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

--

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 five songs made with simple electronics and one song made with no electronics.

1. "No-input mixer minimal techno", closedcircuits

Consider the mixer. It's supposed to be a passive thing, but it has bandpass, which combined with feedback can do simple but interesting synthesis. It often has a compressor and sometimes sidechains, which means dynamics are an option. And it's got a lot of controls. So this leads to the idea of the "no input mixing board" (most famously explored in a series of excellent albums by Toshimaru Nakamura). This artist takes the idea one step further by using the technique for rhythm, cross-wiring two mixers into a funky drum machine in this quiet but rocking dance track.

2. "Polyend Tracker Untitled Electronics Jam", Risa T

This is a short trip-hop jam on a portable hardware tracker. (Like, the kind of tracker one would normally associate with text-mode DOS or the Atari ST. There have been a couple attempts recently to put one in a standalone hardware device.) Skittering, glitchy beats and a kind of mysterious air.

3. "Battle Against Belch" (EarthBound), Keiichi Suzuki and Hirokazu Tanaka (Nintendo)¹

EarthBound is the game that famously managed to permanently change how every millennial video game hipster thinks about games, without being what Nintendo would consider a financial success. This dark jazz track from the equally influential soundtrack (one of only a few from the SNES to realize that the SNES sound chip is basically an EMU SP-1200) stitches a series of samples and ~leitmotifs~ which appear both before and after it in the game together with a grinding bass.

4. "Magritte's Dream", Yusuke Shirakawa

Music concrète on a desktop, this piece is made with tape loops and scavenged-looking cassette equipment (including one literal loop of magnetic tape which appears to have no "cassette" attached). With one four-track tape and one mono, the artist has five faders that (in a performance with no instruments) they can play like an instrument to create peaceful and only slightly creeptastic ambiance.

5. "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)². Here it's performed on the guqin with a devastating gentleness, each of the five(?) sections keeping a distinct and sharp emotional tenor.

⬇️ Click below for beeps ⬇️