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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70. "Melodic Techno Live Looping Roland Juno 106 analog syntheziser at Mauerpark Berlin", TribalNeed

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

10. "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.

71. "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?

32. "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.

238. "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 ⬇️

Here are some acts of woodworking (literally)

1. "Electro-acoustic Improvisation", Ipek Eglini

There is almost nothing that excites me more of late than when I find some YouTube video in which someone is performing music which they clearly put a whole lot of work and preparation into and it has like, 38 views. I'm about to hear the rawest shit. I'm about to experience so much of this artist in their creation.

In this video a woman in Doc Martens has driven wooden stakes into a piano, turning it into a percussion instrument. She then tortures it by banging the keys and (literally, with a hammer) the strings inside, while making bird noises into a headset mic. Then she turns to a bank of electronics she's been ignoring, and DJ-scratches her own bangs and chirps. Then she does both these things at once. Pure ecstatic sound, no notes.

2. "Ambient Noisebox DIY with Pickup & Piezodisc", Endo Monk

4 minutes of spooky atmosphere from a prepared wooden box the musician handmade by sticking pieces of metal wire directly into a guitar pickup. With a few layers of enormous echo, these simple sounds become coherent, meaningful, dramatic.

This link skips the first 42 seconds of the video, in which the musician explains his setup in German. If you speak German, feel free to rewind.

3. "If I Had a Heart", Fever Ray (cover by Ebanisteria Musicale C.M. Ferrari)

Are you, or have you ever been, goth? How goth? Because unless your answer is "I handbuilt a 14th-century string instrument that looks like a guillotine, then covered Fever Ray on it while dressed in black sitting on a couch decorated in dying leaves" you are/were not as goth as this lady. The dread-soaked original is dragged out even slower and lower in this cover, a sleep paralysis dream.

This YouTube account is run by a studio that makes and sells musical instruments, and all their videos are just showing the instruments off. "Ebanisteria Musicale" means "Musical Cabinet-Making"; apparently in Italy "cabinet-making" is just a generic term for custom woodworking. Judging from the backgrounds of the YouTube videos I think she may have also made the cabinets she stores her stock in but she doesn't seem to sell them.

4. "Drone Commander", Eric Archer

Eric Archer is a synth designer now selling modules under the name "Rare Waves"; in this 2009 video he shows off his first creation, a knobs-only chaotic drone unit built into an ammunition canister and named the "Grendel Drone Commander". Here he's running four in parallel, each moaning its own strange song with its own structure; each oscillator interrupts itself with wobbles and clicks, which in the broader choir form complex, cross-interacting rhythms. A symphony of backward guitar solos.

5. "06-29-2020-Grone", H.R. Terror

Created on the Grone, the previously-mentioned creepy synth module that my friend J.Z. may have accidentally summoned into being from the Noosphere, this is 35 minutes of hiss and distant barely-heard echoey sounds blending together into a terrifying/soothing ambiance. Good focus music for tasks such as exploring an aeons-abandoned alien spaceship never certain if a fell shadow stalks you through the corridors.

⬇️ Click below for more drone and more from the goth cabinetmaking lady ⬇️