How long has it been since you've made a mixtape? Frankly, I've made three in my life. I have made a few mix-CDs though hardly any mixes to play through on my computer. A good song can be repeated for five hours in my opinion, yet earlier this month the idea to make a summer mix appealed to me.

Having limited space on the computer provided this chance to sift through musicians I’d stored away into the shadowy binaries of my Seagate. Here is a list of albums I rediscovered this summer while looking for tunes to guide me through working and the mix that came from it.

12. The Weakerthans – Fallow

Their debut album, and in my opinion best, rocks. “Confessions of a Futon-Revolutionist,” though it was released in 1997, is an anthem for the generations’ allegedly misdirected and apathetic citizens evidenced by the make-believe we’re strong, or hum some protest song like “maybe we shall overcome someday—overcome the stupid things we say," bit. The album waxes and wanes between softspoken/thoughtful and grungy/aggressive songs throughout. The Weakerthans set out to mention political and existential questions in creative and ironic ways.

11. The 6ths – Wasp’s Nest

A side project of The Magnetic Fields'Stephin Merritt released in 1995. Why it’s neat is because there’s a wide emotional range in the album. From “Falling Out of Love” which is lyrically melancholy and otherwise hopeless (if it weren’t for the upbeat filtered drums, synth popery, and resolve of Dean Wareham delivering it) to “In the City in the Rain” sung by Lou Barlow which is a monologue rejoicing in the mood of being alone with an undertone of the bitter acceptance of that loneliness and “Here in my Heart” whose style is echoed in later Regine Chassagne recordings [most notably “Sprawl II (Mountains beyond Mountains) and “Haiti”] that packs the punch of an indie "Single Ladies" message. It’s an old album that accommodates itself to drives, walks, and bike rides throughout the city with themes that are relatable in ways that songs about throwing money away at bars, getting wasted, and narratives about getting ghosted aren't

10. Meals for Children – We bid on Stronghold Mountain

A band from Venice now on an unfortunate (possibly indefinite) hiatus whose album was released around 2007. The sincerity of Mario Luna’s lyrics and singing combined with the acoustic arpeggio’s makes for an introspective evening soundtrack or work tunes. Of the 13 songs, 4 are instrumental, which adds a nice variety to the collective piece. The pieces are simple and made by high school students so naturally it’s an album whose theme orbits around nostalgia, the promises of love, and loneliness.

9. Polmo Polpo – Like Hearts Swelling

Sandro Perri’s project Polmo Polpo is an all-instrumental project dedicated to harmonizing disintegrated found sounds by patient and meticulous manipulation, either through dilation or compression (I suspect that “Requiem for a Fox”’s drum loop is actually a laundry machine on tumble overlapped on itself. If you have any information regarding this piece, let me know.)

They say music is a universal language, and in my opinion, instrumental music approximates itself closest to that possibility than songs with lyrics do; the artists appear to be more conscious of communicating with the sounds of their instrumentation than with the content or relatability of their lyrics. Released in 2003 it’s a deeply chaotic and meditative sonic piece.

8. Michael Kiwanuka – Home Again

This is the most honest and sentimental album I’ve heard recently with words (though it was released in 2012). In the same way there are 6 main story arcs in fiction ²

there are like, 3 main subjects in music. I like the album because the themes are atemporal and seem to come from a distant place beyond this or even last decade where I imagine folksy sincere singer-songwriters who’ve found a comfortable home compose and record on vinyl at. “Bones” is beautiful sounding though mad dark textually. Though the themes are common (love/loss/hiareth/death) Michael’s voice is pristine and is encoded with the feeling intensity of the subject that he is writing about.

7. Little Wings – Light Green Leaves

Little Wings is Kyle Field’s musical outfit which comprises 11 album releases. “Light Green Leaves” is a low-fi and mellow album with poignant lyrics which, like Michael Kiwanuka, references simple objects i.e. “snowshoes on our feet and sand in our sheets/let the fall flood around, let us see with new eyes, please destroy this disguise.” Missing New Hampshire, where I study, this is ringing true and supplies mantras of sorts. "Boom!" is the musical equivalent of a Michel Gondry skit about a cloistral adult on shrooms; what I mean is that Kyle's lyrics and execution are clever and artful.

6. Library Tapes – Fragments

As the sun sets and the moon becomes visible, so too do our emotions appear on a sinewave. This is my favorite album by Library Tapes. I’d call it classical-emo because of the piano, violin, and somber melodies. This album came out in 2008 and is comprised of 8 “fragments,” meditations, or variations on a theme, similar to the way Forest Swords composed his 2013 album Engravings. “Fragment III” is reminiscent of Yann Tiersen’s style of repetitively iterating scales with slight mathematical variations over time. It’s another collective piece without words so the songs lend themselves nicely to emotional adoption.

5. Duke Ellington – Far East Suite

This is the first jazz musician/album I fell in love with. I was at a Books&Books when “Blue Pepper” came on. The album includes slow, swingy, and spicy orchestral accompaniments. I’m too biased to speak at all even near-objectively about this piece. According to Ellington, “the most important thing [he’d] ever done”¹ was compose his three “Sacred Concerts,” the first of which was a "transposition” of the first four words in Genesis (in the beginning, God) into music. The mind of person and their (along with the orchestra’s) musical genius is most impulsive and confident in “Far East Suite.”

4. Geotic – Eyes

In 2008, Will Wiesenfeld as his miasmic-ambient outfit Geotic, released these 10 symphonic haiku in "Eyes." Each track is a meditation on itself and named after a visual image and parenthetical notation i.e. “Middle School Sleepaways (Yosemite).” It’s ambient because the songs seem to be a record of the progression in which the theme was discovered, with iteration after iteration layered, refrained, and sustained. It’s a pensive and confidently stuttered experiment.

3. Ô Paon – Courses

Created by her newest incarnation in 2010, Geneviève Castrée layered her sharp yet delicate voice above guitar loops to create an ethereal ambient; because she sings in French and distends her formants to resemble more a seraphim glossolalia than a terrestrial language it [her voice] sounds like another instrument besides the violin and guitar. How the listener is charged by the volume and potency of Jónsi’s singing without understanding exactly what the words means so too can they understand the depth of Geneviève’s madrigals. I feel as though the layered voices I hear represent different mental voices of hers and the songs are like conversations between those voices—attempts either to convince herself of something or a plea to stop believing in another.

2. Federico Durand – El Idioma de las Luciérnegas

This is an all-instrumental album as well. Federico incorporates just about every sound that you can imagine in his ethereal compositions and particularly in this album; there are crickets, wind chimes, wind passing between trees, water trickling from the awning and flowing between a bank. It’s like an attempt to recreate musica universalis. The album titles translates to "The Language of the Fireflies," which sounds awesome and prepares you for the sonoric recreation of nature

1. Ólafur Arnalds – Living Room Songs/For Now I Am Winter

(It was hard to pick one album)

Released in 2011, Living Room Songs is Arnalds’ most creatively executed album. The idea was to release one new song a day for a week. You can find it online because that’s the way that he released them – straight to YouTube. The album is a performance piece that embraces the visual pannings through his house over the days where his friends, books, images, and blurry self appear. Perhaps he did preemptively arrange some songs in the head though that hypothesis doesn't reduce the poignancy or sentimentality presented therein.

"For Now I Am A Writer" is his most recent album where that flair to include synthesized and flanged drum loops beneath strings is most honed. The title track is so good it’s included two more times (remixed by Kiasmos and reworked by Nils Frahm) which embellishes what the respective artists (including Arnalds’) felt was the most prominent or encompassing mood of the song. It's poppy sometimes and just way beyond mellow, which is to say sad, other times. The album is well produced and by that virtue tied with Living Room Songs.

A Summer Mix

1. This Place Is A Shelter – Ólafur Arnalds
2. Bones – Michael Kiwanuka
3. None of the Above – The Weakerthans
4. Look at what the Light did now – Little Wings
5. People Watching (Halloween Parades) - Geotic
6. Blue Pepper ( Far East of the Blues) – Duke Ellington
7. You Can’t Break a Broken Heart – The 6ths
8. Toys – Meals for Children
9. Fragment VIII – Library Tapes
10. Requiem for a Fox – Polmo Polpo
11. For Now I Am Winter (Kiasmos mix) - Ólafur Arnalds
12. La Cible - Ô Paon
13. El Idioma de las Luciérnagas – Federico Durand
Hidden Track:
14. Edit the Sad Parts – Modest Mouse

(because a 9-minute epic song calling to edit sad parts is the best way to end a mix as full of instrumental and sad pieces as this.)

If anyone is interested in this summer mix ask me and I'll send it over to you!