A few months back, I decided on a fun project: to begin to put out online mixtapes every two weeks or so. I decided to call give it a name I’ve had floating around in my head since I was probably in high school, “It Came From Outer Space (And IT Was Me).”

I created a Mixcloud account, built my first playlist, converted it into a single MP3 stream, and posted it to Facebook with some commentary. Every few weeks, wash, rinse, repeat. Here are links to the most recent four mixtapes, along with their accompanying commentary…

TENTH EDITION OF THE MIXTAPE! – LINK

A few notes on this mixtape:

• The What Cheer? Brigade is this amazingly fun punk marching band from Providence, Rhode Island. I became aware of them via the Honk! Community – a network of marching bands that usually has annual convergences on both coasts and Texas – and have actually played with them a bit at such gatherings in Cambridge/Somerville, MA, and Providence.
• Sleaford Mods is a ridiculously unique electropunk duo from England that my bass teacher told me about. Been very in the zone with them since finding out about them. They just dropped a new album this year, which features this “Mork and Mindy” song.
• “Square Pegs” is the theme song to the early 1980s teen comedy show of the same name, by the band The Waitresses, who also did the song, “I Know What Boys Like.” In digging into this song’s history, I found that the singer passed away from lung cancer in the 1990s. Such a tragedy; she seems like a really kickass singer.
• I’ve probably said this before at some point, but Lincoln is my favorite TMBG album. It’s when the two Johns were still doing most everything with a drum machine, and songs were more tightly contained. Flood has a few songs I love, but it’s really the beginning of the end of what I consider TMBG, and a shift towards something different. Still good, but different. Anyway, what I love about this album is how while it does have the surreal weirdness that is key to much of their early songs, it’s also filled with a bunch of quirky hard relationship/breakup songs (more than you would think).
• “Jumpers” by Sleater-Kinney is easily my favorite song from their album The Woods. It’s just got this deep sense of both hanging on and giving up that is incredibly difficult to capture in a single song. I always end up feeling both more up and down when it’s over.
• It is hard to say I have a favorite song on Prince and the Revolution’s Purple Rain. But “The Beautiful Ones” is damn close. The ache, the pining, the drama, the clear communication.
• Despite having some strong connections to the Murder City Devils’ world, I’m still a pretty casual fan of the band. But “Idle Hands” has always stood out to me over the years. I can listen to it over and over again.
• “Youth Decay” is possibly my favorite song on S-K’s All Hands on the Bad One. The chorus is just so great.
• “Won’t Get Fooled Again” is a helpful reminder, at all points of political transition and social change. I’ve been thinking of it a lot as I’ve been working to learn and think more about transformative justice and abolition of late, and how we need to turn away from movements that replicate the same structures and practices we are trying to escape. As Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore writes in The Freezer Door, “I don’t want any team to win, I want to end winning.”

ELEVENTH EDITION OF THE MIXTAPE! – LINK

A few notes on this mixtape:

• I recently went on a solo retreat to the Olympic Peninsula, and during it I watched the movie “Nightcrawler,” which featured the actor Riz Ahmed. After watching the movie, I looked him up and began digging into his career, finding out that he is also a rapper, and has a group that features Heems, formerly of Das Racist called Swet Shop Boys. I got their album Cashmere, and immediately got into it. Thus “T5” and “Zayn Malik” on this mixtape. Riz Ahmed also has a few solo records, including one called The Long Goodbye, a concept album around Brexit and British colonialism.
• I’ve heard both of the band Orange Juice and the song “Rip It Up” over many years, and decided to check them out during the solo retreat as well. The album this song is from is really solid, a post-punk classic.
• The Lathe is a brand-new duo made up of a few folks I know, including Margaret Killjoy.
• “Here Comes the Rain Again” is simply glorious, as is the video. I once saw a video of Eurthymics doing this as an acoustic song (meaning just acoustic guitar and voice), and it’s actually even better than the electropop version.
•  Three Depeche Mode songs on this one, more by accident than intention. Really love all three of these.
• I only saw Fugazi play twice, and it was before In On the Kill Taker, which is probably my favorite overall album of theirs. But “Instrument” is a rad exemplar of their post-hardcore/dub vibe.
• Tin Tree Factory was a folk-punk band I was in for a few years. We got asked to play two friends’ wedding, with the playlist they requested a series of songs (by the Mountain Goats, Magnetic Fields, The Cure, and others) they had exchanged on mixtapes while having a long-distance relationship, which we covered during the day, and then recorded. This Magnetic Fields cover is one of my favorites that we did. I played keyboards on this song; I also played a small glockenspiel, and percussion (a snare drum and other random items including phone books or other items I’d find at each house we’d play at).
• Survival Knife is a band featuring Justin Trosper and Brandt Sandeno from Unwound (Brandt was the band’s first drummer, but plays guitar in this band).
• I feel like folks have strong feelings about the Foo Fighters. I have strong feelings mostly about their second album, The Colour and the Shape, which I think is pretty flawless as an alternative rock album. I like a few other songs from their following album (There is Nothing Left to Lose), and haven’t listened to anything else since then. So they are an example of a band where I emphatically one particular album and know next to nothing of the rest. The thing I really appreciate about this song “New Way Home,” besides the buildup leading to the end, is the mentions of the Kingdome in the chorus. This Seattle stadium got ceremoniously imploded in 2000 to make space for a new football stadium.

TWELFTH EDITION OF THE MIXTAPE! – LINK

A few notes on this mixtape:

• I saw Scout Niblett when she was on tour with Shellac when Kidnapped by Neptune came out. She owned the room through simple presence and fire. For a few songs, she just played drums and sang, which was a revelation to me about how you don’t need a full band to make a big impact as a musician, just the courage and confidence to do your own thing.
• I was pretty into Superchunk in the 1990s. This song, “Precision Auto,” features one of my favorite opening build-ups in any song ever, everything up to the beginning drum roll. It’s still a good song after that point, but honestly, that’s the part that hits me the hardest.

• Dry Cleaning is a band I’ve come to enjoy through their being played a lot on KEXP, which I’ve started listening to regularly during the pandemic. I really enjoy the singer Florence Shaw’s rather jaded delivery style.

• “Spoons” by Aryeh Gonif (aka folk musician Mark Gunnery) is a fun, flirty, nerdy electro-BDSM romp. My band Tin Tree Factory played a few shows on the East Coast with Mark shortly after this album he put out under the moniker Aryeh Gonif came out, and particularly enjoyed a basement show we played in DC where we’re fairly certain the folks who came were expecting more run-of-the-mill indie rock and punk, and instead got weird low-fi folk-punk with horns and tiny keyboards, and Mark’s goofy and challenging electronica.

• “Animals” is possibly my favorite Talking Heads song? At least, probably my favorite on Fear of Music, which is possibly my favorite TH album? It’s hard to not say Remain in Light, but FOM is kind of more weird and jerky and rough, which is a form of TH I really like.

• It was only in looking up the information for this mixtape that I found out that Blondie’s “Hanging on the Telephone” is a cover! The song was originally written by a guy named Jack Lee for a power pop trio called The Nerves. Another member of The Nerves, Paul Case, went on to form a band called the Plimsouls, that wrote the song, “A Million Miles Away,” featured prominently in the 1983 Nicolas Cage movie Valley Girl.

THIRTEENTH EDITION OF THE MIXTAPE! – LINK

A few notes on this mixtape:

• Just note: A Place to Bury Strangers is loud. Both on this recording and apparently in person (they were voted the Loudest Band in NYC several years ago).
• I first saw the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion at CBGB when this album, Extra Width, just came out; I was at Rutgers in New Brunswick, NJ, and frequently went into NYC to see shows. They were opening up for the Jesus Lizard, and blew my mind with the noisy, strange, messy energy and groove they bring. It was the first time I ever saw a Theremin, too, which Spencer used intermittently throughout the show. My Jesus Lizard CBGB shows usually always had some sort of memorable aftermath, such as when I missed the last train from Penn Station one time (sometime around 1-1:30 AM), and had to stay in the station until the first train (5:30-6 AM). I even briefly took a nap, on that most infamous of floors. Another time (I think and hope these were separate), I made it back to New Brunswick, and only realized I’d lost my wallet on the train when I got to my dorm and couldn’t get in, because my access card was in my wallet. Luckily, it was towards the end of the semester, so I only had to suffer through a few things (no food center card, no ATM card, no dorm access card, no credit card) for about a week or so.
• I’ve heard so much about Run the Jewels, but have to admit, I am only just starting to listen to them. But I think they are brilliant.
• I’m starting to forget if I’ve repeated some of these songs from earlier mixtapes. I’ve decided just to forge ahead, and not even look back at the earlier ones. “Return of the Mack” may be one of those, but then, it’s so good, it deserves another go even if it is a repeat. Such a good beat, and such a nice texture to his voice.
• “Wait” is one of those that just breaks me every time.
• Including one of Andy Rehfeldt’s mashup-type songs (a session musician based in LA who overdubs different music genres over existing videos/songs), this time “Y.M.C.A.” His reggae version of Pantera’s “Walk” is hilarious, as are some of his smooth jazz overdubs of Metallica. His death metal version of Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” though, is kind of the pinnacle.
• When the Movitas Marching Band still existed, I did an arrangement of “Invincible” for marching band. We didn’t play it much, but I still feel pretty proud of it.
• Princess Seismograph is a unique amalgam of quirkiness, nerdiness, and heart. They had many wonderful songs, but this is my favorite. It’s a sparser version than what they recorded for their album We Put the Situation in the Show, which captures what it was like to see them perform at a house show.
• Janelle is Janelle. Just bow down already.

FOURTEENTH EDITION OF THE MIXTAPE! – LINK

A few notes on this mixtape:

• This cover of the opening track from The Cure’s album “Disintegration” is by Ships in the Night, a musical project by Alethea Leventhal, a Charlottesville-based artist. I met Alethea in January of 2016, at a showing of Labyrinth shortly after David Bowie died. Charlottesville had mostly been shut down by a massive snowstorm, with mountains of snowdrifts all over. Sara and I had only made one real friend outside of their creative writing program at UVA at this point, a music PhD student named Aldona. We went to the movie, and ended up meeting and hanging out with several other folks (including a few from Aldona’s program) and Alethea, all of whom became friends. I saw Alethea play a show at this funky place called Twisted Branch Tea Bazaar, and then later as part of the Bowie tribute band Lady Stardust at a memorial night many local musicians played at at the Jefferson Theater (also in downtown CVille). That was the beginning of my finding music community there, including folks I would play with, and whose music I still follow and enjoy, like Alethea’s. She’s an incredibly hardworking artist who recently signed to Cleopatra Records, a well-earned achievement…I remember buying my copy of The Cure’s Disintegration on cassette at a record store in Union Station in Washington, DC, shortly after it came out. I was on a weird student exchange trip down to Silver Spring, MD, where I stayed with a family hosting a French foreign exchange student who had come and stayed with me previously. I actually remember not liking the album, which felt like too abrupt a shift in atmosphere from the more hit-heavy, pop orientation of “Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me.” Listening back to KMKMKM recently, though, I realized that album has a lot of atmospheric songs, too.
• This New Order song is the opener off their most recent album, which doesn’t feature founding member Peter Hook. I’ve been a Joy Division and New Order fan since high school, but for some reason, started getting into them again a lot over the past few years. This one feels pretty solid, but the rest of the album is kind of just meh.
• I heard this cover of “Smalltown Boy” by Orville Peck on KEXP, a local radio station, and hunted it down. It really does this song justice.
• I also just recently learned about this synth-punk band The Units from KEXP. They were around in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the same San Francisco scene as bands like Flipper and Dead Kennnedys.
• Bartees Strange is yet another KEXP connection. Hearing such great and idiosyncratic indie rock from a Black musician is so affirming. The album the two songs from this mixtape are from, “Live Forever,” also has hip hop and soul elements on it as well.
• Danny Denial is a bicoastal (Seattle and more recently, NYC) based queer Afrogoth musician and filmmaker, whose work is just amazing. Look for his webseries, BAZZOOKA on Youtube, via Degenerate Films. He recently organized an all BIPOC-centric arts and music fest here in Seattle (BAZZOOKAFEST) in Jefferson Park, a half-block from my house, that featured music, film, and drag; it was phenomenal.
• Not gonna lie; I just love this Stone Temple Pilots song. I can take or leave pretty much anything else of their work.
• CarLarans is the musical moniker of the drag father of the House of Noir, a drag house/empire here in Seattle. I’ve seen other members of that house perform, but not him, but recently heard from a friend about this rap persona. He performed at BAZZOOKAFEST, and the two songs I’ve included here are my post-summer jams.
• The Black Ends is my new favorite live band – so angular and gunky, a glorious falling-apart and coming-back together sound. I’ve heard about them for a while, and included one of their other songs on a previous mixtape, but got to see them live at BAZZOOKAFEST, and was just transformed.
• KEXP recently did a sort of sequel to World Goth Day (May 22), where they played goth/post-punk/industrial style music for 12 hours. They played this Ministry song, which I had forgotten about, and I’ve been listening to it a lot since.
• And the closing song on this one is a New Order song I love from their 1989 album, “Technique.” That album is generally understood to be the last one before tensions between band members started getting bad, leading to their hiatus until they reconvened to record “Republic” in 1993 (which they basically did as an effort to save Factory Records’ Hacienda nightclub, a money pit which ate up a LOT of Joy Division and New Order’s royalties). The story of the Hacienda is simply unbelievable. Peter Hook speaks about this in interviews, and details it in his book Substance (about his New Order days) and The Hacienda: How (Not) To Run A Club. As such, this is kind of the last New Order heyday album, and the closer from that album.