low light mixes

I absolutely love NPR music .  The host of their All Songs Considered podcast is Bob Boilen.  I've heard him describe music as "Sunday morning music."  I'm not exactly sure what that is but I think I know when I hear it. I'd been thinking about doing a Sunday mix for some time and then I heard Wilco's song "One Sunday Morning" & immediately loved it & had to start a mix so I could use that tune in...

Back in 2007 I did a Prog Rock mix that is still one of my favorite low light mixes.  You can find the original post & download here... PROG ROCK '07. I've always wanted to do another prog mix.  While on a pro rock binge I came across "For Absent Friends" by Genesis and that gave me the idea of doing a mellow prog mix. In the original mix I tried to stay away from prog rock mainstays like Genesis...

"I, the fiery life of divine essence, am aflame beyond the beauty of the meadows, I gleam in the waters, and I burn in the sun, moon and stars." - Hildegard von Bingen Electronic & ambient music seems perfectly suited for stargazing.  So you really could use just about any ambient mix for night sky viewing and it will work just fine.  But sometimes it's nice to do a mix specifically geared towards...

For such a small country, Iceland has produced a surprising number of excellent artists.  From Bjork to Mum to Seabear to Olaf Arnalds to Sigur Ros, it's really extraordinary the amount of wonderful music that comes from that island. This last mix of 2011 is an Icelandic journey.  All the music is created by artists from Iceland.  The brilliant idea for it came from loyal listener, Kevin.  I wasn'...

For some reason,when I think of falling snow, the instrument that comes to mind is the piano.  Maybe it's from years of listening to Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown Christmas album.  So it's no surprise that there is a fair amount of piano music in this "snow" mix. We didn't have any snow yet but I had been thinking about doing a "first snow" mix for awhile & decided to throw one together Friday ni...

This past Saturday NASA launched the Mars Science Laboratory known as "Curiosity" on a 9 month journey to the planet Mars.  As I was watching video of the launch, I was thinking about music that would work well with a launch & space voyage.  I quickly collected some appropriate tune & cranked out this mix at escape velocity speed. The tracks are all electronic/electronica cuts that I thought seem...

I recently had surgery on a broken collarbone & had to spend a fair amount of time laying around, recuperating, sleeping.  So I decided to make a mix that would work well with Percocet & Vicodin. I've produced other sleep mixes before, "I fell asleep at my desk making this mix" , "slo mo" , "slow & sleepy" , and have often relied on them for nighttime listening.  Of course most of the mixes found...

A friend of mine made an excellent Spotify playlist called "Atmospheric Songs for Travelers" which had some great music from John Martyn, Nick Drake, Wilco & more.(I saved it as my own playlist which is why name is on it if you click the link.) Listening to that collection made me want put together my own mix of vocal music.  I don't do vocal mixes very often but I thought it'd be nice to do one n...

Josh, from Nocturne Records ,  requested a Halloween mix. At first I was reluctant because I'm not a big fan of dark ambient.  I've never really cared for Lustmord records, although I do have "The Place Where Black Stars Hang."  While I do have a fair amount of drone music I don't like dissonant drones. When I set out to do this mix I wasn't sure what direction it would take.  Would it be noisy, s...

It hasn't felt much like autumn around here, with temps in the 70's & 80's the last week or two.  But the leaves are still falling and before you know it we'll have snow flying. So I figured now is as good a time as any to publish this new mix, "Autumn in Slow Motion."  This is a fairly straight forward mix with a nice blend of old & new tracks.  As you can tell all the tracks have the word "autum...

I guess you could call this mix "Televison Sky #2".  It's a continuation of the sounds found in that mix. This has more beats than a normal low light mix, more of an electronica sound.  I think it has a nice mix of old & new material.  The oldest cuts are from Can, Eno & Earthstar, 1973, 1975 & 1981 respectively.  In the middle we have the Casino Versus Japan cut from 1999 & the Aspen track from 2...

"Several times I've seen the evening slide away. Watching the signs taking over from the fading day." - Brian Eno from Golden Hours This is music for sitting on the porch in the evening, as the day slips into night. The sounds of traffic, lawn mowers & kids fade away as the first stars come out. I stole the title from a recording by Fognode, which you can find here... Fognode - Porch Music . Brian...

"Music is the space between notes." - Claude Debussy I found a couple of tunes recently that exemplify that Debussy quote.  So I looked for more tracks that had definite valleys between the peaks of synth washes or long pauses between piano chords and then I let the mix take off from there. The result is similar to the "breathing" mixes I've done before with the lulling ebb & flow that I like so m...

"The loneliness you get by the sea is personal and alive. It doesn't subdue you and make you feel abject. It's stimulating loneliness." - Anne Morrow Lindbergh So much of ambient music has a beautiful ebb & flow that lends itself perfectly to sea metaphors.  Whether its bobbing up & down on the surface or plumbing the depths, ambient music music seems to fit well with imagery of the sea. I could c...

"Astronomy compels the soul to look upwards and leads us from this world to another." -- Plato (427-347 B.C.) I realized that I hadn't done a stargazing mix in quite awhile and with the weather getting warmer & spending more time outside, I figured a new star mix was in order. So here it is... T R A C K L I S T : 00:00 Sonmi451 - Cumulonimbus 05:30 Manual - As the moon Spins Around 09:35 Cyber Zen...

On the heals of the last mix, which was sort of modern classical, comes another neo-classical type mix. I started collecting tunes for this mix after I heard Alva Noto's "Argonaut Version" in a Quiet Sounds mix.  I like that song & wanted it to find a home in a mix. Speaking of Quiet Sounds , there are some excellent mixes available for download there.  I wish Brian would crank them out more often...

I love soundtracks. And if you look at the tracklist for this mix, you'll see that I have a few favorite composers. At the top of that list are Clint Mansell & Cliff Martinez. They are responsible for two of my favorite soundtracks, The Fountain & Solaris . Jon Hopkins, a new composer on the soundtrack scene, could soon join those two as a favorite. His soundtrack for the movie Monsters , got a lo...

As the days get longer, I am able to enjoy a bit of sunlight when I get home from work. There have been a few days recently where I stopped during a walk to gaze at the evening sky as the color deepens to indigo & the stars first start appearing. Being a music geek, I can't help but think of tunes that would make a nice soundtrack for that scene. So while listening to music the last couple of week...

I am very excited to present this next mix. It's a guest mix by longtime listener/downloader, Ron Sylvester. Ron was the inspiration for a couple of my mixes that used old 78rpm recordings as a basis for the mixes "Sustain & Decay" and "Revenants of the Past". Ron sent me some mix cd's which I really enjoyed & I told him he really should do a proper mix someday. Well I am delighted that Ron has al...

"Distant transmissions flicker and fade, there's a drift on the signal, a ghost in the phase."I've had that phrase on my blog profile for a long time. I've used different parts of it as titles for my series of 'shortwave' mixes(drift on the signal, ghost in the phase, flicker & fade).With this mix I've completely tapped out that slogan because the new mix is called "distant transmissions."I'm not...

No pretense of ambience in this mix, just straight forward jazz.  I came across an interesting list here... Quintessential Jazz Songs. The Jazz 100 is a list compiled by listeners of jazz24.org & NPR Music.  It's kinda fun to read some of the comments because the listeners get very passionate about the list.  Much of the list is very recognizable & some of the tracks I'd never heard before, so it...

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel." >    _ William Gibson,  Neuromacer I love that line from "Neuromancer" & it's the jumping off point for this mix. Now if I was going to do a true Neuromancder mix I'd use stuff like Autechre & other noisy, abrasive electronica.  But this isn't really a Neuro mix, I'm not a big fan of later Autechre & music that gets so...

Yah! A new mix finally! I've been ridiculously busy lately(10 days at the Super Bowl) so haven't been able to do much mixing. Hopefully that will change. This is another mix where the title says it all...slow & sleepy. Pretty straight forward ambient with long, stretched out chords, slow motion sounds to suspend consciousness. Many of the tracks used here are new or fairly new. A lot of good music...

"The passage of time is flickering dimly upon the screen." I've called this mix "Obscured by Time" because it has that grainy, blurry feel to it, like looking through gauze. The once distinct events in our memories melt together like the washes of sound in this mix. This collection was inspired by the two 2010 releases by 36, " Memories in Widescreen " & " Hollow ". A pair of great releases that a...

This last mix of 2010 is a mix that I did for Headphone Commute about 3 months ago. They were kind enough to ask for a mix & I was honored to add it to their great collection of mixes they post at their own site & at their Mixcloud site. I realized that if I was going to post this piano mix I'd better do it now because the title is "pno 2010" so I need to squeeze it into 2010 before it's gone. Thi...