various artists - Troubleman Mix-Tape

I look at this and think of the old adage, "How you goin' to keep 'em down on the farm when they've seen the big city?"

How are you going to keep the kids from getting even freakier with their sound after they've been on the bleeding edge for years? When they've gone off to college and broken edge and read Baudelaire and taken modern lit and political science and moved past three chords and the truth?

You can't. You never have been able to. It's how we got this comp, 52 tracks from folks who had populated your 7" collection back in the 90s but were ready to reintroduce disco and no wave and free jazz as the  new century dawned and before the world went to shit, all filtered through this lens of basement shows and fanzines. DIY as an ethos, art as a goal. Tell the story however you think fits the moment.

It absolutely shows that it took Mike S. 4 years to put this one together, because it is more than a kwal-lit-tee compilation. It's a perfect mixtape.

Discogs

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The Anasazi ‎– Calculating Components And Compound Formulas For Mass Population Reconstruction ... ... A.K.A. Measurement & Control

A week of great potential has emerged here in the northwestern corner of the empire. Cher boi's DVD-ROM drive in the ancient MacBook Pro has gone to the great recycling center in the sky, meaning it's come time to, at the very least, to replace the drive, if not the entire computer. Do they still make laptops with an internal disc drive? Or should I just chip up the $50-$100 to get an external drive, and keep using this here steel-encased marvel of late-aughts Apple technology?

The missus and I have also been engaged in serious talks to relocate back to our homeland of Charm City in the next few months. Let's face it; it's REALLY - FUCKING - EXPENSIVE to live in our corner of paradise, and last month's heat dome laid plain a number of the disadvantages to remaining here. So, here I am, packing boxes at 2 in the morning, with the portable air conditioner working it's lil heart out, and "Bob's Burgers" playing in the background. 100+ years worth of pulp paperbacks and out of print cookbooks, collected over the past five years, all going into 12 x 12 x 12 double walled cardboard.

The Anasazi sounded like the future 21 years ago. Made up of former members of Jenny Piccolo and Casey from Yaphet Kotto, it was the sort of progressive hardcore band that I was taken in by.  It, too, goes into a box, one of the last things I ripped before the drive gave up the ghost, now to be immortalized in 320kbps bit rate, on a blog unbound by time or location.

Discogs

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Tracy + The Plastics - Culture For Pigeon

There's a big, thick thru line from the Screamers to Tracy + the Plastics, who combined DIY music, filmmaking, and queer culture into a multimedia performance that the likes of the Whitney fawn over, but kids with mohawks sadly tend to overlook. I only saw this once, possibly during the tour in support of "Culture For Pigeon", the third and final full-length from Wynne Greenwood, and it kinda blew my mind, to the point where I still wonder what I saw that so many others overlooked.

I really just wanted to dance, you know? I was a young white cis male, finishing up college, in love, finally confident enough in myself to accept it was ok to like Madonna as much as I like Fugazi. And where a lot of the electroclash scene felt ultra posey to me, this was mutant dance, for a weirdo who was looking for something that felt as honest as Gang of Four. This was a start for me.

Discogs

Click here to download.