WARMER MIXTAPES #1179 | by Hunter Pharis Johnson [MC NASDAQ/Airport] of Miranda, gGarageband and Gost Bich
1. Popol Vuh | Song Of The Earth
This whole album is more or less one song. It's amazing sounding. Everything about it resonates with me, the whole minimalistic mantra expanding all based on a core melody throughout the whole album is insanely beautiful. It always reminds me of this one time I had a particularly intense moment with it while riding around in my 1998 Ford Taurus in the country outside of Richmond, Virginia. It was sunset. I had been driving my friends (including my now girlfriend, Emaerie) filming things for a Music Video. Anyway, we had not acknowledged our feelings yet and the mood was very loaded with tension. This album really loud in a car was the perfect way to communicate without communicating. I could tell she loved it so much even without talking. It was a deeper embodiment of actually communicating and everything was lush and pink around us. Everything looked the way the Music sounded. I actually made the mistake to listen to this song while writing this and started crying.
2. Young Jeezy | Halloween Massacre
This is actually a remix of Young Jeezy's verse from a song called 3 Kings and I have never been able to find out who produced it, but it has absolutely brilliant production and gets more done in 2 minutes than anything I've ever heard. The whole thing is so absurd and overdone - it's like a medieval Royal Orchestra blowing your face off over and over. I found this song amongst my friend's vast collection of Trapped out mixtapes. She has subwoofers in her car and it came on one night late after riding a loop and completely took me to the edge of sanity. I had to hear it something like ten times that night because I couldn't believe Jeezy's greasy, slithering voice and ad-libs over some beautifully ascending mixture of heavy bass and angelic choir. The visual for this is LED lit leather interior bathed in smoke and dirt roads interrupted by the occasional beam eyed deer, illuminated by headlights.
3. Mike Oldfield | Tubular Bells (Part One)
This is best known as the soundtrack to the Exorcist, but that musical passage doesn't do nearly as much as the gently climactic ending of the A-side. I listened to this extensively as a child and decided, somehow overtime, that my mother was in the choir and I could single out her voice. At around age ten, I made a mixtape where this ending sequence gently faded out and DMX's Party Up abruptly came on afterwords. I decided that on my deathbed I would play this tape and slowly lapse into Death to the end of Part A and be awoken from Death by DMX's jubilant chant-anthem.
4. Joanna Newsom | Sawdust & Diamonds
This one reduces me to tears every time. It's like some tormented faerie's ode to her love in an impossible world that promises to keep them eternally apart. When she breathlessly croaks Push me back into a tree! and her harp starts to flutter so gracefully, I imagine a fateful kiss in a dense forest bare with snow. I listened to this on repeat in my basement while mentally preparing myself to go to jail one night. I also cried unabashedly to it on the way to court as it seemed perfect during something so terminal, something that would keep me from my loves in the World as I was kept from the World behind bare walls and iron bars.
5. Triple Six Mafia | Now I'm High, Really High
This song is a fucking masterpiece. I heard this while experiencing the phenomenon in the track's title, which is honestly how one should experience it. Once again I was in my old car, on some country roads with these two insane girls I knew from School. They put this on as we sparked a blunt and over the next 4 minutes and twenty seconds, I was completely mind blown. It was a wistful Spring day and the Music was so completely night incarnate and dungeoned out. The rapping skills of Lord Infamous and Koopsta Knicca, as they describe elements of Satanic murder scenes while church bells and demonic laughing pummel you, and a dark, atonal baseline propels you forward, are the most poignant elements to ever grace my ears. This song cut through the mirk in my mind and filled me with an empowering malevolence. I would never see the World the same way again.
6. U.S. Maple | Touch Me Judge
U.S. Maple has been a lot of things whilst retaining their own noodling, spastic sound. On this track, however, off Purple On Time they collapse into a warm pile. The song lurches forward in the most euphoric manner, tightening up to mimic the sound of a Compact Disc skipping. It reminds me of my old days with my battle-scarred Sony Walkman CD player. It was engraved with a million band names and painted haphazardly repeatedly. I would zone out to this graceful mess of a song while driving in my mom's station wagon to Roanoke, Virginia to visit my relatives. Everyone in my family on my mother's side plays Music and I repeatedly tried to get my uncle to show me how to play the guitar parts off this song, to figure out how it was made because it is such a mystery and so masterfully crafted. Nobody ever understood my obsession - or how to recreate the instrumentation.
7. My Bloody Valentine | To Here Knows When
My dad used to work nights for a year while my step mother and sisters were visiting South Africa. This was one of the few newish albums I owned on vinyl at the time and I had just gotten my own first record player. I loved playing this song at the maximum volume my Stereo would allow, and since the record player was on the same shelf as the old wood paneled JBL speakers, the bass vibrations would cause the record player to vibrate, accentuating the warped guitar whirlwind that engulfs this track. I also loved to place one speaker in my window and blast this song into my backyard in the summer and make myself dizzy jumping on the trampoline while this song wafted through the dense Virginia air, the soundtrack to Heat and Dizziness.
8. Rapeman | Monobrow
Monobrow has the most perfectly abstract guitar sound Albini has ever produced. The cutting screeches are mellowed by some metallic chorus, and the drums come in with profound intensity. I have danced harder to this song than any dance song. I think Rapeman knew that because they break into an abrupt dance section at one point. It is so full throttle and testosterone packed. I showed this to everyone when I was at a summer Governor's School program, expecting them to be gripped by it's intensity and creativity, but they weren't and then my giant CD book with 400+ albums in it got stolen. Also the band I was in insisted on playing a radioed cover for this talent show thing even though I wanted to do this song. I don't think the drummer could handle it. Rey Washam goes in TOO HARD. Anyway, I hope somebody got a great deal of enjoyment out of my CD collection. Asshole.
9. Sonic Youth | Ghost Bitch
The first time I ever really got high off weed was on a Halloween when I was like 15. I was supposed to go to a party with the little crew of delinquents, but we all got too weird. Everyone parted ways and I was left miles from my house with a backpack filled with Mike's Hard Lemonade and my previously mentioned Walkman. I listened to this song while drifting the dimly illuminated streets in a part of Lynchburg that is basically like a rich neighborhood in a forest. I was super aware of the guitar sound, which is something like a hovering foghorn over some body of water at night. Kim's lyrics are brutal and Tribal sounding. It's like a human sacrifice is about to happen and you are an outsider watching things escalate. She sounds demon possessed and things keep gaining momentum. Also, the quality of sound on this recording is perfect for the way the instruments are played; mad props to whoever did that. I was terrified by this song and it was perfect.
10. Wolf Eyes | Half Animal, Half Insane
I was absolutely obsessed with Beat oriented Noise because of Wolf Eyes. This song is that period's early apex. I first listened to this at home lying in bed with nobody around when I was 16 and my mom was out playing Music with some people. The house was silent and still and I played it on headphones in the dark. I swear I hallucinated and had some sort of out of body experience. It was heavy shit for my age I guess. Everything turned to shapes and patterns in the dark and I felt like an animal. Time seemed to stop and everything was reduced to the jabs-like Analog beats, background squalor, and Nate Young's scratchy stoned rant. I was engulfed. I have some low key synesthesia and this song is absolutely black and gray. The gray is like huge fucked up animals moving in the dark.
