Quantum - Darktech

Werkstatt Recordings: 2014

Here we go again. A Werkstatt Recordings release featuring an artist with this as their lone entry at Lord Discogs, and no bio to speak of. It's starting to feel like sifting through long-forgotten goa trance compilations on ultra-obscure French labels containing a pile of one-offs barely anyone's even aware existed. Or maybe I'm just feeling that way given the nature of this particular item, but it's astounding how many dead-ends I've met finding things out about artists released under the Werkstatt banner. I mean, hey, nice of them giving all these unknowns a little extra promotional buzz beyond whatever Soundcloud and Bandcamp tags provide (d'em stickers, yo'!), but surely both parties could be a little more involved than this? Is it some Millennial thing I'm not aware of, online music makers flaunting any and all traditional modes of distribution and PR? Hey, I'm hip, I'm game to the Streamstep and Cloudcore play.

Fortunately, there's a little more info regarding this Quantum fellow in other outlets, including confirming it is a dude we're dealing with here. No doubt about the sex this time out, the associated iconography featuring a menacing Predator-like creature in shadow, its skeletal features illuminated by kinetic neon light. It's like something straight out of psy-trance's playbook, which makes sense as Mr. Rasmussen freely admits to cribbing ideas from that scene and incorporating them with the trendier new hotness of synthwave. It makes for a weird hybrid I haven't heard before, though edges just enough into the psy side of things I'm surprised Werkstatt picked this up at all. Like, isn't their whole modus operani reviving any and all '80s sounds and vibes, from industrial to synth-pop to EBM to space-synth? What's a decidedly '90s genre doing here? Gotta' corner every niche these days.

Actually, Darktech isn't retro in either a '90s or '80s fashion. Yeah, it features the same style of chugging, 'outrun' rhythm synthwavers love indulging, but Quantum does it in a real gritty, vicious darksynth manner – has Blood Music heard this guy yet? There's also ample sprinklings of the half-step 'metal-thrash' bridge dudes like Perturbator are always doing, which keeps things in the realm of synthwave, I guess. Like, if this was a real psy-trance project, those bridges would have been triplets. Aside from that though, everything else has me thinking psy-trance, from the screaming leads, to the chaotic bridges, to the trippy arps. Hell, I'm even willing to cautiously inch towards calling Worldeater aggrotech, that semi-existent '90s sub-genre of industrial that got all comfy with techno. It's certainly noisy enough to fit the vibe

I'm sure there's some micro-nano-yocto sub-genre of the psy scene that would claim singular ownership of Quantum's stylistic fusion (it's called 'psy-synth', isn't it... *sigh*), which really, really, really makes me want to tap out on all that nonsense. Mr. Rasmussen's just made some nifty tunes with a unique identity that can fit in either camp. It isn't necessary to create a lone island for every style.

Plunderphonic - Plunderphonic

Mystery Tape Laboratory: 1989

(A Patreon Request)

It's not every decade that a conceptual album title so perfectly encapsulates a new genre of music that it's forever attributed to it ...but enough about Brian Eno's Ambient 1: Music For Airports. We're here to read my typed words regarding Plunderphonic, the seminal album from John Oswald that took the concept of sampling into strange new realms.

These aren't remixes or pilfered breaks or the stitching of uncleared sources into something entirely new, oh no. Mr. Oswald's aim was re-contextualize existing and familiar music such that you could still easily recognize the source, but be thrown just askew enough that it sounds warped and twisted from the author's original intent. As you can imagine, this was highly dodgy where copyright was concerned, but John never intended to make a single dime out of the project, giving copies away freely to radio stations, libraries, and passing gents. Even that wasn't good enough for the Canadian Recording Industry Association though, forcing him to destroy any copies he had on his person or face being sued into oblivion. Thus, original CD copies of this album now fetch stupid prices on the collector's market, which kinda' defeats Mr. Oswald's intent, doesn't it.

Another key gimmick/challenge/stylistic-choice John placed upon himself in crafting these tracks was to only use material recorded by a given artist in each piece. For instance, opener Beatles only uses The Big Chord that ended their song A Day In The Life (plus some fanfare chords). Dab tape-splices and edits Michael Jackson's Bad (in case the cheeky cover-art didn't give it away). Don't pilfers Elvis Presley's Don't Be Cruel. Net cribs snippets off of Metallica's And Justice For All (and sounds like a really complex math-metal tune in the process – I wonder if anyone's tried performing this live?). Spring plays about with Stravinsky's Rite Of Spring (for a composition that induced a riot when it premiered, it sure does receive love from unconventional sources). Brown gets ultra-meta in raiding Public Enemy's raiding of James Brown. As should be clear, no genre or scene was safe from Oswald's interest, everything from any era fair game for plunder.

Which is all interesting to hear, especially for trainspotters and studio rats. Does it actually sound good though, or does Oswald's incessant cutting, splicing, and layering render tunes intimately familiar into weird nonsense? Eh, depends on what you want out of this. Why settle for a herky-jerky mess in Birth when you can hear The Beatles original Birthday instead – oh, isn't it cool how manipulated it sounds though? I don't know anything about the jazz originals Mirror gets its stuff from, but to my ears, it don't come off much different than the actual nonsensical improv free-jazz gets up to on the regular. Still, d'at ambient drone of Rainbow!

There's fun bits and pieces in Plunderphonic, but ultimately comes off as John Oswald intended : an exercise in abstract studio artistry, with familiar music as the painter's palette. Goodness, how pretentious.

Fantastisizer - The Dark Sun

Werkstatt Recordings: 2013

And another one of these! Is this just something that comes with the synthwave scene, where anonymity is a currency as with early dubstep? Not like I have much of a leg to stand on here. I've been on the interwebs for over two decades now, and would like to think I've maintained at least a semi-anonymous presence. You can find pictures and details about myself if you really want to look for them, but I haven't plastered them all over the place for all to see either. If music had been a stronger calling for my muse than writing though, would I still walk this shadowy path through the Information Super-Highway (wow, there's a callback)?

I suppose it would matter just how successful I'd become. A forgotten single or two, who cares where it came from, but if it was even a minor hit, someone would at least be looking at Lord Discogs for additional info. How many details would I want shared, then? Full name and bio? A third-person essay? Just some scrub nonsense? All these Soundcloud kids and Bandcamp bands may not be ready for the limelight that is Discogs Famous, preferring their real lives unintruded upon. Not every amateur producer needs their musical upbringing splayed out. Some just had a few softsynths at their disposal, cranked out a couple tunes on a lark, and happened to get noticed by a digital label who's quality control has no lower limit. It's a tale as old as time.

Fantastisizer's tunes are nicely crafted synthwave tunes though – I wouldn't have sprung for the bulk pack deal from Werkstatt Recordings including it if I thought otherwise. And of course, there's absolutely no additional information of who this is, where they're from, and all that good stuff us 'music critics' are supposed to detail. I suppose if I wanted to do some actual 'journalism', I might use an email and contact Fantastisizer personally, but what if they prefer this anonymity? They (he? she? I kinda' wanna go with 'she' for a change – why should every electronic producer be assumed a 'he'?) does have a Soundcloud and Facebook page that hasn't been updated in a few years, so dead ends there. Even 'her' Bandcamp offers a mere two additional releases before calling it quits in late 2014 [EDIT: Spotify also has an additional track dated 2017, so not abandoned after all]. Either that, or whoever was behind the Fantastisizer alias (gads, do my fingers ever trip over each other typing that name) moved onto another project, though this one isn't outright obscure. At least a couple dozen folks have snagged up tunes from Fantastiszer – the 'name your price' price don't hurt.

Four tunes make up The Dark Sun, all of which doing that slightly chipper synthwave stylee with twee synths and moody rhythms. There's almost a trance vibe to some of these, especially Before Dawn, which I didn't expect. When something's titled The Dark Sun, it ain't the obvious feels you usually get.

Michael Mantra - D#m / Gm

Purple Soil: 2008

Much of Michael Mantra's career was fairly typical as most egg-headed ambient/New Age composers went. Releasing material via ultra-rare tapes on his own label, occasionally popping his head out of obscurity for a compilation track or two, and generally minding his own business honing his craft with little care for fame and fortune. Maybe he'd receive a nice shout-out from one of the ambient journals of the day, but I doubt tapes like Sworn To The Bell and RNA – Ribonucleic Ambience were getting much attention. He did release one notable album, Sonic Alter on the American ambient print Silent, but for the most of the '90s, that looked to be Mr. Mantra's lone brush with success.

After a while, Michael paired with a producer named Rod Modell, the two collaborating on a couple LPs. You know Mr. Modell as DeepChord, and he even did a remix album of Sonic Alter under the guise before folks knew much about him. This gave Mr. Mantra a little associated buzz, and soon his works were getting unearthed for a new generation of ambient heads. Even Silent Season got in on the act! Man, that's wild. I'd seen the name 'Michael Mantra' here and there, but never made the DeepChord or Silent Season connection. Having now taken in a little more of the man's drone-scapes, the association does makes sense. This particular album comes care of Purple Soil though, a Czech print releasing material about as glacial slow as the frigid forms from which Mantra took inspiration in crafting these pieces of minimalist drone.

Yes, we're back in these waters again, ambient so subtle and minute that it'd have Geir Jenssen hoping for a little more action. His is a meditative sort of drone, the likes I've touched upon before (The Eternal Om springs to mind – the inlay even has a similar 'do not play while operating automobiles' warning), and is almost impossible to detail in any useful sense. I'll still give it the ol' college-try for sure, but if I don't make it back alive, tell my loved ones- never mind.

D#m is forty minutes long, and has around a half-dozen sounds coming and going throughout its runtime. There's the distant breath of wind through alpine cirques, something like bird-song slowed and stretched into weird abstraction, an even subtler drone tone than the wind that gradually changes pitch over dozens of minutes, and that's it. I cannot deny I'm strangely entranced by it all, like I must pay astute attention to even the most impalpable of changes to get the proper experience of this composition. Forty minutes is a bit much though, my mind often conking out somewhere past twenty-five. At a 'tighter' thirty-three minutes, Gm has a little more going for it, in that it isn't so impossibly quiet, with field recordings stretched out as a distant tone resembling an om chant emerges. A real 'reach for the laser' anthem compared to D#m, this one.

Kriistal Ann - Cultural Bleeding

Wave Records: 2015

Kriistal Ann can't remain in synth obscurity. I'm sure experts in coldwave scenes or darkwave scenes or 4AD scenes could point to '80s talents that exuded pure Gothic charm and dread, tut-tutting that Ms. Michailidou isn't anything new. Maybe so, but in our contemporary times, such music remains ultra-fringe. Hearing any vocalist with such distinct flair is even rarer, thus how can Kriistal not leap out of a black-n-white YouTube video like the spectre from The Ring, dragging you into some pagan autumn ritual by graveyards and cathedrals.

I feel like it's only a matter of time before a major label exec comes sniffing around the Werkstatt Recordings offices, hearing upon the easterly winds of a dark muse surrounding herself with undeniably low-grade production standards. They won't care that it's part of the music's appeal, the bare, brittle rhythms and out-of-tune synth strings adding to the cold, Gothic aesthetic Ms. Michailidou has crafted into her own fiefdom. They'll ignore the fact she's already four solo albums deep with the Greek print, not to mention her work with label head Toxic Razor in Paradox Obscur and Resistance Of Independent Music, plus François Ducarn in Sine Silex. All they'll see is a female talent generating some underground buzz, ripe for exploitation if they can just mould her to fit their schemes. Yeah, good luck with that – save a sudden revival of The Crow or The Craft franchises, this brand of ultra electro-Goth ain't generating dollars anytime soon. And even if it could, studio-sleeking it up will only ruin that which makes it so intriguing in the first place. We don't want our coldwave sounding so fresh and so clean - it's gotta' be deep in the muck and dirt, making you writhe with the worms. Wait, why am I talking like I'm some expert on this scene? I've barely dipped a pinkie toe into these icy, black ponds reflecting pale moonlight.

Anyhow, Cultural Bleeding is Kriistal Ann's third album, and her only solo outing not released by Werkstatt. Oh no, my ridiculous scenario came true! Heh, no, this was put out by Wave Records, a Brazilian outfit. How they came into contact with a Greek synth/cold/dark/industrial peddling the same sort of sound, I haven't a clue – Hell, I didn't even know Brazil had such a scene going for it!

The material on Cultural Bleeding is slightly better produced than her outings on Werkstatt, but not drastically so. There's still the bleak atmospherics, claustrophobic electro rhythms, and grand Gothic, operatic words of Kriistal's voice, selling lyrics like “This is the end of things; Now at least, I know the truth”, and “Once more an ancient tragic, bard recall; In boldness of design surpassing all”, and “Je fais le deuil d'une fleur; Repousses le sort; Et te dis lalala”. There's even a track sung in ancient Greek, Αντιγόνη! It honestly makes about as much sense as her broken English to my ears, but Kriistal doesn't sound any less entrancing in the language.

Marnie - Crystal World

Les Disques Du Crépuscule: 2013

This is what I mean. Just look at this cover! I know that's Helen Marnie posing there, a somewhat sultry glance your way with latex (rubber?) leggings propped high against the wall. It's something I can easily see a fly-by-night pop starlet do, but the lead singer of Ladytron? The band that's maintained a stoic aesthetic no matter what era of their existence (including that Yo Gabba Gabba! guest spot ...yes, really!). My brain has a difficult time processing it, adjusting to a Ms. Marnie that didn't know could exist. Like, was she always lurking there all along, but didn't want to upset the Ladytron apple cart in all these years? Had she not fallen in with those synth dorks, might Helen have taken a stab at a solo album much earlier in her career? Would such a solo career have led her to retro synth music just the same, or might she have been lured elsewhere, like Brit-pop bollocks? Eh, I can't imagine that, no matter what twisted time-line we find ourselves in. Her muse definitely seems fixated on the ethereal synth-pop of 4AD lore.

Besides, if you squint your ears enough, Crystal World isn't that far removed from the roads Ladytron had been travelling up to that point. She already has fellow 'Tron member Daniel Hunt helping her out in the studio, so really Ms. Marnie's debut solo is like a Ladytron album, just without the other lady or the guy who adds much of the 'tron' to the sound. A slickly produced and polished record, then, retaining much of the songwriting but unencumbered by ultra-retro analog synth noises. Now now, not everyone's a fan of modular Moogs.

Thus the album opens with a sweeping ethereal cry, building upon soft synths and rhythms thick with '80s reverb. Marnie finally drops some poetic nuggets about being The Hunter, and oh man oh man am I ever getting Clannad flashes here – the band, not the anime. Damn, the Irish synth-folk group is even fronted by a lass named Máire Ní Bhraonáin. Too much coincidence for one brain to handle, mang!

Crystal World isn't a total throwback though, production more contemporary than even Ladytron's output typically is. We Are The Sea features a sludgy electro-pop beat, while tracks like High Road, Violet Affair and Submariner touch upon the indie scene's fascination with '60 dream pop. Heck, Submariner sounds like something off Gorillaz' Plastic Beach.

In fact, there's a lot of familiar songwriting on here, melodies that you'll swear you've heard elsewhere (dear God, is Sugarland ever driving me crazy that way). That's not to say Marnie's style-biting, as she owns every piece of music she sings and crafts here. There's just little in the way of challenging synth-pop on hand, Helen more focused on the lyrical content of her work. And hoo, do I ever get swept away by her voice, but then I did even when she sang about mundane things like taking girls to movies. No blame.

Boogie Down Productions - Criminal Minded

B-Boy Records/Traffic Entertainment Group: 1987/2016

Can't be a hip-hop completist without having Boogie Down Productions in your collection. Not that I'm under any delusion I'm a completist - I'm in no hurry to add Biggie, Jay-Z, or Lil' Wayne to my rap shelf (far right, lower third). Just saying, if you want hip-hop heads taking you seriously, the group KRS-One built is required study material, this debut album from the BDP posse a Very Important rap album from the '80s. A remarkable feat, considering there's no Rick Rubin or Def Jam association with Criminal Minded. Can't escape the influence of an AC/DC sample in Dope Beat though. But hey, a ton of hip-hop culture cribbed from Boogie Down Productions after, so fair play.

Like gangsta' rap! Only, Criminal Minded isn't gangsta' rap at all, at least not in the way N.W.A. would define it. No doubt KRS-One gets into some gritty street tales, like resorting to gun violence to save his ass from home invaders in 9mm Goes Bang, or dealing with a crack whore in Remix For P Is Free. That's only two tracks out of ten though, hardly enough material to consider this album gangsta' rap through and through. Hell, such tracks aren't even playing up the 'gangsta' lifestyle, no more than Grandmaster Flash's The Message does (and it doesn't). It's that cover art, isn't it, KRS and DJ Scott La Rock all decked out in a small arsenal. Definitely a first of its kind, rappers showing off their guns and ammo rather than their sneakers and jewellery, though seems overplayed for the sake of marketing here. Gotta' draw attention from that crashed jet on License To Ill somehow.

Beyond all that though, Criminal Minded still has its feet within the realm of old-school hip-hop. The beats are simple boom-bap and quick-cut sampling (rock and James Brown, naturally), with Scott La Rock scratching between KRS-One's verses. Meanwhile, Mr. Parker goes off on a variety of topics, mostly showing off his lyrical prowess (Poetry, Word From Our Sponser, Elementary, Criminal Minded) while going after lesser MC – truly, the essence of vintage street battle-rap. In fact, this album was also among the first in bringing crew feuds into the spotlight, KRS-One singling out the Queens rapper MC Shan of the Juice Crew for being a style-biter and “sucker MC” compared to talents from the other Boroughs of New York City. South Bronx and The Bridge Is Over are often name-dropped as seminal classics of 'diss rap', and hearing them even this far out of context, I can't help but lean back and proclaim, “Daaa-yuum!”

And there's more! KRS-One switching between Jamaican toasting and his Bronx flow, properly bringing the two styles together. The tragic fact this was the only material we'd hear from Scott La Rock, murdered later that year. The album's underground status cemented due to years of being out of print from label mismanagement. Me finally knowing where Method Man got that 'super sperm' line from. It's all here! Completist material indeed.

Falcon Reekon - Consecration

Werkstatt Recordings: 2016

This is ridiculous. Would it kill the Discogs community to be more thorough in its data-logging? I get that it's mind-numbing to keep track of EVERY. SINGLE. digital release, and there honestly should be a little quality control - Soundcloud demos and giveaways need not apply. But if the Discoggian community allows DJ tapes and exclusive white labels into the archives, surely items that have an actual price tag attached to them are worthy as well. A mere half-dozen souls may buy a $2 track, but that legitimizes Bandcamp releases far more than some of the rubbish I've come across in the utter recesses of CDr-Land.

What I'm getting at is, despite only two albums appearing in Falcon Reekon's Discoggian profile, his Bandcamp provides plenty more: an additional five albums, a single track release, plus a compilation of old material. Why hasn't anyone entered these as well? Is it because they're self-released, and not tied to an actual label like Werkstatt Recordings? That don't fly, 'cause I've seen oodles of 'self-released' entries throughout Discogs too, especially from the ambient camps. Is it because synthwave remains a rather niche interest, so young that dedicated chroniclers of the genre's releases are scarce? It sure ain't like a decade ago, when every micro-genre would have a three-dozen blogs sharing the same few singles at a time. Not that I've gone out of my way to discover otherwise, but I do wonder if I'm one of the few folks out there even giving labels like Werkstatt any attention at all. I did not ask for this burden, but if such is my fate, then so be it.

Falcon Reekon is... um, Falcon Reekon, from France. Of course Lord Discogs has no other information on him, although neither does his Bandcamp. His Soundcloud adds where the name comes from ('80s inspired, naturally), but no details regarding actual name and the like. Proper anonymous action. For a chap with nine albums under his belt, you'd think he'd (it is 'he', right?) be a little more up on the promotional game. What would I know about that though, the very antithesis of self-hype?

Consecration is Falcon Reekon's second album with Werkstatt, and is about as typical and classy a synthwave album as it gets. Not a bad thing if you're still vibing on the stuff, as I am, but if the likes of Perturbator haven't convinced you of the genre, there's little chance this album will either. A few 'outrun' styled tunes aside (Live Chase, Outrunners Wiz Attitude, Overnight), Consecration is also some of the most chill synthwave I've come across, without ever sliding into sappy synth-pop. It almost sounds like synthwave inspired by house and disco than anything strictly ripped from the '80s. A deeper vibe, if you will, suitable for late night cruises on the boulevard rather than tearing through neon-soaked roads. Why, I'd almost be willing to call it 'deep-wave', but don't let the Bandcamp Tagging Consortium know – tags are abused enough as it is.

Biosphere - Compilation 1991-2004

Biophon Records: 2012/2017

Now isn't this just a right dandy little item Geir Jenssen's given us. As Biosphere, he released few actual albums throughout his first fifteen years of music making, but each one was a bonafide classic of ambient and frigid techno, making fans squirm and itch for more material. There were collaborations with Pete Namlook (Fires Of Ork) and Higher Intelligence Agency, but if you fancied yourself a true Biosphere completist, you'd have to do some serious sleuthing and digging, many tracks exclusive to compilations littered among his discography. Some of these weren't too hard find – even I could find copies of Trance Europe Express 3 on my local store shelves – but chances are you'd have to come from the hinterlands of Norway to snag yourself a copy of Nova Norvegia – (Get) Into The Arctic Groove. To say nothing of the outright obscurity of a Denmark museum collection in Krydsfelt – Norpol. I imagine even the peer-to-peer juggernauts of old had trouble tracking that one down.

Well fuss no more, Biosphere Completists, for Geir has gathered all his wayward offspring between the years 1991 and 2004 into a tidy 2CD compilation, titled, um, Compilation 1991-2004 - doesn't beat around the lichen moss, does it? Of course, if you really want to fancy yourself a true-proper Biosphere Completist, you'll still hunt down all those CDs these tracks were sprung from. For sensible people though, this will suffice.

Although, having listened through this now, I wonder if Compilation: My First Fifteen Years has any appeal beyond only the most die-hard Biosphere disciples. There's no denying Mr. Jenssen's frigid oeuvre can leave some folks cold (hah!). Yet whether you prefer his bleep techno beginnings, desolate field recordings, or looping drone, few come away from his work without at least thinking, “Hm, that's interesting.” And this double-discer touches base on all these aspects, but if you were coming in here looking for brilliant exclusives that never made an album cut, you've come to the wrong place indeed.

There isn't much from his techno days, opener Hypnophone the lone cut with any sort of beat among these fifteen tracks. The Third Planet and The Seal & The Hydrophone (Geir has a fascination for hydrophones) do the bleep ambient thing that marked his second album. By four tracks in though, we're already in the year 1997, when the minimalist abstraction really started taking hold of the Biosphere muse. Knives In Hens and Superfluid features some of the most experimental samples and drones Geir's ever produced, tediously so. At least the gentle ambience of Bird Watching and Sun-Baked end CD1 on a pleasant note.

CD2 is generally more consistent, as Mr. Jenssen's figured out how to craft his abstraction sampling into compositions with direction and focus, despite sometimes taking forever getting there (such a lonely road in Vi Kan Tenka Digitalt, Vi Kan Tala Digitalt). If you can't mess with ultra-minimalism though, well, you probably haven't bothered with post-Millennium Biosphere anyway.

ACE TRACKS: May 2018

It's been a strange feeling, this past month of writing. More relaxed, not as much pressure to keep pressing on to an end goal. Like, there still is an end goal, in that there has to come a point where my infinity project comes to fruition (receiving another twenty albums in the mail this past week alone sure makes it difficult tho'). Yet if I'm not feeling the free-flow of creative juice, I'm perfectly fine taking a step back for a day, regather my thoughts, come at better, stronger, though not necessarily harder or faster. There's no denying a few efforts from the past five years could have been better if I'd given them a little more care.

Of course, another thing is this past month's been a rather distracting affair, all 'round. So many movies (damn you, Marvel!), so many sicknesses (had to take two sick days – I seldom even take one per year!), plus that looming, work-related uncertainty that just won't be settled anytime soon. Okay, within the month for sure, then I'll finally know just how gainfully employed I'll still be. If not though... well, I guess I'll have more time to write. Plus there's that Patreon thing too. Can't forget to plug that every chance I get – the service tells me it's in my best interest to do so, no matter how much of a whore you end up feeling.

On those cheering thoughts, here's the ACE TRACKS for the Month Of May, of the year Twenty-Eighteen!


Full track list here.

MISSING ALBUMS:
Various - 10 Years Of Drum&BassArena: Mixed By Andy C & Grooverider
Wu-Tang Clan - 8 Diagrams
Gravediggaz - 6 Feet Deep
Euphoria - 2 Days Away

Percentage Of Hip-Hop: 25%
Percentage Of Rock: 6%
Most “WTF?” Track: Anything Gravediggaz ...but in a good way!

So strange that 8 Diagrams isn't on Spotify. Like, I get that the album was released on a short-lived label, and it's current status is probably still in legal limbo, but surely RZA would have found a new home for it a decade after the fact. AND Gravediggaz too, for that matter. Is Gee Street just being tight in its licensing with that one?

So I did something I haven't done in a long time with these playlists: sequence the tracks into a proper mixtape or set. I do this not because of nostalgia or a need for creative outbursts, but because my old alphabetical stand-by resulted in an incredibly wack order of tunes. Seriously, it was just... painful, the transitions I was hearing, over and over and over. I've had some 'eclectic' playlists in the past, but man, nothing like what this was turning out as. You just can't go from Global Communication to Canibus to Ladytron. You just can't. Hopefully this arrangement makes listening through this more tolerable. Well, for me, anyway.