Blotto 8: Holidazed

And to all a good night. Happy Holidaze everyone!

Available HERE.

Blotto 7: Between Two Mysteries

Available HERE

Blotto 666: Leftovers

Thirds, anyone...?

Stuffing that never made it into the cavity. Available HERE.

Preferable Mixtape 7: The Fastest Kid In Fifth Grade

A bunch of people had left after high school and it was tough, but it also meant I had more time to hang with others. Russ was in his senior year and he made this tape around the time we started putting songs together. I think I told him a story about coming in 1st place for every race in the fifth grade Olympics, but during the last run this one kid ran against me. He was with the popular crowd [the ones that would shave nike and batman symbols on the back of their heads and color in the skin with colored markers]. And he just beats me by a bit in the last race and he became "the fastest kid in fifth grade."

We were toying with that as a band name or song title at one point, and then he made it a mix tape name. I included it in this series because 1. I've blasted the hell out of it over the years and 2. It's a good snapshot of a moment in time and of course its got some awesome tracks on it. The Archer's and Polvo and Jawbreaker songs were soundtrack during that fall and winter after highschool dead-ended in a crappy job, trying to scrape some money together and figure out what the hell I wanted to do. I could pass on the Ben Folds, Velocity Girl, and Promise Ring songs. Not hate'n here. I love this tape, but some of the flow slows down with these. I thought I shouldn't meddle with someone else's mix and it's definitely Russ's style and a moment in time [as per the date] and I know [as he clearly stated] that he sent it with love...

Available HERE.

Buuuut I went ahead and did that I feel bad and feel like I'm opening up pandora's box with this tape series, but you can get the sense of what I do without hearing the weeeaaarrrrwww of the tape fast forwarding. So I clipped those songs and put that version up HERE.

Thanks for the tape Russ!


Choose yer own adventure!

Blotto 666: Night

Just under the wire... For your eternal rock out with the dark out

Available HERE.

**UPDATE**

Ahh damnit. Rushed. 2 random tracks got uploaded with. If you see em in the folder without the cover above - toss em. One was rearranged and the other junked. They are:

6-31 I Can Smell Your Brains.aif

6-63 Footsteps With Chains.mp3

The mix should look like this:

Preferable Mix Tape 6: Robocop - The Metal Years

It was June 2000. I was back in Durham just before we went on a trip cross country and like any good last minute efforts your attention turns to music. We need some favorites. We need new stuff. Do we have enough? I cut together all the soundbites I could think of on my dad's tape deck (which was EQed and hooked up to the VCR and gave me all the soundbites I needed from high school on). I took the tape to Chad and Drew's. Since my collection was packed away I needed someone else's and they had this glorious stretch of vinyl - just row after row blocking out a fifth of the living room and ridding high on inch high shag carpeting. I needed suggestions, there were a few I knew I wanted in but it was their collection and so Chad wrote out some stuff (it's included). I marketed off some of the list as I put it on, and forgot on some of the others. You should get the idea - hope it helps you. This really was a last minute thing (even though it had been an idea for a while). We were leaving soon. I stayed up either the night before or the night before that - head weaving in and out of consciousness as metal played low and all the sleeping heads lay in rooms nearby.

I played it a few times on that trip. One time in particular many hours north of New Orleans in the late late afternoon sun bathing orange and red glow drippy sweat swaying moss from wise old trees. Our arrival back in town brought upheaval with my stuff over here and our stuff over there. In all the moving and time this mix bit a premature bullet. It was made. And I never gave it out.

So Finally here is Robocop: The Metal Years.

\

Blotto 666: Day

First of 2 mix spooky stuff mixes.

Available HERE

Spooky Stuff on the Way

We've got a few Halloween mixes in the works (just ironing out the spooky-to-not-spooky-enough ratio) plus an old tape that I never sent, but I would consider it a brutal masterpiece. hope you all are enjoying the fall.

Preferable Mix Tape 5: This One's For The Children

The 2nd tape here from Chad - one that he sent me after I moved back to California from North Carolina in late august 1998. I was only in Oceanside for four months before I took a greyhound back to Raleigh just before Christmas. But while I was there I received this tape in the mail and remember rollin' deep in the warm southern California fall. Aimless and not all to into my courses at Palomar college this tape got steady rotation in my Grandma's van in golden sun of late afternoon only to be ejected later when, in the early hours of dark morning, I'd climb back into her van and take excusions to donut shops with the oldies A.M. station. This wasn't the "oldies" radio of FM playing "shama lama ding dong" to "american pie". This was my grandfather's music - the 40's and early 50's - nat king cole on a good night - and the 'stached shlubs of so cal donut shoppes in their infinate quest for fresh-out-of-oven-ness stuffed the lots and booths in ways the occational passerby at 3pm could never fathom.

But I never recorded those drives from house to donuts to moonlight beach and up and down the PCH and 5 freeway in darkness of night when the world seems smaller and more your own to roam. It's the thinning of the masses. And this is about chad's tape - which is the flip of that - a mash of pushing through waking life.

Available HERE.

And thank you Chad for both of these.

*UPDATE*
The track year information is incorrectly labeled 1997 - Change it to 1998 for both tracks if you care to.

*UPDATE*
Chad sent me his tracklisting he found in his archive [i.e.: a pile of shirts]! Thanks Chad!

Preferable Mix Tape 4: Had A Heart, Don't Miss It

These next two selections come from a person who I think cares about music and it's integration into every aspect of life. He's also a dear friend and someone who I can count on to help me romanticize shit - Chad Layton. I suspect his tape deck was busted as you'll no doubt notice the left channel on certain tracks is often lower, but chad made this wonderful mix and you should rock it too because it really really kicks. It was made, I think, in 2006 after he had been in Asheville, NC and I in Berkeley, CA for many years. It was also crazy sped up so I tried to slow it down after digitizing it (which speaks to the 48 minutes per side). Many choice cuts. But I remember the VLE track and Kinski track just blowing my mind and forcing steady rewinds on my walkman. It was also cold when I got it, if I remember correctly, and as the days get colder now so shall you receive it. Let it bring about an autumnal state of mind.

Available HERE

(Stay tuned for a 2nd tape)

Preferable Mix Tape 3: Dear John

Raleigh 1996. Autumn. I had moved before senior year of high school and with it fell into various crews each with their own mixtapes and they battled sounds in the night. Ahh, maybe not, but can you see that as short film? Well. Somewhere early in I met Tom Homolya who passed this cassette onto me. This tape holds dual meanings as both introduction to friend and, once ownership of sounds are gained and new adventures forged in accordance with - as soundtrack to the alienated youth. I suppose it has obtained a third as of now becoming instant time travel passageway / temporal distorter. I'll always hold this one close - to those memories of being new in town, again, and of being older and not sure about what to do next in my life. Bad times, sure, but they were real and true, and who doesn't or didn't struggle with those. The Struggling. Combat boots on ground with army jacket loafing after school in park on cold day aimless, foolish, with all feelings so recent and familiar and new. Listen. Transport to time with frustration over pending adulthood. Anger spiraling like a drunk fly.

Available HERE.

Thanks to Tom also.

Hip Hop Suckas Fifth

The rips keep rollin' and this tape was a long strange trip in synergizing. Back in 1999 chillin in Jon Pratt's family mountain cabin my bro Josh from Winston-Salem School of the Arts was flipping though his caselogic packed with new Hip Hop. He told me if I tossed 50 bucks in for blank disks he'd burn fifty cds of my choice (this was in a pre-itunes-pre-computer literate era for me). A whole new world of rips opened up for me. I was like "You can do that?"

So, over the next 3 months, the most amazing and agonizing, I decided to move to New York and was killing time at my dad's house for a week in between living in Raleigh and couch surfing in Durham to get enough money to move up north. After being out swimming in a quarry or something like that I came back to my dad's and found a shoe box stuffed with disks and paper towels wrapped around each so they wouldn't scratch. It was like christmas and my birthday. I can't say it enough: Thanks Josh!

Somewhere around 10 or 12 months later - 2000 - when I moved back to NC - Somewhere within a few days I knew I needed to synthesize the cds down to my favorite tracks just to make sense of this awesome stack of music. Within that time I had bought a stack of videotapes [Krush Groove, Beat Street, Tougher Than Leather] from the Blue Light in Durham who were jettisoning their rental section and somewhere in the idea just hit me.

In addition to Josh's cds, there are a few tracks from my record collection and other tapes I made and stuff I knew just needed to be on for sake of flow. Anyways, dig it [And try to catch that last half second sound bite the tape let me squeeze in on the 45 minutes of Side B].

Available HERE

Preferable Mix Tape 2: Preferable Blues

Preferable Blues came only a few months after the Mad Max tape. Again, New York, this time 2000. A new beginning. Shelly had a tiny "apartment" with Molly. You see I worked two jobs at the time, both a couple of blocks away and they were kind enough to let me crash there at all times of the day and night. Which I did so fluently. At one point not too long into the new year I noticed some cds and records laying about for a day or so. And later that week Shelly passed on a tape wrapped in a beautiful piece of paper with the title "Praise God I'm Satisfied" scrawled on the spine and "Preferable Blues" on the tape. It introduced me to one of my all time favorite songs and and musicians: "Spoonful" by Howlin' Wolf. And I've always imagined "Praise God I'm Satisfied" by Blind Willie Johnson sung by a bulldog with a little bird on its shoulder as they move on down a dirt road.

So many treks through late winter and spring to and from Brooklyn, the lower east side, and Jersey City at dawn and night on that janky 10-speed with my walkman chuggin along. This here's a good one.

Available HERE.

hi-res image below.

Blotto 5: Staring Down The Demons

Whatever they may be...

Available HERE.

Preferable Mix Tape 1: Mad Max

"What is this? Funny Week?"

-Fifi

December 1999. After being back in Raleigh for a month, I stopped and spent the night at my old digs on Vanderbuilt just before tagging along on a trip up to New York in Shelly's dad's truck to deliver her a chair. Luke and Sean had just made a mix that would color the road and the new year in sonic wreckage. He stuck the tape in my hands that next morning, and at 6AM or so with Clare and Luke and Bojangles in formation we headed out to the highway. Hands down it still is one one my favorite all around TIGHT mix tapes and I thought I'd share a little bit of that with you...

Available HERE

UPDATE:
Forgot to include a hi res scan with the tracks. Just click on this to enlarge and drag it to your Mad Max music folder for archival purposes.

Hip Hop Suckas Fourth

We're gonna switch-up for a couple of mixes. This was a tape I bought in 1996 at unclaimed baggage. Since a number of you tossed yr decks into the sea in the last 10 years, ima bring it back in digital form.

Lock in an' everyone say "beat boxes bumpin' in the year '92!"

Available HERE.

Blotto 4: Beep Street

For long drives and chill out spots.... Just peep the rear views for satanists... an' never believe a schoolbus on Sunday.
Get it HERE.

Hip Hop Suckas: Third

This just may be yr summer bump. But'cha also might loose yr life bwoy.

Available HERE.

Blotto 3: Kiss of Death

Try to shake it.

Available HERE.

Blotto 2: Sunglasses After Dark

Roll your windows down.

Available HERE.

Hip Hop Suckas: Second

Available here.

Hip Hop Suckas: First

Available here.

Blotto: Mix Number One

The first round from the Blotto mix is available here.

A New Type Of Skull

We're taking a change of course here at Escape From Skull Mountain... we've got a couple of new mixes in the works:

Blotto

Feelin' pie-faced? A mix to get you there at any time under any situation.

Hip Hop Suckas

Beats, Rhymes, Life...

Preferable Summer

New mixes and old from the preferable archives. For maximum chill time at the beach or your front porch .

Stay tuned...