Welcome to Solstice With Egg 2011! I hope you enjoy it. As always, feedback is welcomed and encouraged.
For the first time this year, I won't be burning physical CDs except on request -- I think we're finally at critical mass for mostly abandoning the physical medium of the CD. I'm happy about that; it was a fragile medium which degraded gracelessly. Nonetheless, if you listen to music primarily on CD and don't have a good way to burn one, let me know and I'd be thrilled to make you one.
To download, right-click this link and choose 'save as' or 'download as' (or click here for a faster download from MediaFire); double-click the resulting zip file and you'll get all the mp3s and the artwork and whatnot. Select them and drag them to your media player of choice. Or you can stream by clicking the play button next to the tracks below. Or right-click below to save individual tracks. Enjoy!
I did the mix as a true DJ mix this year for the first time in a while, with, you know, some minor transitions and stuff. So I recommend setting your media player or CD burner to play or burn with no gaps between songs.
Incidentally, the streaming links below seem to work on every OS/browser combination except my favorite: OS X + Chrome. Sigh.
01 The Righteous Wrath Of An Honest Man
05 Manateo en Menor (Tremor Mix)
07 Pintar El Sol (Chancha Via Circuito Remix)
12 If Eilert Loevborg Wrote A Song
Just a couple of notes on the music itself. Track 1, by Colin Stetson, is entirely solo saxophone, no loops or post-processing. I encourage you to watch him live on youtube; it's a breathtaking experience to see and it's the most exciting new direction for solo horn I've heard in a long time.
2011 is the year dubstep jumped the shark, but newly-foregrounded and innovative bass sounds continue to be critical to a lot of the most exciting electronic music out there, and you can hear that in several tracks here.
A lot of the new music that's most exciting to me these days is coming out of South America. Tracks 5-7 are from artists affiliated with ZZK Records in Argentina. The ZZK Records website has a lot of great mixtapes if you want to investigate further.
Gillian Welch (with the irreplaceable Dave Rawlings) released her first album since 2003 this year, and it's stunning. Rawlings describes it as "ten different kinds of sad."
Finally, the one album that meant the most to me in 2010 was The National's "High Violet." I had a terrible time picking a song from this album to put on the mix, because it's just packed with melancholy, sweet, beautiful music. If you like track 17, you should go get the album right now, put it on headphones, and go for a walk around your neighborhood and listen to it. Thank me later.
I hope your holiday season is full with warmth and joy and community. Regardless, remember: it only gets brighter from here.