Welcome to a new monthly..ish column from Charles, where he dives into his Bandcamp addiction each month and indulges in the sin of gluttony, with the intent to force-feed all. The rules and picks are completely his own and there’s no limit on what he includes; genre, quantity, or otherwise. Without further ado…
Do you miss mixtapes? I miss mixtapes.
Twenty years ago, all my music discoveries were coming from Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles, a now defunct Canadian magazine that came every month with a CD full of new metal tracks. I discovered so many bands through these discs. Hell, I only just disposed of them a couple years ago; I had one of those ridiculous old giant CD binders filled with discs. So, here’s my take.
I hope to try and recapture a little bit of that again, in digital format, with a few rules:
- The tracks have to be on Bandcamp. I love Bandcamp. It’s the best thing to happen to music and music fandom since mp3s. Best of all, it’s all legal. So we’re going to roll that way.
- I will keep the total run time at less than one CD’s worth of music (1:19).
- Maximum one song per band.
- All songs are from albums released in the month.
- It’s stuff I like, so if you don’t like my taste scroll-on buddy! Most of it will be heavy, some of it will not.
- This will come out mid-month, to give me time to digest any late releases. I hate rushing.
Does that sound good? I hope so. It does to me. (One thing that sucks is that you won’t be able to just click play and let it run. I’m working on that, but no promises. In the meantime, you can just buy all the tracks and throw them in a playlist if you want! Support artists.)
So here it is, mixtape #1. Pretty post-rock vibes from Rosetta, noisy shoegaze from Woe’s drummer’s other project Timelost, Damian Master releasing under his own name and giving me that Pantera tingle (minus the racism), a morsel from Vukari, who are the most under-appreciated band out there, one from Alcest‘s latest masterpiece, and then some riffs from Shadow Limb followed by some quality post-metal from Syberia to round it all out. This one’s a short one, but I hope you enjoy.
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Until next month…
– Charles
Nine Circles 