One of the nice things about the era we live in—sometimes I call it the YouTube era, other times “The Age of Consumer Enlightenment,” it varies—is that this is a time when any piece of music or video is almost instantly consumable just for the asking, and as a result the “walls” between the various genres of music have fallen by the wayside. If it’s good, it’s good.

For the past week, I’ve been obsessively listening to two mixed CDs given to me by DJ Nobody (he of Low End Theory fame) that skip wonderfully between musical genres and the cracks between them. They might be the best mixed CDs I’ve ever heard. From pastoral folk to glammy heavy metal to insane psych to easy listening, love songs and thick, thick FUNK, these mixes work, and work great You can buy them from his MySpace page. If you trust my tastes at all, these CDs are the shit, believe you me. I’ve probably listened to them 30 times each.

So this got me thinking that I needed to make a CD back for him, you know, to show him how it’s done—the young whippersnapper!—and this is one of the tracks I set aside. In the punk era it would have been heresy to say you liked prog rock, but how naff would you feel about boosting a song like Mason William’s Classical Gas to all of your bemohawked friends? That’s what I thought, but seen in the light of day in the year of our Lord 2010, this song is fucking rad, isn’t it? Enjoy!
 
Bonus: Joy by Apollo 100!