the short version

every mix from every month last year. you can either stream or download links below:

January - Mostly Recent Music
February - 50 Love Songs
March - 25 Songs for Stabbing People (Mix for Sebastian)
April - METAL UP YOUR ASS (Mix for Joe)
May - SPRING SINGLES!
June - Townes & Friends (Mix for Rich)
July - from mike for jason
August - SUMMER BEARDS
September - September
October - Fun Fun Fun
November - mix for naz
December - Mostly Recent Music 2013

mixes for eugene

so, i guess this is a gift for eugene? after i found out he was gone, i started thinking about mixes/compilations and started making them again. i guess it was a way to remember him and maybe a way to disassociate. or move on. or 'find closure.' haha. it's really disassociation though, isn't it?

anyway, i made one compilation a month last year. which is what this is.

i put them up on the web and am sharing them here because well, because - bmbx. it seemed only right to do so.

to explain to those who do not know... bmbx, or b00mb0x, was (and still is) a website dedicated to personal mix tapes started in winter of the year 2001.

eugene and i met on um (cough. sorta embarasing) the napster tech support forum, where we were both led there to help people get unbanned from the software after metallica succesfully got hundreds of thousands of users banned. and if that's not an embarrasing encapsulation of life in the year 2000 I don't know what is.

we ended up sort of joining a spinoff group of um... piracy enthusiasts and general misfit toy characters, and while hanging out on that particular IRC chat room we had a bet over who could make the better virtual mix tape. i made a website so others could easily download the mixes to listen and decide, and bmbx was born.

we did one or two other websites after that, and a blog. i'm proud of all of them, and i'm happy to say i had a strong friendship with eugene. in 2002 he came to visit me in america and stayed a week.

we both fell out of the (still ongoing*) website eventually, me even more than him, but we remained friends and chatted online for a bit at least once a week. 6 months before he died, he chose to return to NYC as his city of choice for his honeymoon, and i got to spend a day of said honeymoon with him and cherryl.

he died suddenly in february of 2013. and i decided to do this pretty soon after. i had already made a sorta mix/compilation of best music of 2012 in january, so i figured one was done, i'd just have to make 11 more. so i did.

here we are in 2014, and here are the 12 mixes, linked by month. you can stream them at the top of each page. another close friend died in july of 2013, so july's mix is dedicated both in song selection, artist selection, and emotional tone to that dead friend. if you're looking for upbeat mixes um... go with april and may (december and january are both 'best of the year' comps so those also have some upbeat stuff).

i'll eventually make something physical as well. i'll plan to make 5, CDs (maybe? I'm also considering VHS and other esoteric mediums haha) with probably more original cover art than the sort of mournful-yet-personal-communist-generic-with-a-small-dash-of-personal that i created for these 12.

"mournful-yet-personal-communist-generic-with-a-small-dash-of-personal" cover art

one finished box will probably go to cheryl. one maybe to irish mike. one i'll keep. the 2 remaining... eh, i'll figure out. i like trading stuff i make so...

um... pretentious paragraph... obviously i'm a big advocate of fan art, appropriation in all creative arts and a thriving free culture underground for non-profit purposes. bmbx was created and nurtured by me over the 5 years i was involved with those ideas in mind. same for this project.

ok, this is already too much babbling. here are the links to the mixes. miss you eugene.

mixes by month

January - Mostly Recent Music
February - 50 Love Songs
March - 25 Songs for Stabbing People (Mix for Sebastian)
April - METAL UP YOUR ASS (Mix for Joe)
May - SPRING SINGLES!
June - Townes & Friends (Mix for Rich)
July - from mike for jason
August - SUMMER BEARDS
September - September
October - Fun Fun Fun
November - mix for naz
December - Mostly Recent Music 2013

* as mentioned above, the website is still going, under new (and lovely!) management. if you'd like to hear the mix tape like things me and eugene made 8-13 years ago, you can still. our mixer psedonyms were assorted (me) and naz (him).