Seahawks – A Circular Trip [mixtape]

This is a special occasion. One of my favorite current projects, UK duo Seahawks, have crafted a mix for exclusive release here on Optimistic Underground. This hour-long set conjures a celestial, funky, freewheeling spell that feels precision crafted for my tastes despite being composed of mostly new-to-me artists and tracks. It’s a treasure that I’m beyond excited to share.

I’ve now released 18 mixtapes here on Optimistic Underground, but before today I’ve never shared one made by anyone else, much less an artist I adore.

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Off World [mixtape]

This is the biggest mixtape I’ve ever made. I’ve pieced it together with every bit of leftover energy and stolen time as my life has been radically changing during these inescapably hot and humid Michigan summer days. I’ve been in transit, in transition, floating in zero gravity between two planets, my comfortable old past and my hard-won future. I’d been building this sound mood for weeks and I had to call it Off World.

This strange time has me thinking about my fondest fictional memories of adolescence, hours at home and across the galaxy spent wandering through virtual lands, riding the long arc of a grand narrative while taking plenty of time to slow down and soak in the uncanny beauty of it all. So I started making a mixtape that would reflect both the epic nature of my changing circumstances  and the liminal experience of waiting while a major life process plays out.  Most of all, I wanted it to remind me of that specifically youthful feeling of spending days at a time lost in the beguiling worlds of my favorite RPGs, no responsibilities to tether me to the real world. Yep. Here we go.

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Astral Blues [mixtape]

Zero gravity dance music for lonely cosmonauts. Or utopian jazz for the spiritually dazed. Interstellar beach techno? I don’t know. I’m calling it Astral Blues.

I like to think of it as a fever dream night out on the town, in love and half-crazed, blurred under neon lights and bursting with energy, connected to the earth and the heavens and all that hormonal stuff that makes us feel larger than life, self-mythologizing the way forward.

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Kyle Bobby Dunn & Wayne Robert Thomas – The Searchers / Voyevoda Split LP

Before this year, Kyle Bobby Dunn’s singular shade of ecstatic ambient drone music managed to flit by in the periphery of my tastes. His album releases seemed like big occasions to many friends, but I only listened, it seemed, in the midst of ambient playlists and random spins through Spotify or Youtube. I always enjoyed what I heard, but my attention was swamped by the constant snowblind bliss of the experience – the entire point of listening to hours of ambient music at a time, lost in headphones.

For someone who wrote a list called the 32 best ambient albums ever made, I was hilariously surprised by how quickly I fell in love with his sound. The two tracks on this split LP, by Dunn and Wayne Robert Thomas, make a convincing case for the power of sustained ambient drone in the year 2018.

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Hiroshi Yoshimura – Music For Nine Post Cards

Do you ever hear a piece of music that feels like it was made exactly for you at exactly the time and place you’re hearing it? Music that just fits, wraps around you, slips into your mind like the first blush of sun coming in the window? Music so effortlessly enjoyable that its radical warmth goes unquestioned? I’m not talking simply love-at-first-listens; it’s a different thing. I mean music that feel as natural as breathing.

Music For Nine Post Cards does exactly that. Hiroshi Yoshimura may have recorded this album in 1982, but it slipped into my winter 2018 sound world without notice and quickly became the contemplative little heart at the center of the new year’s listening.

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Dedekind Cut – Tahoe

Dedekind Cut, one of the most exciting experimental composers working today, has released his most accomplished set yet, an industrial ambient juggernaut that folds all his prior rough edges into an interstellar discovery vehicle. Tahoe is music for travelling beyond, informed by a deeply honest sense of what it’s like to be alive right now in this weird world.

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Until the End of the World [mixtape]

Every day, I’m becoming more and more the person I decided I would be. There is no immutable, core me – at least, not on a long enough timeline. It’s freeing to realize this and to reflect upon it every once in a while.

They say that no matter what you’re writing about, you’re always revealing yourself. A moment on this blog tells you I keep my mind on the future, and I keep its aim true with a steady diet of sci-fi, art, music, and stories all filling in the aesthetics of the great beyond. It’s impossible to create anything without these influences pouring out. So it goes, with another mixtape: Until the End of the World.

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