Image from the English riots, the defining moment of 2011 for me

So here it is, what I just know you’ve all been waiting for - a round up of 20 of my favourite tracks from the past 12 months. It’s just over 60 minutes, meaning that some of the tracks have been edited to fit, and it’s in 192kbps resolution to make the file size manageable for download. 

This mix is pretty eclectic and features a ton of acts I have covered over the last year on Dangerous Minds. I’m sure there’s tracks on this mixtape that the other DM writers will hate, but that’s part of the fun. One of the points of Dangerous Minds is that we have not set out to push some unified, all-encompassing, easily-packaged view of the world. We’re all different, and at the end of the day debating stuff is healthy. 

As for the music itself, well I’m with Andrew Dubber on this - the past 12 months have seen some fantastic music, and some very interesting trends in both the artform and music consumption. I mean that stands to reason right? As the amount of music that becomes available increases, the amount of good music increases. It might not come to us through the traditional channels, but it is out there. So here’s twenty of mine (and before you say it, yeah, some of these tunes came out in previous years, but those tracks are also featured on albums released this year):
 

 
Fucked Up - The Other Shoe
SIlverclub - The Goldener Reiter
Atari Teenage Riot - Black Flags
SSION - Feel Good (4 Ever)
Den Haan - Metamorphosis
Black Devil Disco Club ft Farris Rotter - Distrust
Ali Renault - Dignitas Machine
John Maus - Keep Pushing On
Neon indian - Halogen (I Could Be A Shadow)
MEN - Who Am I To Feel So Free?
Azari & III - Into The Night
Midnight Magic - Beam Me Up
Dam Funk - Forever
Destroyer - Chinatown
Grace Jones - Devil Dub
Mungo’s Hi Fi - Super Sharp Roller
Beyonce - Who Runs The World (intro version edit)
Ben Butler & Mousepad ft The Niallist - Infinite Capacity
Arthur’s Landing - Bobby
Andrew WK - Vagabond

You can download my Best of 2011 mixtape here.

BONUS!

If I had to pick just one record from the past 12 months, it would have to be We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves by John Maus. It’s glorious, genuine outsider music that’s also genuinely brilliant. If you dig Ariel Pink, don’t mind a bit of lo-fi hiss and have a soft spot for early OMD, then I can’t recommend it enough. Here’s a fan vid for the album’s opening track featuring a scene from Abel Ferrera’s Ms. 45:

John Maus “Streetlight”
 

 
EXTRA BONUS!

I originally uploaded my Best of 2011 mixtape to Soundcloud as it’s my music sharing site of choice, but oddly it was blocked because of the inclusion of Fucked Up’s track “The Other Shoe”. That’s not very punk rock, now is it? But hey, I don’t blame the band, rather their label Matador. What’s even funnier is “The Other Shoe” is widely available freely, and legitimately, from the label itself. I considered taking it off the mix, but as it’s my single of the year I decided to upload the whole thing to Mixcloud, intact, with a separate download option . 

So just for you dear readers, here’s a link to the free download of my single of the year:

Fucked Up “The Other Shoe”

And here is the mixtape minus Fucked Up.

And here’s to an exciting and eventful 2012!

 
John Peel died seven years ago today.

As mainstream radio in the UK gets steadily worse, as exposure opportunities for the genuinely interesting and different quickly disappear, and as lowest common denominator fodder like X Factor begins to limit the power of music in the popular imagination, he is missed now more than ever.

In the absence of one unifying national media platform it’s unlikely that we will ever see his like again, though I feel that through his influence, and the proliferation of music websites and blogs, we are all a bit Peelie now. Proof of the man’s legacy is that the anniversary of his passing has become an annual day of celebration, with gigs, radio shows, record fairs and even specific releases happening in his honor, every 25th of October. And this is a good thing, a very good thing.

So in memoriam, here’s a clip from a 2005 BBC program where various artists and radio djs posthumously rifle through his (typically eclectic) record box:

John Peel’s Record Box
 

After the jump, John Peel’s ‘Sound of the Suburbs’, Jimi Hendrix playing a Radio 1 jingle for Peel’s show in the late 60s, Peel on the assassination of JFK (which he reported on from Dallas for the Liverpool Echo), and an interview where Peel talks about the influence of punk, how its natural home is in the suburbs, and how scenes get co-opted by a jaded music press…