Blotto 666: Night

Just under the wire... For your eternal rock out with the dark out

Available HERE.

**UPDATE**

Ahh damnit. Rushed. 2 random tracks got uploaded with. If you see em in the folder without the cover above - toss em. One was rearranged and the other junked. They are:

6-31 I Can Smell Your Brains.aif

6-63 Footsteps With Chains.mp3

The mix should look like this:

Preferable Mix Tape 6: Robocop - The Metal Years

It was June 2000. I was back in Durham just before we went on a trip cross country and like any good last minute efforts your attention turns to music. We need some favorites. We need new stuff. Do we have enough? I cut together all the soundbites I could think of on my dad's tape deck (which was EQed and hooked up to the VCR and gave me all the soundbites I needed from high school on). I took the tape to Chad and Drew's. Since my collection was packed away I needed someone else's and they had this glorious stretch of vinyl - just row after row blocking out a fifth of the living room and ridding high on inch high shag carpeting. I needed suggestions, there were a few I knew I wanted in but it was their collection and so Chad wrote out some stuff (it's included). I marketed off some of the list as I put it on, and forgot on some of the others. You should get the idea - hope it helps you. This really was a last minute thing (even though it had been an idea for a while). We were leaving soon. I stayed up either the night before or the night before that - head weaving in and out of consciousness as metal played low and all the sleeping heads lay in rooms nearby.

I played it a few times on that trip. One time in particular many hours north of New Orleans in the late late afternoon sun bathing orange and red glow drippy sweat swaying moss from wise old trees. Our arrival back in town brought upheaval with my stuff over here and our stuff over there. In all the moving and time this mix bit a premature bullet. It was made. And I never gave it out.

So Finally here is Robocop: The Metal Years.

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Blotto 666: Day

First of 2 mix spooky stuff mixes.

Available HERE

Spooky Stuff on the Way

We've got a few Halloween mixes in the works (just ironing out the spooky-to-not-spooky-enough ratio) plus an old tape that I never sent, but I would consider it a brutal masterpiece. hope you all are enjoying the fall.

Preferable Mix Tape 5: This One's For The Children

The 2nd tape here from Chad - one that he sent me after I moved back to California from North Carolina in late august 1998. I was only in Oceanside for four months before I took a greyhound back to Raleigh just before Christmas. But while I was there I received this tape in the mail and remember rollin' deep in the warm southern California fall. Aimless and not all to into my courses at Palomar college this tape got steady rotation in my Grandma's van in golden sun of late afternoon only to be ejected later when, in the early hours of dark morning, I'd climb back into her van and take excusions to donut shops with the oldies A.M. station. This wasn't the "oldies" radio of FM playing "shama lama ding dong" to "american pie". This was my grandfather's music - the 40's and early 50's - nat king cole on a good night - and the 'stached shlubs of so cal donut shoppes in their infinate quest for fresh-out-of-oven-ness stuffed the lots and booths in ways the occational passerby at 3pm could never fathom.

But I never recorded those drives from house to donuts to moonlight beach and up and down the PCH and 5 freeway in darkness of night when the world seems smaller and more your own to roam. It's the thinning of the masses. And this is about chad's tape - which is the flip of that - a mash of pushing through waking life.

Available HERE.

And thank you Chad for both of these.

*UPDATE*
The track year information is incorrectly labeled 1997 - Change it to 1998 for both tracks if you care to.

*UPDATE*
Chad sent me his tracklisting he found in his archive [i.e.: a pile of shirts]! Thanks Chad!

Preferable Mix Tape 4: Had A Heart, Don't Miss It

These next two selections come from a person who I think cares about music and it's integration into every aspect of life. He's also a dear friend and someone who I can count on to help me romanticize shit - Chad Layton. I suspect his tape deck was busted as you'll no doubt notice the left channel on certain tracks is often lower, but chad made this wonderful mix and you should rock it too because it really really kicks. It was made, I think, in 2006 after he had been in Asheville, NC and I in Berkeley, CA for many years. It was also crazy sped up so I tried to slow it down after digitizing it (which speaks to the 48 minutes per side). Many choice cuts. But I remember the VLE track and Kinski track just blowing my mind and forcing steady rewinds on my walkman. It was also cold when I got it, if I remember correctly, and as the days get colder now so shall you receive it. Let it bring about an autumnal state of mind.

Available HERE

(Stay tuned for a 2nd tape)

Preferable Mix Tape 3: Dear John

Raleigh 1996. Autumn. I had moved before senior year of high school and with it fell into various crews each with their own mixtapes and they battled sounds in the night. Ahh, maybe not, but can you see that as short film? Well. Somewhere early in I met Tom Homolya who passed this cassette onto me. This tape holds dual meanings as both introduction to friend and, once ownership of sounds are gained and new adventures forged in accordance with - as soundtrack to the alienated youth. I suppose it has obtained a third as of now becoming instant time travel passageway / temporal distorter. I'll always hold this one close - to those memories of being new in town, again, and of being older and not sure about what to do next in my life. Bad times, sure, but they were real and true, and who doesn't or didn't struggle with those. The Struggling. Combat boots on ground with army jacket loafing after school in park on cold day aimless, foolish, with all feelings so recent and familiar and new. Listen. Transport to time with frustration over pending adulthood. Anger spiraling like a drunk fly.

Available HERE.

Thanks to Tom also.