The reason for the season.

December 3, 2010 3:06 PM

It’s maybe a little early yet for year’s end retrospectives, but who cares: we’ve got 157 songs, 10.5 hours, 1.12 GB of “some of the best and most notable music from 2010... covering indie, pop, rock, punk, folk, rap, R&B, soul, dance, country, modern classical, ambient and electronic music, and in many cases, hard-to-classify genre hybrids.” —Curated by FluxBlog’s own Matthew Perpetua.
posted by kipmanley (30 comments total)

i predict we kill the shit out of these links
posted by nathancaswell at 3:09 PM on December 3, 2010

I'm working on my hoarding this year so I won't even
posted by circular at 3:14 PM on December 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

They're all "free" hosts, so I don't think they'll take the hits too hard.

Random suggestion: replace Vampire Weekend's “White Sky” with the pleasantly Balearic Cecile Remix (also on SoundCloud).
posted by filthy light thief at 3:14 PM on December 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

It would have been nice to have a torrent with all eight disks.. oh, well. Maybe that's a project for later.
posted by chebucto at 3:22 PM on December 3, 2010

Awesome. I was just going through stereogum's mixes for the last couple months looking for new stuff.

my best of 2010-

janelle monáe - the archandroid
ceo - white magic
toro y moi - causers of this
the drums - the drums
how to dress well - love remains
the black keys - brothers
fang islang - fang island
posted by saul wright at 3:30 PM on December 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Archandroid is an amazing album, in that such a strange, inventive, playful R&B concept album about androids finding love could emerge from the current scene. It definitely tops my best of list for this past year and I'll be looking forward to even greater things from her in the future.
posted by dave78981 at 4:01 PM on December 3, 2010

Archandroid is a great album, and I think Kanye West's new album sort of taps into the same vibe. And I actually think that Kanye's is a little better actually -- Monae's album seemed to lack essential cohesion in the same way that Bjork's Post album did. A whole lot of whipsawing between genres and styles in a very "look what I can do!" fashion, and sure enough she totally pulls it off -- but it's not the same as having an album that, end to end, feels like one solid, concentrated artistic effort.
posted by hermitosis at 4:31 PM on December 3, 2010

I like this so far. It will take me a long time to get through it. My best of 2010 is Lady Killer by Cee Lo. I imagine that's kind of trite choice, but very different from my usual listening, so I feel good about it.
posted by OmieWise at 4:41 PM on December 3, 2010

*waits for a torrent*
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:08 PM on December 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Perpetua put together 157 songs into 8 individual mixes - these took some time to curate, they aren't just thrown together - and that's not enough, you're going to wait for a torrent? I mean, that's cool if someone makes a torrent, but it's not necessary to enjoy what Matthew's put together for us here. I've been listening to these for the past few days and they work really, really well as separate mixes.
posted by troika at 5:26 PM on December 3, 2010 [1 favorite]

Downloading now. Should be some fine listening here.
posted by Forktine at 5:30 PM on December 3, 2010

This is awesome. A lot of my favourites of the year are represented (Kanye, Owen Pallett, Sleigh Bells, Janelle Monae, Robyn, Curren$y, The-Dream) but there is also a lot of stuff I don't know or didn't get my attention the first time around, so I'm excited to listen.
posted by SoftRain at 5:38 PM on December 3, 2010

I'm glad you all like it. If any of you can set up a torrent, I'd be happy to link to it on the site. Just pass it along to me via email or leave a comment in the post.
posted by perpetua at 6:00 PM on December 3, 2010 [5 favorites]

After listening a bit, these are fantastic. Thanks a lot perpetua!
posted by saul wright at 7:52 PM on December 3, 2010

Gotta nth the Janelle Monae love. I didn't think the music could live up to the concept but she really knocked it out of the park.

I'm looking forward to listening to the mixes. The Kleptones did five mixes at the end of 2008 (start here and go backward) that introduced me to a lot of great music I'd never have heard otherwise.
posted by immlass at 8:17 PM on December 3, 2010

Looks like someone did it:
http://www.monova.org/details/4061822/Fluxblog 2010.html
posted by chebucto at 8:48 PM on December 3, 2010 [3 favorites]

Perpetua put together 157 songs into 8 individual mixes - these took some time to curate, they aren't just thrown together - and that's not enough, you're going to wait for a torrent?

Yes, precisely. What part of my four-word comment did you find confusing? And how would the way in which I downloaded the mixes in question mean in any way that I wouldn't be listening to them as 'separate mixes'?

Further, rather than downloading the files from some dodgy filesharing site, a torrent would mean sharing the files out to other people as well, right, keeping the mix out there. How would that be a bad thing? Is it that the person who put these together wants some recognition for doing so and you feel like a torrent would somehow take away from that? I honestly don't see how.

Hell, it seems like even the guy who put the thing together has -- rightly so -- nothing against a torrent of the mixes.

So: big shrug from me, there, cowpoke.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:25 AM on December 4, 2010 [2 favorites]

Janelle Monae work is amazing, and her album is a big part of my allergic reaction to the recent Kanye hype. But we don't need to do that again. Thanks for the mixes, perpetua! Glad to see Canadian hero Owen Pallett on the list.
posted by jokeefe at 12:27 AM on December 4, 2010

('A bad thing' other than I assume all these songs would be copyrighted material, and so sharing them is and would be technically illegal, but I don't give a rat's ass about that.)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:28 AM on December 4, 2010

OK, a bit more: I do a lot of making stuff for people on the internet too, and it always galls me just that tiny little bit if I don't feel like folks appreciate how much work has been put into it, so a sincere thanks to perpetua for putting the compilation together. It's too easy to treat everything on the web as somehow 'just there' and forget that the best stuff is often the labor of love of a single person.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 12:39 AM on December 4, 2010 [3 favorites]

I see that this includes both a track from Titus Andronicus and Kanye's "Runaway." I believe this satisfies my "best of 2010" criteria.
posted by eyeballkid at 12:48 AM on December 4, 2010

Hey, Matthew! This is really awesome, great job.

One question, though: was everything on these mixes featured on your blog this year? I recognize most of the tracks, but not all of them (though it's possible my memory is bad). If so, would you consider making a separate file for long-time Fluxblog readers who already have most of these and are too lazy to download the files and weed out all the duplicates?
posted by Ian A.T. at 6:52 AM on December 4, 2010

This is too good to be legal!
posted by tybeet at 8:10 AM on December 4, 2010

This is exactly the sort of thing I secretly hope for, even as I smugly tell myself and others that I stopped caring about finding new music x number of years ago. I've got no excuse now. Thanks, perpetua!
posted by sleevener at 8:14 AM on December 4, 2010

A majority of the material on the mix has been featured on Fluxblog, but there are some songs in there that I either haven't written up for some reason or another, or I wrote about a different song from the same record, or I wrote a review on Pitchfork but not on Fluxblog, or it's very new and I haven't gotten around to it yet, etc. A few things I included in the mix because I wanted to cover some extra ground for the sake of the people who are using this as a guide to the year, and I picked a good song from a record I didn't feel compelled to cover when it came out. But no, I'm not making a separate set, this took up enough time over the holiday break as it is.

sleevener, you are pretty much exactly the sort of person I made this for! There's a lot of people out there in the same boat and I wanted to help you all out.
posted by perpetua at 8:31 AM on December 4, 2010 [3 favorites]

Stav, I guess I read a tone in your comment that wasn't there. My bad.
posted by troika at 11:14 AM on December 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Oh, I hope I didn't sound demanding! I really appreciate all the work you do with FluxBlog, and I've been a fan pretty much since the beginning. Hell, in my iTunes library, "fluxblog" is its own genre, and the resulting Smart Playlist gets a lot of play.
posted by Ian A.T. at 12:53 PM on December 4, 2010

Thank you Saul!
posted by Sutekh at 3:34 AM on December 6, 2010

Arrgh, they beat me to posting my collections of best of 2010 releases. Should all get posted up over the course of the next 10 days.
posted by Theta States at 10:56 AM on December 6, 2010

Alright, so I finally got around to listening to some of these. I have to disagree with them being "surprisingly listenable". I know, I know, my favourite bands suck and vice-versa.

On a related note, this post inspired me to re-discovered CokeMachineGlow's podcasts, which are a treasure trove of music that fits in my personal niche, and I will be listening to on my long holiday roadtrips.
posted by tybeet at 8:58 AM on December 8, 2010