WARMER MIXTAPES #213 | by Warren Hildebrand [Foxes In Fiction]

1. Atlas Sound | Recent Bedroom
It's hard for me to consider my life without the music of Atlas Sound. I found out about Bradford Cox's body of work right around the period of my life where my family and I had just suffered the death of my 16 year-old brother Drew in April of 2008. After he was attacked at a party we were both at he suffered a head injury and went into a coma the day afterward for 10 days, before the hospital told us that oxygen had been cut off to his brain, and we made the choice to take him off life support. I had never experienced anything to completely emotionally fucked up in my whole life, and to this day it's something that I still find myself having to deal with. When I first started listening to Atlas Sound around this period by chance, and started reading about Bradford Cox's own struggles with traumas in his own life, it provided to me a healing effecting that I had never experienced from music before. It's difficult to put into words but it's in the music. Reverb. Tremolo. I make an effort to encrypt a healing effect or something people can connect to in all of my own music.

2. Boards Of Canada | Roygbiv
I bought this album on a whim while in Toronto one day after being attracted to name and artwork with no prior knowledge about what kind of music it was. I think I was about 15 and still fairly unfamiliar with a lot of electronic music. Upon my first listen my mind was completely blown open. It was like someone had taken all the hazy long-forgotten memories of my childhood (some which may or may not have existed) and compressed it into a warm and well-crafted album of electronic music. I think it's amazing despite how it being a synthesizer based album, it still has a very organic and human quality to it.

3. The White Stripes | Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground
Before I got into the White Stripes I only really listened to shitty Weezer and Our Lady Peace and other alternative stuff that was being played on MuchMusic around 2001. The White Stripes opened my mind to an entire foyer of music that I had no idea existed and instantly clicked with me. I first heard this song in an animation on Newgrounds.com when I was 11 or so and never looked back. Jack White was actually the reason I started playing guitar. I remember walking around with road at my Dad's cottage with my brother and step brother during the summer I found out about them listening to this CD over and over on my Sony discman. Humidity, freedom.

4. Broken Social Scene | Cause=Time
This was another song that launched me into state of OMG. After seeing the video for this in 2002 on the Wedge on late night MuchMusic I looked around (the internet, record stores in downtown Toronto) as hard as I could to find more information about this band. The ensuing search and discovery of Broken Social Scene secured them and the majority of their counterparts (Do Make Say Think, mostly) as some of my favourite bands of that part of my life. Too bad their new album is so shitty.

5. Benoît Pioulard | The Loom Pedal
The music of Benoît Pioulard is something I only recently discovered but something I feel like with be with me for a long time. He has an amazing ability to take influence from an array of different genres and musicians and craft them into beautifully textured acoustic-based songs and instrumental passages. Whenever I listen to his music I conjure up a Polaroid-tinged invented memory of being asleep in a expansive green forest in the middle of the forest while dreaming about his music in a time when it didn't yet exist.

6. The Microphones | The Moon
The first time I heard this song was while sitting in my best friend Christine's room in grade 10. I was sitting on her floor and she played it on her computer and I was taken away. Something about the gentle washes of faltering acoustic guitars and quivering voice hit me like nothing I had ever heard at that time. Right at the moment when the voices come in. So much serenity and nervous energy. Oh, to go back.

7. Godspeed You! Black Emperor | The Dead Flag Blues
Another discovery from the same time that I owe to Christine. She, my friend Casey and I were sitting stoned in my basement when she put this on for the first time. It was another instance where I hadn't been exposed to anything like it before and I was instantly moved by what I was hearing, descriptions of a convincingly bleak and beautiful post-apocalyptic world backed by lush strings and post-rock style guitar work. I remember Casey calling it gay...I later purchased the record (the one with the penny and all the inserts) off of eBay and would play it late at night in my Dad's basement on my hi-fi, often sitting right in front of it with the volume turned up, taking it all in after having just gotten stoned by in my washroom by myself. I still have The Faulty Schematics Of A Ruined Machine design drawn across the back of my door there.

8. Tears For Fears | Head Over Heels
Listening to Tears For Fears is one of my earliest memories of life. I have memories of being a really young kid, driving around in the back of my parents Nissan on the way home from our cottage during the summer with The Sun shining in the window, listening to this on cassette tape. I get extreme bouts of nostalgic flashbacks every time I listen to any of their songs now. It's good.

9. Deerhunter | Red Ink
This is one of my favourite ambient songs by what I consider to be my favourite band. I like putting this on loop and listening to it moments before I go to sleep, when and if that happens.

10. Neutral Milk Hotel | In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
I performed this song at my brothers funeral. I was an emotional wreck around that time and I tried to write a eulogy but I couldn't come up with anything. He and I were really big fans of Neutral Milk Hotel and I had even first showed him their record. The lyrics and all over that record and in this song in particular are filled with so much sadness and tragedy it seemed like it would be more appropriate to play it that trying to force out a speech. People applauded and I was on a lot of Lorazepam and it was a strange but cathartic experience.