The Laun Mix-Tape

Chris Laun came at me with this idea a long-long time ago. And I promised him a spot when there was some down time. Little did he know that he was getting a prime-time Friday morning spotlight. This is good stuff, and a good idea. I haven't even listened to these songs yet but I know that this is a good idea. I've recently finished reading The Brief and Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao, which came highly recommended by a couple of our listers. This book was as good as promised. Tune in Monday for a full report. This one is worth a damn, that's for sure. Anyway, from here on out is Laun. Listen to these songs at work. What else do you have to do?

This is another music-based recommend but it's got a bit of a twist to it. It'll hopefully be sort of a collaborative recommend if it works the way I'm intending.

Last year when the best-of lists started popping up on Google Reader I came across a couple blogs that had their top songs of the year. In checking out a lot of the music on there I found that there were a lot of great songs that were by people I had never heard of and had never heard friend's mention. Since then I've had a policy of making a point to listen to every mp3 that is shared on any of these blogs especially if it's by someone I've never heard of before and haven't formed an opinion about. If it was something I liked, I would save it to my computer. I wound up with a playlist of great songs by artists I know very little about.

So I've made a playlist of some of my favorites from the past few months. I don't know exactly when these songs were released. I believe they're all fairly recent but they could be from albums that are a few years old or ones that haven't come out yet. I tried to pick a mix of different kinds of songs so hopefully there is something here that will appeal to you.

Obviously the main goal here is to share music that I am really digging with you guys. The second goal is that if any of this is familiar to you that you can make recommendations or anti-recommendations back to me. Or if you don't know any of it but are inspired to explore further that you can report back with what you find. In that sense it could sort of be like we're discovering new music as a group.

You can listen to the whole thing at drop.io/launmix01. You can comment on each song there if you want but make sure you sign your name as it doesn't have any other way to keep track of who says what.

And here's the track listing:

Forest Fire - Slow Motion
Meursault - The Furnace
St. Vincent - The Strangers
Phoenix - 1901
Malajube - Porte Disparu
Nneka - Heartbeat
Jumbling Towers - The Kanestown City Rips
Bodies of Water - Under the Pines
Mystery Jets - Flakes
Laura Gibson - Spirited
Zu - Ostia
We/Or/Me - Tell Sarah
The Bird and the Bee - My Love
Parlovr - Pen to the Paper
Emperor X - Go-Captain and Pinlighter