Artist	Song
Gregory Corso (prod. Hal Willner)	Last Night I Drove A Car (0:43)
Ben Newman	Rolling On (1:03)
Tom Waits	Step Right Up (5:43)
Birdsongs Of The Mesozoic	The True Wheelbase (2:59)
Gnarls Barkley	Feng Shui (1:28)
Rick Shapiro	Whitney Houston [live] (1:36)
Frank Zappa	I'm The Slime (3:36)
They Might Be Gannets	New Friend (3:13)
Gnarls Barkley	Transformer (2:19)
Yes	Sound Chaser [Single Edit] (3:09)
King Crimson (mk. II: Burrell/Collins/Fripp/Wallace)	Get Thy Bearings [live] (8:17)
Dangerdoom feat. Talib Kweli	Old School (2:42)
Primus	The Heckler (3:42)
Rudolf Serkin	Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, 3rd Movement: Presto Agitato (6:57)
Bob Dylan	It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding) (7:32)
California Guitar Trio with Tony Levin and Pat Mastelotto	Zundoko-Bushi (incorporating 21st Century Schizoid Man) (3:38)
Paul Nash	Restless Is The Soul Of Grace (5:15)
Harris Berlinsky and the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company	Johnny Crack And Flossie Snail [from Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood] (0:47)
ProjeKct X	Overhead Floor Mats Under Toe (5:51)
Dangerdoom	A.T.H.F. (Aqua Teen Hunger Force) (3:05)
The Clash	London Calling (3:20)
David Bowie	A New Career In A New Town (2:52)

Comment:

Here's a mix I've been working on forever! Now that I'm done with it, what it really sounds like is the present culmination of the idea of the all-purpose, crazy-poly-genre friendship mix for another person; what with the magna-digital age rampant upon us, now, with laptops hungry and big-bellied and with all the music stores within an atomic blast radius of me closing imminently in rainy sadness. I'm starting to find this method of mixmaking to be a form of nostalgic sweetness, though one of the best, surely. But hopefully as this chapter is (for the time being?) closed, you can bet I'm gazing forward at the florescent effusions of mixes to come.

What we actually have here, in the present moment, is yet another mix I've constructed for my friend Rob, who is (in case the inference is missing) a fan of, among other things, robots, cartoons, wordplay, drum `n' bass, video games, ELP, Captain Beefheart, instrumentals, They Might Be Giants, video game music, electronica, and absurd humor. Here's some info about some of the more obscure tracks:

Ben Newman is a friend of a friend who, if he so desired, could certainly be an even prolific-er songwriter than what he's displayed to us already; he's apparently got the ability to make a nicely quasi-tradition-steeped folk song about the most random-ass of shit; although most of his songs are very tightly on the subject of something or other, usually another artwork (outside of music), they have the particular intriguing quality quite often that, if one didn't know any better, they'd seem to just be particularly resonant folk songs. "Rolling On" is on the lighthearted side: the subject is the '80s video game Marble Madness, and it uses the game's level theme as its melody. His songs are free at his website; I particularly like "A Long Way From Home", "Shechinah" and "Desert Rain".

Rick Shapiro, who quite possibly has *very* high-end notoriety in some circles, is a crazy-ass downtown New York improvisational comedian who manages to sneak plenty of sheer absurdist ridiculousness into his torrents of the undenied foulest of language ("wherever your ass is, look for it near you"). He's somehow primarily affiliated with the so-called "anti-folk" scene congregating at the Sidewalk Cafe in the East Village; I got this track on an Anti-Folk compilation also featuring another sometime acquaintance of mine, Turner Cody.

Also at the heart of downtown is -- or rather, was -- the Bouwerie Lane Theatre, housing the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company, which had the tendency to always put on absolutely stunning versions of whatever it was I cared to see, most notably an incredible version of Tom Stoppard's Night and Day. Once during an intermission at the Bouwerie Lane I skipped down to the basement and picked up a strange album yclept Every Play's An Opera, which turned out to be music and songs written by one Ellen Mandel to all sorts of previously resolutely music-less classic plays. Even among the likes of Metal Face Doom and Les Claypool, her 47-second Dylan Thomas snippet is quite possibly the most disturbing thing on here.

Then there are those who muse most brilliantly on reflected light: They Might Be Gannets were "formed to flesh out the material of the song `Fingertips' into a whole album", said song being a mad four-and-a-half-minute agglutination of 21 microscopic sub-songs by the creative pop avatars known as They Might Be Giants; the junior TMBG's Fingertips album is also available for free. The California Guitar Trio were trained in the cauldron of Robert Fripp's Guitar Craft seminars, and on rocked-up Japanese folk song "Zundoko-Bushi" they weave in a tribute to their former teacher; it's certainly more than King Crimson themselves, who recently might have passed through YOUR town incognito in the eleKctronic disguise of ProjeKct X, can be bothered with.

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