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 ⬇️

Three live performances, plus drone, vaporwave and "New Music":

1. "Live on KEXP", Black MIDI

"Black MIDI" is a British post-rock group that broke out around 2020. I tend to prefer their first album ("Of Schlagenheim"), but I highly recommend this live set, wherein they get an entire horn section on deck and really make their second album come alive. There's frenetic drumming and an upright piano and the lead vocalist is wearing a weird white suit. In all the world there's no escape from this infernal din

2. "Violence", Andy Stott

Back in the 10s during whatever "Vaporwave" was, Andy Stott released a couple albums that either helped create the genre or elevated it to something else. "Faith in Strangers" is 54 minutes of darkness interrupted by half-glimpsed forms; "Violence", the high point, is a calm/terrifying blast of anti-pop, sharp blurry distorted objects, too close to see and too loud to hear. I can only describe it using visual metaphors

3. "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

4. "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?

5. "Live on KEXP", Squid

Squid is a British post-rock group that broke out around 2020. I tend to prefer their second album ("O Monolith"), but I highly recommend this live set, wherein they really make their first album come alive. They've got enough overlapping guitarists I lose count, and the drummer sings, and there's a five-minute drone freakout segment with a trumpet. That's why I don't go outside

The video switches to an interview at 35:40, so if you only want the music you'll want to stop there.

⬇️ Click below for disintegrating doom piano ⬇️