These mixtape posts I do every week are recaps of a running thread of mine on Mastodon, one song per day. To keep Mastodon's server from falling over completely I reboot the thread once a year. I guess it isn't actually noticeable from these Cohost recaps, but this week's songs are the final posts of year 2.

When making a mixtape, I think it's really important that the first song feel like a First Song and the last song feel like a Last Song.

1. "Pink Lemonade", Kittie

Have I mentioned Pink Lemonade? Aside from being by Kittie, who are interesting in their own right (they're a rare all-female metal band), this is an interestingly high-concept track. It's a metal song slowed down— literally, I've tried listening to it in time compression and regular heavy metal simply falls out. Just by lowering the tempo they produced something unique, doom-flavored and terrifying. You should listen to this if you either love or hate metal.

2. "12", Scoth

This musician has a series of tracks made entirely on Yamaha's 1997 portable/handheld music workstation, the QY70. (I featured "07" in these posts before.)

This one is a really fun, bouncy MIDI dance track with a lot of production polish. Lots of sounds that whatever synth designer put them in the QY70 probably thought "kind of Caribbean?". Shows the versatility of the device well, it sounds a bit retro today but in 1997 could have felt glossy and futuristic. Space beach vacation

3. "Jan 7", Jon Coe

In January, as part of the "Jamuary" challenge, this musician made one song every day on their Yamaha AW16G desktop workstation. I linked the Jan. 14 track before, this is… Jan. 7. The vibe on this track is compelling and super weird. Dark, progressive composition but it's being played on the AW16G's General MIDI instruments, giving the entire thing a surreal tone. A corporate training video from 1995 is here to kill you.

4. "BREAKWATERS", asymptotes

Last year I meant to include a song named "THREAT ACTORS" by Mastodon user "apaleslimghost" in these mixtape posts, but I got confused and instead posted an unrelated song of the same name that happened to be on Bandcamp. Belatedly, here's an asymptotes song from her new album (which is quite good). Giant atmospheric hums and beats that dance like they're dodging blows.

If you want me to like a song, put a slow-attack sidechain on a loud pad so it ducks whenever a kick plays. Just one of those things that gets me every time

5. "Rocco (Dave Clarke mix)", Death in Vegas

Way back at the start of these threads, before I started mirroring on Cohost, I linked "Rocco", a song, by the perpetually underrated Death in Vegas, made of psychadelic guitar solos and a backwards sample of old jazz standard "Moanin' low" (as sung by Claire Trevor in the 1948 film Key Largo). This is a remix that de-reverses the sample, and piles a forest of jostling techno beats on top of it. I love this mix, I had it on vinyl in high school and kept listening to it backward (de-de-reversing, I guess).

⬇️ Click below for tape music and Bette Davis in The Petrified Forest (1936) ⬇️

This starts off as the kind of lo-fi electronic music I usually post in these mixtapes, and then, uh… takes a bit of a turn. I'm not sure what happened here.

1. "MELANCHOLIA", roxxx303

Made on Roland's new budget desktop remakes of the 303/808 and Jupiter-8, this is a slow, gradually-developing, low-bpm acid techno jam with a good chill vibe. There's something nicely unique about this one I can't quite describe.

2. "07", Scoth

Yamaha's QY line, first released in 1990 (three years before the Apple Newton!) and awkwardly branded as a "Walkstation", was an attempt to make something totally new— a fully portable, handheld MIDI music production station, run off AA batteries. This modern track was made entirely on a 1997 QY70 and it sounds great. Peppy fusion funk grooves and some gorgeous pad sounds.

3. "SOMA Pulsar-23 + Piano // Dreamy Ambient Machine", Dexba

This is a gorgeous piano piece, played on an electric piano overlooking a window somewhere in Ho Chi Minh City (and accompanied by a few beastly glitch machines— but reverb-squashed down until all you hear is the quiet rush of a river and the strange distant chirping of robot birds). Is the music I link sometimes… uh, a bit much for you? Well, here's something a bit gentler.

4. "You Didn't Break Me", Pedestrian Deposit

GENTILITY OVER! NOISE TIME. This is some kinda strange post-rock/metal… song? EP? I'm not sure. There's no separations, just one 20-minute track, but it has multiple distinct movements within it that feel like different songs but also like part of one whole. Big shifts, violins falling into harsh noise and such, like a harder Godspeed You Black Emperor. Definitely hits the feels hard.

5. "War Photographer"

Jason Forrest. Sample artist. Originally used the recording alias "Donna Summer" just to see how long it would take him to get sued. Creator of songs such as "My 36 Favorite Punk Songs" (it samples them all). His one brush with popular appeal was this absolutely incredible music video, which presents some kind of baffling narrative about a Viking mecha powered by rock music. You want to watch the video while you listen.

⬇️ Click below for Atticus Ross ⬇️