loreena McKennitt, a folksong with the energy of rock.
Wikipedia says the song is about a troll queen proposing marriage.
⬇️ Click below for industrial techno and David Bowie ⬇️
- "Cwejman, Trogotronic, Make Noise - 1st patch in the Needham Woodworks case with Eskatonic power 23", James Plotkin
An incredibly dirty modular synth jam with fast, borderline-IDM beats. Often modular synth music tends to single repeating measures in a way that doesn't lend itself to drum sounds, but this rack's so large it's able to support multiple complex parts and lots of different things going on. What do you call this? Dance industrial?
- "I'm Afraid of Americans", David Bowie (Photek remix)
Heterodox drum & bass artist Photek leans heavily to a kind of minimalism that when it goes too far can feel sparse and strung out. Here the strung-out feel works strongly in the song's favor, as it gives us more time to luxuriate in the voice of David Bowie.
Incidentally I think this mix (from a 1997 remix EP organized by Trent Reznor) might secretly be an early draft of "Seven Samurai".