CDs

How hyped was I for Denis Villeneuve's DUNE in 2021? So hyped that I took a deep ocean dive into music inspired by Dune -- both Frank Herbert's novels and David Lynch's movie -- and resurfaced with 91 hours of Dune-adjacent music. An old-styley J-card…

Kermette the Froglet wants to welcome you to the verdant world of Spring. Season Cycle was conceived as a 4-CD set that I would mix, design and assemble almost in realtime, completing each CD by the advent of its season. I decided that the title…

Hey hey, it's volume two of my 2020 series of CDs to match the seasons. Summer is a boisterous time, but after collecting possible photos my design took a different turn, keying in to the sounds of summer nights both spooky and serene. Booklet…

Carrying on with the Season Cycle series from 2020, here is the third of four. As DJ DanK, I'm the audio selector / mixer / editor of the whole shebang, as well as graphic designer. The animal star for autumn is not a cute kitten,…

The concluding volume of the four-CD Season Cycle (2020). As ever, the audio selection / editing is all my doing, as well as the graphic design. Perhaps it suits the year-end feeling of putting business to rest and leaning in to relaxation, but I did…

For a few years in the 2010s, I made year-end CDs, not of "the best" of that year, but of my favorites from what I had heard. And if a few songs from the previous year (or even many years previous) made the tracklist, well,…

It started as a casual playlist for a campus LGBTQ+ group get-together. It became a 150-minute, 2-CD documentation of the AIDS epidemic in America and England, as told through pop music and news soundbites. Sourcing the news soundbites added a lot of time to the…

I'm an absolute nut for early synthesizer music. One of my first formative discoveries in my parents' record collection was Dick Hyman's Age of Electronicus, a Moog-filled LP of original compositions and groovy covers like "Green Onions" and the Beatles' "Blackbird." The two best music…

His name was Prince, and he was funky. At some point, my thirst for new Prince recordings could no longer be slaked with B-sides, remixes and rarities, and I went down the rabbit hole of other artists covering Prince. While there is a near infinite…

Although Eurythmics' albums were remastered and resold as "deluxe" reissues in 2005, RCA did a disappointing job of it. The remastering is at an ear-fatiguing brickwalled level, obliterating sonic detail; the multi-page booklets wasted most of their design space on full-bleed photos overlaid with pull…

If Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe saw this, would they cringe harder that they used to have these hairstyles, or that they no longer have hair at all? Here, what began as a simple collection of 12" mixes and b-sides from the very start of…

One of my very favorite albums by anyone at anytime is David Byrne's Complete Score from the Broadway Production of "The Catherine Wheel" (1981). And it has such pitiful artwork. The original LP artwork was half-decent, but that was a 45-minute condensation of the score;…