A few months ago, DM brought you news that a legendary postpunk mix that had been bouncing around for years was now officially downloadable in full for the first time. That mix, titled 1981, was the brainchild of a well-nigh bottomless musical compendium of awesome and obscure shit named Ian Manire. That mix exhaustively covered the manifold epiphanies from 1981, and when I say “exhaustively,” I’m talking on the order of 25 solid hours of music. If you’d like to hear more about that, by all means, you really should.
Earlier today, Manire uploaded a relatively modest effort called 1979, which consists of seven new CD-length mixes that organize the postpunk output of 1979 into several broad themes, which was also more or less how the 1981 compilation worked: “Fire,” “Amplifier,” “Brain,” “Cassette,” “Computer,” “Convertible,” and “Ice.” Fans of Talking Heads, Magazine, Comsat Angels, etc. are encouraged to download and burn the mixes for free. Many of the tracks will be known to you, but one of the pleasures of Manire’s mixes is the encounter with less familiar bands, such as Essendon Airport, Essential Logic, and the Embarrassment and even many bands not starting with the letter E.
In a longer note, Manire said this of the motivation behind investigating 1979 after such an intensive engagement with 1981:
I originally made ‘1981‘ because that seemed the year of peak post-punk fecundity, the maximum expansion of its sounds, styles, and energy before it all inevitably had to cool down (though post-punk-rooted artist aged much more gracefully than their rock forebears, see ‘The Dawning’ and ‘Evensong’). 1979 isn’t quite so overgrown with sheer diversity and quantity, but it’s got the quality in spades. Post-punk might have been ‘born’ in ’78, when all the fomenting strands began to coalesce. But 1979 seems like the year the spark of punk fully became the post-punk wildfire. Many of the most well-loved and iconic albums of post-punk were issued in ’79: ‘Fear of Music,’ ‘Entertainment,’ ‘The Raincoats,’ ‘Y,’ ‘Unknown Pleasures,’ ‘Cut,’ ‘Metal Box,’ ‘The B-52’s,’ ‘Quiet Life,’ ‘Replicas,’ ‘Specials,’ and on and on, and those artists are well represented. But ’79 was already generating remarkable breadth, as many more nascent and less well-known groups were also making incredible music, and a lot of them are here, too. As with ‘1981,’ the gap between the legendary and the mostly forgotten is strikingly non-existent.
Here’s a stirring “sampler” from the 1979 mix, just so you can get an idea of what you’re in for. FYI: The first track is “Do the Du,” from A Certain Ratio’s 1979 John Peel session, which is an exemplary kickoff to more than 8 hours of galvanizing, bracing tunesmithery:
via Carpet DM
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
For the first time, legendary ‘1981’ post-punk mix is available to download in full