My last Chocolate Grinder mix contained only songs that had the sound of a gun being cocked. I had fun making it, but it was horribly timed: the mix was published on the same day of the Dark Knight Rises shooting in Colorado. So, for this mix, I stayed away from overt violence and focused on something much simpler but no less thought-provoking: music whose aesthetic relies almost solely on Δpp®øp®¡▲†I☺Й.
One glance at the tracklist and you might already understand where this mix is coming from. With their satirical, copy-pasted names and song titles, many of these artists seem more concerned with reproducing over producing, sampling over composing, triggering over performing — or, at the very least, blurring these distinctions over reifying them. From VΞRACOM to spf5Ø and マイケル·ジョーダンLINCKOLN to ☯ARPEGGI8☯, these artists evoke a feeling of much-needed transience, an approach to music-making that has very little to do with pop art and more to do with an extra-sensorial plundering of the already-commodified and already-expired, released in small-batches and fleeting SoundCloud streams, a way to both extract from and add value to the past while also reviving the present-future — in other words, a way of destroying temporal constructions and foregrounding perception. Over time, all that’ll be left are a bunch of weird symbols rendered incorrectly by operating systems and weird music ready to be re-appropriated.
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[00:00] 情報デスクVIRTUAL - “(from Sacred Tapestry)”
[03:23] ☯ARPEGGI8☯ - “☾ ℳOONLIT ℬAY ☾”
[07:11] VΞRACOM - “Virtual Realm ID Number 4 Sunset-Bay”
[09:51] transmat思 い 出 - “私はあなたが時々私を覚えていることを願って”
[12:45] マイケル·ジョーダンLINCKOLN - “科学呼吸離婚”
[16:21] Macintosh Plus - “ブート”
[19:43] DJ/PURPLE/IMAGE - “THA MACK IS BACK”
[24:17] Oneohtrix Point Never - “I Only Have Eyes for You”
[31:26] Mediafired - “Cinderella’s Big Score”
[36:09] spf5Ø - “†ΞΞNΛ9Ξ D2ΞΛM”