February

If I haven't mentioned it before, or if you haven't read that far back, I'm a member of a geek-out music community called the International Mixtape Project. Essentially, it’s a group of guys and girls who make mixtapes (usually CDs) for each other on a monthly basis. Unless serendipity steps in, you don’t know the person and they don’t know you – you’re really just picking a bunch of songs that you think they’ll like. Let’s be honest though: it’s mostly stuff you like and stuff that you want to people across the globe to hear. So far I’ve received some cool tunes, some radio-ready, overplayed songs and some real creative CDs from people. I’m not sure how seriously people take it, but sometimes, you’ll get a pretty cool one with some serious thought put into it on sequencing, song selection and design.

For February, I went with the weather. It’s been icy in the Northeast US for the past 3 weeks, with the thaw finally hitting the last 2 days. There’s a plethora of icy cold, chilling and minimally orchestrated/barren songs out there that I thought would be a good fit for the time of year. I tried not to make the whole thing emotionally void, but the a few get pretty cold there:

1. “Hallogallo” by Neu
2. “Gutted” by Burial
3. “Farben Says: So Much Love” by Farben
4. “Silent Shout” by the Knife
5. “Conjugate the Verbs” by Enon
6. “Experiment” by the A-Frames
7. “Almost the Same” by Clearlake
8. “White House” by American Analog Set
9. “Pearly-Dewdrops’ Drops” by Cocteau Twins
10. “The Other Side of Mt. Heart Attack” by Liars
11. “Solar System” by the Microphones
12. “Undertaker” by M.Ward
13. “Motion Pictures” by Neil Young
14. “Saltwater” by Beach House