Category: Mixtapes

Whatever happened to the human race? This mix explores the darker sides of the much maligned “AOR” genre, typically associated with 1970’s overly-produced pop excess, while embracing it’s playful and uplifting side. From Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott’s lamenting a “Fatalistic Attitude” to the Monkees’ Michael Nesmith’s time capsule to “People A Hundred Years From Now”, from Emitt Rhodes lamentable solo swan song “Farewell To Paradise” to true FM radio classic jam Starbuck’s “Moonlight Feels Right”, here The Human Race is represented in all it’s conflicted glory.

“Sing a simple song, you can’t go wrong” // Some slow and mellow songs for these not so mellow times …

For years if you lived in Nashville you were lucky to have the soothing sounds of WAMB 1160 AM, playing glorious easy listening music from the past. But what was truly special about WAMB was their late night programming, from roughly 12 am to 5 am, dubbed ‘beautiful music in the night.’ During this time frame the station would play blocks of old reel to reel mix tapes assembled by the late Nashville radio personality Ken Bramming…

Not exactly easy listening, but something like counter programming against the ambient dread of the moment. “We try not to lose our hearts, not lose our minds.”

As the nights turn colder and quieter, like clockwork an internal alarm shifts our headspace towards the sounds of 1970’s UK folk rock. Pastoral aural blankets of snow … a […]

Jazz-funk and big band rarities from the Soviet Socialist Republic of Armenia from the 1970s and 1980s; tracks recorded in Yerevan, Soviet Armenia and Moscow, USSR. Armenia has been without the symbolic mountains of Ararat and Sis since the latter stages of the Armenian Genocide and during the inception of the Armenian SSR … think of these records as “the sound of Armenia on the other side of Ararat.”

~spiritual jazz, free improvisation, experimental electronics, ethnographic oddities, and world-wide psychedelic funk~

And now something far out. Avant-Garde Got Soul Too is a mixtape by David Mittleman, host of Tucson’s KXCI independent radio’s Observations of Deviance, a weekly “all vinyl, free form program that harkens back to early days of underground FM radio.”

Another soul-cleansing vinyl set from the folks that bring you the Gospel Jubilee every Sunday on Nashville’s Acme Radio. This volume features youth choirs, radio ensembles, organ maestros, local, regional and national stars…plus in-the-red vocals, a flute solo (!), heavenly harmonies, faint-inducing falsetto, sanctifying grooves and some of the best drum sounds you will ever hear. Selected from records rare and everywhere. Because the price tag shouldn’t be the thing that moves you.