WARMER MIXTAPES #333 | by Willy Joy

This leaves out current dance music (Pandora's Box) and by the time I send it I'm sure I will have thought of 10 songs I should have written down instead.

1. Bad Religion | You
This is going to start a little theme of me picking one of my current favorites by some of my all time favorite musicians. I love Bad Religion and it's hard to pick just one. I like this because it combines their punk roots and epic out-of-nowhere harmonies with a bit of a personal touch. They so rarely break out of the anti-establishment tunes and make a song about a person or a relationship that when they do, it's awesome. This band takes me back to 7th grade, sitting on the floor of my house and just rocking back and forth with my eyes closed, full of the music and my sense of adolescent self-righteousness!

2. The Prodigy | Your Love
The Prodigy's Experience album is one of the most directly influential albums for me and what I'm doing these days. I'm pretty sure I re-played Your Love for months when I got it. It was everything I loved about raves and dance music distilled into this immediate shock to my system. My earliest experiences with rave music all came losing my mind dancing to music like this, and this is maybe one of the most successful examples of this oldskool sound...

3. Son House | Grinnin' In Your Face
This song should be played for anyone getting into music - one man singing and clapping packing a bigger emotional punch than pretty much anything else I can name. I love the sound of human voices, and his is heartbreaking. I still get goosebumps.

4. Ol' Dirty Bastard | Dog Shit
Again, hard to pick a favorite ODB joint. There's a lot of musicians who inspire me, but I don't count many as my true heroes. ODB is a hero to me. The people that really allow me to keep trying to live my dream are the outsiders, not the virtuosos or the masters. I love when someone just comes in so sideways, in such a weird way, that they can't be denied even though it's hard to define exactly WHY they're so incredible. Someone who just confuses and warps the system to fit them, instead of the other way around - that's a hero to me. Here comes rover, sniffin at your ass/but pardon me bitch, as I shit on your grass!

5. Devo | Jocko Homo
This is the jamming-est non-jam ever recorded, as far as I'm concerned.

6. Psykosonik | Welcome To My Mind
So this is a terrible song that would have been on the Matrix soundtrack, if it hadn't been made close to a decade before the Matrix. However, it's from a band and album I was obsessed with a kid, and that nostalgia has kept it close to my heart ever since. I remember playing nerdy games with my nerdy friends listening to lines like drive your mind down deep underground/feel the Cosmos swirling around/take a trip across the neural sky/you got to enter my mind. It's like jock jams for the kids... The jocks would torment, and I still sing along to this day.

7. Seu Jorge | Carolina
Another example here of me being completely blown away by a human voice - for whatever reason, Seu Jorge's voice cuts right through me. I don't speak Portuguese and have very little idea what any of his songs are about, but I've listened to this one probably 10000 times.

8. Herbert | The Audience
The entire Bodily Functions album by Herbert is one of my favorites, but I keep coming back to this tune for two reaons: the piano that drops in the second half takes me completely off guard, and secondly, I've been obsessed with this one line for years: You and I together, together in this room/you will not remember, this passing moment soon. It's such a powerful way to express the melancholy of every day relationships, and I've thought of it often when spending time with my loved ones that I hope to never forget.

9. Sepultura | Escape To The Void
One of my all time favorite metal groups with a BARN BURNER. Especially at this early stage, Max Cavalera could barely speak English and still managed to make some of the most brutal imagery and sounds around, ever. I was a huge metalhead growing up and this kind of brute force, by-any-means aggression has definitely helped to shape how I work today making music.

10. The Streets | Weak Become Heroes
Never has there been a better way to express how amazing a night of dancing can feel. It's hard to evoke a real feeling you might have in life via song, and this one works for me, takes me straight back to off-season ice arenas in Minneapolis, MN. That's where we had raves when I was a kid.

+11. El-P | Tuned Mass Damper
This album got me through some rough times in college, and, looking back, it's an insane piece of artistry. Outside of the Bomb Squad it's hard for me to even see what might have influenced it. So dense and so heavy, but still a head-nodder.

+12. Black Sabbath | Sabbra Cadabra
The ultimate. Period.