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Pretty much from the moment I got my first dual-cassette stereo when I was 13 years old, I’ve been making mixtapes, mix CDs, even mix Minidiscs, and pushing them into the hands of friends, crushes, family, internet acquaintances and almost-total-strangers. I started Musicophilia in October, 2008 as an outlet for that ever-present itch to share with others the thrill of discovery. I was already by that time, an unrecoverable, unrepentant music addict, a decade gone into the strong stuff (Library music, obscure Kosmische, post-Post-Punk art-pop, spiritual Jazz, and deeper still). Thanks to early adoption of kooky mass-storage (100GB at the time) mp3 players, I’d digitized all my CDs and records, and I would often put hundreds of albums on “random,” and as I became acclimated to crazy musical leaps in my everyday listening habits, the supposed boundaries of genre, style, time and place were of decreasingly little interest to me. What excited me were the connections between sounds, trans-genre, across time. A mix-blog (at the tail end of the “golden age” of music blogging) was the perfect outlet for both deep dives into the territory that excited me, and for illuminating connections as I heard them. I’m sure there are people that know Musicophilia as a post-punk place, or maybe for some other area of focus; but even at the outset I hoped to build something that spoke to the infinite beauty and myriad shapes of music, and that would encourage fans of whatever lead them to their first Musicophilia mix into the exciting unknown of new-to-them.
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“Madly in love with sound,” the masthead has read since day one. And now, fifteen years later as of October, 2023, I hope the collective endeavor has lived up to that statement of expansive purpose. While the last couple of years have been relatively quiet, as mid-life has brought its challenges, looking back at the last five years since Musicophilia celebrated its first decade, overall it’s been a prolific rebirth period of the blog, expanding into ever broader sonic territory, fueled by my resurgent love for contemporary music. Post-punk and Library music, much as I still love them, have given way to other focuses: modern experimental Hip-Hop and R&B; a search for more maximum emotion in minimal sound; a search for joyous sounds in dark days; even further forays into 1970s country music. Additionally, Musicophilia became a semi-real record label, as in late 2021 I began making music again of my own for the first time since 2001–and how could I resist releasing the first real CDs ever to bear my name under the “Musicophilia Co.” banner that has adorned many mixes here? By quick count, October 2018 to September 2023 has seen 47 new mixes added to the catalogue (plus four albums and an EP).
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To celebrate fifteen years of Musicophilia–spanning youth into inescapable adulthood, personal triumphs and hardships, and some of the darkest years for the world at large of my lifetime when the light of music has been more critical than ever–please allow me to present my favorite 15 mixes in the last five years (in alphabetical order), since October, 2018 (following up on my favorite 10 from the first decade of the blog, all of which I still love). If you don’t already know them, I hope you’ll dive in, and trust me once more with your ears and a bit of your time–I’m certain you’ll be well rewarded. As always, my mission is to bring new sounds to fall madly in love with into lives–and my not-at-all ulterior motive is to get listeners to support working artists by buying the albums, going to shows, picking up merch, and spreading the word. As formalized piracy algorithm streaming services and their soul-sucking corporate masters continue to make it more and more difficult for artists to be paid fairly for their work, your support means more than ever.
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As always, whether you’ve been with Musicophilia since 2008 or this is your first time here, thank you for listening. Making these mixes and sharing this music and supporting these artists with you has been the most sustained honor of my life, and with any luck, we’ll be here in five years to look back on two decades of this labor of music-love.
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‘A Boy & His Pet Heart‘ (1950-2004) [2020]
Perhaps appropriately for a list looking back, this mix itself looks back to the college radio show and internet radio “station” I had circa 1998-1999 called “A Boy & His Pet Heart,” which was both intentionally emo-as-possible as was the style at the time, but also equally tongue-in-cheek. This mix revisits and reassess a sound I loved in my late teens, but which I’d jettisoned as I moved on to music from other times I guess I took more seriously. Making this mix made me realize the music of this time-and-place has lasting power in its own right, even if I’d considered it a musical cul-du-sac in my own life. There was a type of indie rock from just slightly later than this that I indeed despised which really helped launch me away from the “now” for a decade or so, and personally I don’t regret that. But this music didn’t deserve to be left behind, and I’m glad to know successive generations have carried the torch (look no further than the recent best-seller deluxe reissue of the oeuvre of hometown heroes included on this mix, Everyone Asked About You by Numero in 2023).
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The Bassist: A Tribute to Danny Thompson‘ (1968-1994) [2020]
Over the years, a good number of Musicophilia mixes have paid tribute to particular artists or even specific albums. But ‘The Bassist’ remains unique thus far, in paying tribute to the amazing upright bassist Danny Thompson by collecting tracks by many artists from across a quarter-century on which he himself brings his inimitable sound to bear. Thompson provided the musical foundation for so many artists I’d loved over the years, but only quite a bit later did I realize he was the common thread, spanning The Pentangle, Nick Drake, Sandy Denny, John Martyn and many others in the 60s and 70s, but also so much of the 1980s and 90s English sophisticated post-post-punk sounds of David Sylvian, Shellyan Orphan, Kate Bush and my all-time favorites Talk Talk. Hearing all those and other less well-known marvels tells a deeply compelling story about an artist who deserves even more recognition than he gets. (My one regret on this mix: somehow leaving off Donovan’s “Get Thy Bearings,” which is probably the first track that made me look Mr. Thompson up. Oh well–he only has 490 performance credits on Discogs…)
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‘The Dance of Water and Fire‘ (2020-2023) [2023]
This mix is a tribute to my adopted home city of Providence, Rhode Island and in particular the “secular evensong, a mass-quietude, a civic contemplation, a slow-art moment, a reflective celebration” that has graced its city center many Saturday sunsets for the last quarter-century. I don’t know of many events that celebrate this kind of music, and the states of mind it engenders (especially as a social collective experience, rather than a solitary one), but WaterFire does. For those who can’t visit, I think this mix of remarkable music from the 2020s thus far will get you as close as you can without the heat of the fires warming you.
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Elegy for Mark Hollis: A Life (1955-2019)‘ (1982-2000) [2019]
The number of musicians who so indelibly shaped the way I hear music as Mark Hollis has done, I can count on my fingers. And those whose music affects me as much emotionally, even decades in, I can count on two or three. If you boil it down, a great many Musicophilia mixes are de facto tributes to Mr. Hollis. But just few weeks before he passed, I’d begun finally making a mix explicitly in his honor. Even though he had entered into an intentional artistic silence two decades prior to his death, many of us had lived in hope of the possibility of more of his singular sound coming into the world. With his death, we had to acknowledge and accept his wishes–and to be sure, he’d created absolute perfection, and perhaps nothing more was needed after that. ‘Elegy‘ focuses on his contemporaries and those who (I surmise) his work impacted immediately thereafter. (On another day, I might swap in the companion mix, ‘Rememberance,’ which focuses on Hollis’ spiritual forbears, if not his musical influences, in the decades prior to Talk Talk’s ultimate form.)
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‘The Great Wide Yonder‘ (1968-1975) [2020]
I have to confess, I’m hot or cold, or often lukewarm to Wes Anderson’s films post ‘Rushmore,’ though even on the ones that elude me, I’m glad he’s out there doing his odd auteur thing. His first two films, though, were strangely something like a meditation for me in my late teens and early twenties. As much as their casual melancholy and romantic view of dreamers in a world that doesn’t do much dreaming, it was their brilliant needle-drop soundtracks that won my heart. Anderson doesn’t do that too much anymore, but what this mix supposes is, maybe he should? My biggest lament is that, because he’s created a joyous summer camp for good-hearted famous actors and it’s apparently just too much fun to do otherwise, Anderson’s films just have too many characters, and thus little to no emotional investment is possible in most of them. Plus, all the characters actually live in the dream worlds of Max Fisher’s hit plays, and so they never have to learn anything about dreams or reality; they never really have to change. My solution would be that he make his own take on the space epic a la ‘2001,’ which, ironically, I think would necessitate some concentration on just a few central characters, who would be forced by submarine-like confines within the infinitude of space to come to know each other and themselves more meaningfully. Or, at the very least, it would provide an amazing opportunity for these songs to provide a soundtrack of fuzzy, warm, early electronic songform. The soundtrack is done, Wes–cross that off the to-do list.
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‘Hindsight Twenty-Twenty‘ (2020) [2003]
Sometime around the turn of the millennium, I checked out of “now” almost entirely, part in protest of where the most Pityfork-lauded indie music seemed to be headed (think Strokes, Sigur Ros, et al); part in continued disinterest with most commercial music marketed to my generation; but mostly due to a series of revelatory discoveries of music made before I was born or in my earliest years, that firmly put me on the path of the “digger”. Somewhere around 2016, I began to hear new music that, for the first time since my early teens, suggested there was something larger than a few quality one-offs going on, something very good. That sense, combined with discovering Bandcamp in 2017, reopened my ears to the “now” and reignited my love for music of my own time, in a major way. Something about this year-end mix for 2020, a year of incredible sadness, anger, unrest, and (very, very tempered) hope, for me especially gets at the excitement the contemporary music Musiciphilia features continues to make me feel. These are brilliant artists that I hope get their due now, and in the future.
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‘Joy! Volume 4: Africa 1971-1979‘ (1971-1979) [2020]
August, 2020 was not a time of great joy for about anyone I would trust. There was hope in the uprising, despite the re-entrenchment of racism and evil that continues to dominate so much of daily life. But the simplicity of outright joy–it was hard to come by, and I concede still is. I felt I needed joy, and the only expression of joy that I felt could overcome my armor was musical joy. So across four mixes, that year, I tried to collect music that struck me as expressing and engendering not vapid smiley-face-ness, not mawkish Pollyannism, but true joy (which to me allows for the complexity of life, and is all the more meaningful because of rather than in spite of struggles). I might have picked any of the four volumes in the series for this top 15–spanning early 70s Jazz, 60s-70s South American psychedelia, post-punk of 1982, and the pan-African funk-rock brilliance of this mix, they all bring a smile. But this volume most completely achieved what I had in mind, blazing the brightest light.
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‘Late‘ (2005-2019) [2020]
Turning forty didn’t phase me too much–even as a small child I always received the backhanded compliment “old soul” applied by adults, and I was busy doing my best early Modern Lovers “I’m Straight!” piety as my friends partied in college. In other words, I’d always felt old; so being forty meant now I simply *was* old (I jest, mostly). But it did make me think about how often popular recorded music writ large is treated as a young persons’ game (to say nothing of “pop music,” though Beyonce is perhaps moving the needle). So I made ‘Late‘ to shine the light on artists lauded in their youths making work in their forties and beyond that is as good as or perhaps even better than what their younger selves crafted. There is something to be said for experience, perspective, and letting go of almost all fucks given about what others think of us, after all.
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‘Old Souls, Part III: Chicago‘ (2015-2019) [2019]
As described above regarding ‘Hindsight Twenty-Twenty,‘ the late-2010s to early-2020s so far have ignited in me a passion for contemporary music I haven’t felt since I was a teen (and certainly with a heck of a lot more breadth than I managed back then). Time and again, Chicago, even more than London or Baltimore (both of which got ‘Old Souls’ volumes, too) or L.A. or New York, has bowled me over with the music being made there and by artists from there. A follow-up mix is now long overdue, as these artists and many others continue to make some of the very best and most exciting music today. Chicago feels like the fulcrum of contemporary music.
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‘Old Souls, Part XII: Phosphenes‘ (2016-2020) [2020]
Like in nearly every form of popular recorded music going, Black musicians are creating much of the most brilliant and moving and innovative ambient and experimental music today (as ever). And yet Black musicians working in those fields (and their forebears, there since the very beginning and before), are often given the least recognition and acknowledgement in white-dominated press and music geek discussions. To put it bluntly, most white writers and fans treat these kinds of music as if they were almost intrinsically white and Eurocentric. ‘Phosphenes‘, mixed as a captivating and pithy continuous 60-minute narrative, provides only a very introductory demonstration that this presumed whiteness couldn’t be further from the truth. This is music of staggering beauty, wit, and emotional resonance, and it needs to be heard.
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‘Old Souls, Part XIII: Rock‘ (2017-2020) [2020]
When it comes to rock music, the standard white press history largely seems to posit that Black people invented rock n’ roll, sure, but basically from the Beatles on it was ceded to white people as Black artists moved on, with an asterisk for Jimi Hendrix, and half an asterisk for Love and Sly & The Family Stone. This despite endless and nonstop evidence to the contrary, not least the fact that a hell of a lot of Funk that clearly “rocks” more than most contemporaneous white-lead Rock. ‘Old Souls, Part XIII: Rock‘ (and its sister mix “Roll‘) are just a cursory introduction to the fact that Rock remains Black music, and that many Black artists are making the most vital, living, non-conforming rock and guitar-based music happening today. The stylistic breadth dispels any notion that rock is dinosaur music going out with the old white Boomers, and evinces that in fact it is flourishing in ways I for one don’t think it has in decades.
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‘Pith & Echo‘ (1968-2019) [2020]
I love all kinds of different minimalism, but for most of my life I’ve found myself especially drawn to that relatively rare form of minimalism: the minimalist song. ‘Pith & Echo’ collects some of my favorite music from across a more than forty year span that takes the general “song” form–music with vocals and lyrics–and boils it down to its very bones, leaving every small gesture and every spacious note (and chosen silence) carrying an incredible emotional weight, wherein less isn’t merely more, it’s everything. This might not be everyday music for most people, but I think for those it moves, it will hit deeply.
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‘Post Punk 1980: Heart‘ (1980) [2020]
The ‘Post Punk 1980’ box is the last (at least, so far…) of the Musiciphilia post-punk “box sets” following in the footsteps of what is inarguably Musicophilia’s best-loved set of mixes, the ‘1981‘ box. To a significant extent, my thesis across all of these sets was that post-punk’s popular reputation as gloomy and self-seriousness (the long shadow of Joy Division, much as I love them) is incomplete, to say the least, and that, in short, post-punk is often a hell of a lot of platful fun. However, a secondary thesis would’ve been that post-punk is also often surprisingly unironically emotional music (and, this mix’s cover notwithstanding, those emotions span far more than varying shades of dour gray). The ‘Heart‘ mix is in the end my favorite mix from the ‘1980‘ set, and it packs an emotional wallop.
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‘Post-Rock 1979-1989‘ (1979-1989) [2021]
Like its sister mix ‘Post-Punk 1968-1977,’ the point of the seemingly counter-historical title of this mix is to emphasize the ways in which any art movement called “post” implies less a break from predecessors (as commonly assumed) and more an “after,” as art that draws on a continuity and a lineage of ideas that stretch back as well as forward. As much as Modernist concepts of creating new “year zeros” every so often has a certain intellectual appeal, the truth is that nothing in art occurs on a tabula rasa, and “newness” is far less important in music than we often seem to need to pretend. Traditions will find a way in humanity–that’s almost a working definition of culture. So this mix is comprised of music that may or may not have directly influenced the musicians Simon Reynolds had in mind when he coined the term “post-rock,” but that sonically and intellectually draws on similar impulses and ideas, just a little “early.” (And, I promise, the very-long-gestating “prequel” to this mix, something like “Post-Rock 1969-1979‘ is coming, sooner or later…)
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Musicophilia 
Congratulations on your 15th anniversary! I’ve enjoyed every one of your mixes and listen to many of them regularly. I’ve not said thank you often enough so here’s a big THANK YOU!
Thank you so much, that really made my day!