Coming hot off the heels of our December 2015 wrap-up and best-of mix, this month’s mixtape also marks our year anniversary of putting these compilations out. In all likelihood, this project’s ended up being as beneficial for us as it has been for anyone else, if not more so, putting us on a more deliberate, scheduled path of musical exploration that definitely and rewardingly takes us out of our comfort zone, but we nonetheless hope others have enjoyed this music too. At the end of the day, these mixes are about finding great new music and we’re happy that they’ve been accomplishing that on any level.
This month’s mix benefits from last month’s being a yearly retrospective, essentially giving us two months of new music to pull from, so it’s a pretty great one. We’ve got a really amazing track from Oakland’s Waterstrider (who have an equally amazing video for the same song); a chilled out, beautiful new song from opera-trained New Zealand musician, Andrew Keoghan; a song from the newly reunited Brazilian Girls; one from a Seattle band we’re liking a lot, Deep Sea Diver; and we’ve finally made room for a fun new collaborative effort between Los Angeles’ own TOKiMONSTA + Gavin Turek.
We’ve also got a track (featuring Rhye‘s Milosh) from a Brooklyn-based musician known as j.viewz (née Jonathan Dagan) who is blowing our minds. His DNA Project gives us an in-depth look at how every song on his album is created, step-by-step, as it’s created. Visiting his site, you might come upon a song that’s completed and essentially how it’ll appear on the final album, or you might come upon a snippet that’s destined to become a song, and at points along the way, the artist shows you the inspiration or individual sounds that make up songs or parts of songs. It’s a beautiful and inventive way to think about song-writing and album-making and, to top it all off, it’s presented via one of the most gorgeous, exciting websites we’ve seen in a long time (skillfully designed by the team at Hello Monday, who you should hire…I mean, if you don’t hire us).
So, yeah, we’ve got musician AND designer crush going on.
Give the whole mixtape a listen below; below that, a quick video from j.viewz’ site on creating a beat out of a river, a dolphin, and some leaves.
