Your opinion, please: 366-band, 411 track 1981 box set

(also, shamless plug time: Seattle Weekly now has a weekly column called CD-R Go!, check out the first one by me: http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0509/050302_music_cdrgo.php)

Thanks so much! It's definitely an example of making the most of my material limitations, but I think in the end it doesn't look too cheap. I would've liked to have a square-shaped booklet, but folding/cutting an 8.5x11 is just more practical.

No! School us! How did you do this? Did you own and listen to all these records in 1981, or have you accumulated all these over time? I'm just asking because I'll probably be the average ILMer in, er, eight(?) years, meaning that I pay close attention to and consume music at an alarming rate-- but I couldn't dream of making an anthology like this for, say, 2004... I just looked through the tracklisting, and I only recognized about eighty of the bands. Did you own a record shop or something?

haha thanks. I considered getting in some hip-hop, but I didn't want to be cursory or throw in some token Flash track. Clearly the scenes coallesced at points (NY at least) but I was primarily interested in helping young people (my age and younger) who suddenly the last couple years find it hip to call things "post-punk revival" or "dancepunk" or whatever that there was a lot more to the 78-82 period than Joy Division, Gang of Four, and maybe (if the kid is adventuresome) Wire, much as I love those bands. I split the set up into varyingly definable sounds/feelings/aesthetics to make it more approachable, but the point remains that even though you could probably call 90%+ of it "post-punk," there was a hell of a lot going on. I included a smattering of sub-Hannet-wannabe stuff, but mostly I went for breadth.

I am an addict, plain and simple. I don't know what the "average" ILMer is, but to put it this way: I could've bought at least a couple cars with the money I've spent on music since I was 12. I'm not proud of it in some capitalist aquisitive way--it's just that music is not an option, it's life. That's probably true for most people here (or they wouldn't be here taking all this stuff so seriously-not-seriously). I can't think of anything else on which I'd rather have blown almost every discretionary penny I've earned. I wish I owned a record shop, but I've never even worked at one.

I'll tell you a little secret (not much of one--it's in the opening "essay" for the set)--I was a year old in 1981. I'm ambivalent about how this fact affects my appreciation of all this music. On the one hand, it means I'm hearing things slightly less in terms of whats considered cool at the time; on the other hand, maybe "what's cool" is valid, and I'm not getting the full picture from the recorded sounds alone. I'm fascinated to hear from people who were there about the whole thing--whether the relative inaccessibility of it all made it an elitist bastion, whether the internet deomcratises things--or whether because it was so scarce it was much more community-driven, that its expansiveness came from the necessity of staying busy. I tend to come down on the feeling that I like how I've heard the music--that much as an honest, non-selfconscious scene (a rare thing indeed) can be exhilirating, I'm more likely to have an honest response to the music "on its own terms" coming to it all after the fact and with relatively little knowledge of ephemeral elements. I could be wrong.

! My, that's dedication to be showing when you were a year old. ;-) (I tease, etc.)

I sympathize with you on the money/car thing. Happily I have never owned a car. ;-)

I work in preservation/restoration architecture and even though I live in a small city, I'm a pretty rabid urbanist. So I like to explain to people who love their cars why I find the utter and total reliance on them (indeed, the razind and reconstruction of society to accommodate them) so absurd in the following way: imagine instead of being on wheels, imagine cars were the same amount of metal and glass and rubber all put together into a big 14'-tall "Mech". Then imagine every suburban mother hopping into her 4,000-pound robot to go to the grocery for milk and bread! Fucking insane, but not much scarrier than the way freeways and cul-de-sacced squirrely over-wide roads look to me.

Michael ---

I'm not sure what I raised the bar on besides time-sucking geek hobbies, but . . . thanks!

I'm within a couple spots of 100 as of 10:20A.M. C.S.T., but if you think you would enjoy the set, I still welcome requests. I simply can't guarantee that I will get to those beyond 100 in the immediate future. As the interest seems to be there, however, I guess I have a responsibility to meet it as best I can. If you're willing to wait a little longer (perhaps a month) by all means, go ahead and write to me.

Again, thanks, all. I envisioned this thread quickly falling into oblivion---this is much more fun.

This really is a beautiful thing. You should be proud.

I'm using nice white-on-top CD-Rs

So are these (in any case, very wonderful) cd's pressed, or burned? I gotta say, it's really impressive how you've gotten some of the more underground stuff on here (e.g. Monitor, Nervous Gender)

Oh, they're burned. Very home-made affair. It would be amazing to make a "real" version, but I'm sure it'd cost more than I earn in a decade.

Especially if you had to own 80% of the CDs!

I picked up a copy of I.M.'s box on the original pressing and it is indeed a lot of fun. Good on ya, *i. Stop making this thing and get to work on 1991. :D

And this is PITCHFORK saying this.

It's possible that I'm prone to over-emphasising the advantages of the soujourner path. I had no cool older sibling, no hip (only hippie) parents, and lived mostly in smallish towns and medium cities that could hardly be consdered record shop hotbeds (though after initiated into musical obsession, I later discovered they often had the most cohesive, passionate kind of local music scenes around). My parents instilled in me a sense that music was important (and gave me one of my great loves, Joni Mitchell) but didn't have much breadth to share. I'm still not really sure how I got from The Beatles and Smashing Pumpkins and Simon & Garfunkel at age 13 to Sunny Day Real Estate and Stereolab at 17 to where I am today at 24. I didn't have the internet till I was 17; I didn't even have MTV (120 minutes seems to have influenced quite a few burgeoning music kids in the 90s). So I suppose I carried an inflated sense of my own luck, my own instincts--I managed to get here (here being nothing impressive, you know, a predictable 500 records of Jazz/Blues/World Music etc., but it's a start) "without any help".

Which for a while I was troubled when I found myself being adopted as some sort of knowledgeable figure by younger/less experienced kids some years back. Partly this was due to the fact that I didn't (and still don't really) feel I have much musical knowledge--just a record collection a little larger than most "normal" people my age. But the primary source of misgiving came from a distrust of "giving it away," not in the elitist sense that "I've earned it and you haven't"--I've always assumed that notion to be obvious bullshit, though many of you may disagree. But rather I hesitated because I wondered if somehow I might be depriving people of something if I cut out the "labourious" process of trial and error, the often tedious and risky adventure of placing your own money on the counter. I wondered--would I have really appreciated the music as much, if I hadn't had to "work" for it?

If it tells you anything about where I ended up, I eventually gave 70 mp3-CDs filled with roughly the first eight years of my serious music addiction to a younger cousin. Though I have friends who claim that "the internet ruined music," I decided that even for me, there was relatively little "work" involved in the "process of discovery" anymore. Even before it was common to have high-speed internet and good p2p like Soulseek, the "challenges" were essentially whittled down to "do you have the money to afford to be eclectic". I began to ask, what did it mean to have "earned" ones musical knowledge? Pitchfork might be ruining young minds with their awful writing, but hipster "cheat sheets" had been a staple of "musical knowledge" since well before I was born. My own "country mouse" success story in some ways notwithstanding, hadn't the primary determinant of being musically-in-the-know really come down to a few very undemocratic and ultimately ephemeral things: where you happened to live, how much discretionary money you had, and who you knew (whether people or zines)? Where was "PASSION" on the list? Sure, someone with passion AND all the aforementioned advantages could live a great musical life. But for him the "process of discovery" was about as tricky as popping down to Rough Trade to see what'd come in this week (to exagerate). Meanwhile someone with no real passion but a desire to be seen as "hip" could also pop on down. Meanwhile the passionate kid in the hinterland (or the poor kid in the suburbs) had to stagnate with frustration; or, as in my case, find mail-order, making the process not really so difficult, but not that romantic, either.

Now don't get me wrong. I'm still the sort who needs to "own" the record--mp3's don't count--as my bank account can attest. I'm not even proud of this, as it probably comes down to some consumerist materialism as much as any ethical imperative. But let's be honest--the glory of crate digging, the joy of a good local shop, blowing sizeable savings each visit to London or New York--these are all enjoyable, and it's reasonable to wear them as badges of verity (in our own geek minds, at least). Chatting down at the shop or spinning at the radio station--these will always have a visceral appeal that things like typing away on ILM etc. can't provide. But what are we really on about, ultimately? What compels us to take part in all these geeky rituals? (And being honest, when I see Trekkies, I know that but for the grace of God, there go my passions--we're not that different.) It has to be The Sounds Themselves.

As the 1981 set itself attests, I've clearly come down that "giving it away" is a logical fallacy. All that you can give to a passionate kid, a neophyte who would know more, will only fuel the fire. None of us (well, maybe a few at this place, but in general) knows everything, and I imagine we'd get depressed if we thought we did (and probably all of us, at least early on, hit that wall of asking, "is this it?" before the next thrill of discovery). So what's the damage done if some kid hears This Heat at 16 on a silly boxed set, instead of waiting around till luck of Pitchfork exposure and the whimsy of reissues made it more likely? I say, more power to him--that's less time he might waste on lesser stuff.

Which brings up my final potential qualm about "giving it away": does a "musical tutor" not risk simply indoctrinating his "puil," risk blunting the development of his capacity for discrimination? Well, I'll pose another question in response. For those of you lucky enough to have been the right age at the right time in the right time for Peel's golden age: did you simply take his word on every track? Or even if you did initially, did his opinions remain yours for good? Well, compared to any of us, John Peel is the "tutoring" God; and if God's own trumpet didn't deafen your own opinions, then I think none of us is likely to do so for anyone else. I say: exposure, exposure, exposure. People may not be ready for everything all at once--and so the temporal facet of our beloved "process of discovery" will inevitably reassert itself. Even if some kid queues up half your collection on Soulseek (as numerous have done mine,) it will take them plenty of time to even hear it all, much less listen to any of it. So I embrace the democratic age of access; don't fear the instantaneousness of it all--our ears and our hearts are still analogue, and for those with passion, the process will still take time. Passion should be the only criterion for gaining access to the beautiful world of music (and paying in to keep the practical side will come with salaries, years on).

I love listening to my collection, and remembering that I bought this record in 2001 on a trip to Philly to meet some girl I barely knew, and listened to it the first time we made love; or that it was recommended me by a kindly shop owner in 1996, and that it changed my life. I doubt that many kids will remember "I downloaded this album, the modified date says, on 5th May 2005, along with these other 10 albums". They will, isntead, form their own memories--when the music first meant something to them, what was happening, maybe even when they got the money together to go out and buy the record. I'm not worried we stand to lose anything important.

Intro to the 1981 box, 1st Edition:

My first idea of how to introduce this set was to start with a question: "what do we do when we realise Pandora's box is never going to shut?" I wanted to persuade you that the music heard on this set provides one answer to that question: if our belief in fundamental order is shaken, we resolve to make a beautiful mess. I wanted to argue that a lot of this music is part of a lineage of noble "outré" and progressive popular art made by people trying to restore hope and meaning amidst derelict shells of classicism, modernism, and post-modernism. I would also have tried to say something pithy regarding the historical context of this music, about how the shattering of the notion of monolithic cultures made music like this possible, and necessary; and about Thatcher, Reagan, suburbs, post-industrial economics, the dole, the rise of fundamentalism and yuppiedom and anti-disco rockism.But the truth is, I was in diapers in 1981. As far as outré music is concerned, I have less than a decade of experience with the stuff. My parents were hippies spinning Joni Mitchell and James Taylor records in the '80s. They imbued me with a sense that music was deeply important, but didn't have much of its sonic breadth to share. I "know" about as much about music as could be expected of any musically obsessed twenty-four year old who spent high-school in the School of Indie Rock, owns only a couple hundred jazz records, a hundred (predictable) hip-hop records, overuses Skip James on mixes, and only heard his first Talking Heads album as a junior in high school. What I mean is: I still function musically primarily on passion, not knowledge. I'm confident about my abilities to put together a good mix for just about any tastes; do a decent radio show; and hold my own with young know-it-all record clerks in Chicago. But I don't know enough to write cool, authoritative, impressively linernotish liner notes. The fact that I know all this music after-the-fact or "second hand" should affect the quality of the music; an attempt to give you the storytelling goods secondhand would probably do a disservice to the story.This set inevitably reflects my biases as its curator; but I hope it is deep and wide enough to allow you to decide what the "best," "most important," "coolest" sounds are. In fact, I realise you may even disagree with me that 1981 is worth all the trouble. Personally, I think something was happening from about 1978 to 1982 that is noteworthy in the history of pop music. I think there was an earnest expansiveness and playfulness regarding the boundaries (or absence thereof) between genres and between "art" and "pop". Nothing I could say will convince you--but the music might.

I admit that a portion of these tracks are undeniably dated (if charmingly so,) and will probably trigger nostalgia even if you've never heard them. Progressive (in pop terms) as these tracks were at the time, they established the paradigm for the infamous "sound of the 80s," and by extension the cartoonish aesthetic currently revered by college students too young to actually remember the decade. I resisted investigating many of the bands I knew as pathetic yuppie crooners on my older sister's radio in the mid-80s for years; in their early incarnations, at least, some of those bands have become my favourites. The majority of the music of this particular 1981, however, would set a fire were it released today; the paradigm they operated within (or without) was expansive enough that a lot of the best "progressive" music is still exploring it today (in just the way that many of these bands can be said to have been working in virtual homage to Can or the Velvet Underground).Investigating threads of Influence and innovation; glowing about "prescience;" and dividing the thieves from the tributaries arguably enhances musical enjoyment. But I hope you'll ultimately take this music on its own terms. I came into my interest in the "post-punk period" slowly; I bought the hype young that punk was the Sex Pistols, which I didn't especially like, and therefore skipped ahead to Yo La Tengo and the Pixies. It was only after I stumbled through a couple dozen records that I started to notice common years popping up. My subsequent effort to consciously put together a picture of the movement (and my appreciation of the music as a cultural artifact) came only after I first felt the picture. Even after as work-like a relationship as I've had to this music after spending countless man-hours putting this set together, I still hear it foremostly in the visceral way that I did when I knew nothing of its history.On to the indisputable facts: 395 tracks, 345 bands, almost 21 hours of sound, spanning most elements of the post-punk, art-pop, new wave, hardcore, no wave, d.i.y., new romantic, power-pop, dancepunk, art-punk and electropop spheres. Nine of the discs are audio CDs, carefully selected and sequenced along sonic or emotional themes. The tenth disc is an mp3 "appendix" containing tracks by 130-plus bands that didn't fit the main mixes, most of whom are just as good as those on the main CDs. For some of you, there is little new to you here. For a good many, this may be all the "post-punk" you'll ever want. I don't need to change your life, I just want to play you some music; so if you enjoy any of it, my effort has been worthwhile. It is my secret hope, however, that for a few of you, this will be another step toward deep, passionate addiction to music you might not have known existed. Music does not truly exist without both passionate playing and passionate listening; you make music out of noise by listening well.

One could -- if one wanted to -- create an alternate 1981 set that removes many tracks in favor of a slew of R'n'B selections, but understandably that would reflect the bias of the creator as much as this set does. The whole *point* is that it is biased. (Something like the original Nuggets was biased after all.)

Lovebug -- indeed there were. And hip-hop, and avant garde, and probably Nashville Country for all I know. But this box was never intended to be "the" "objective" story of 1981. I definitely indended to have a limited (but not too limited) scope. I definitely didn't mean to offend anyone by leaving things out--I just figured my scope was one that could use some in-depth anthologising, and it happens to reflect my favourite sort of music going on at the time.

Were I to put my money where my mouth is, I'd assemble the early 80s R&B/rap version of your box. As if. Your anthology is an achievement!

I Love Music CDR700Go! Collections

A series of other single-year retrospectives have been given birth in recent years by the denizens of the music critic circle-jerk I Love Music, who have generated an entire inventory of single-disc mp3 mixes, with listings accessible in the message board's archives. Assembled by folks like Seattle Weekly editor Michaelangelo Matos, All Music Guide contributor Andy Kellman, and former Pitchfork rabblerouser Chris Ott, most are less motivated by personal taste than a desire to most accurately document the calendar year, above and below ground. Hence, the 1976 disc makes room for both the Buzzcocks and "Disco Duck", and Barry Manilow and Pere Ubu are compilation flatmates for the first-- and probably last-- time. Waiving the right to selective hindsight makes the discs great archeological fodder; on random, they play like great radio stations with extreme microprogramming.

Hmmm, can't imagine what year(s) the statement in bold is referring to... *whistles*

I'm not sure I agree that things were as segregated then as they might seem, and I certainly don't agree that post-punk was particularly "rockist" or anti-disco---a large portion of this stuff is very dance-oriented, often with straight-up disco beats. Call it cultural imperialism, call it cooption--I think a lot of these musicians (especially in England) were very broad-minded, heavily immersed in jamaican musics, American funk, and, I suspect, a good deal of African music (both Afrobeat-ish/High-life and traditional forms) as well as a broad swath of "white" music. I guess I'm one to tend to cut arguments about "authenticity" and "originality" down quickly, because they tend to insult just about everyone involved (supposed "originators" and accused "coopters") and paint everything into tight little corners. I'm certain there was plenty of posing and faking and hanging-on, but I prefer to focus on the cooperative, the joyous, the fun. I think there was a lot of play back and forth between the "white" music (apparently what is on my set, though many musicians involved were not racially white) and "black" music at the time--white kids were stealing calypso beats but adding Stockhausen splicing and Scratch Perry echoes, black kids were sampling Liquid Liquid and Tom Tom Club, early goth-tinged electro-pop was providing production aesthetics for hip hop, and on and on. There are very few outright Elvises on this set. I'd love it if you did "the" "other" 1981--I'd love to see all kinds of spheres anthologised in this fashion, and I'd love to put them all in a big CD changer and hit "random". It'd be a lot of fun.

prob also noteworthy that i grew up without a solid radio station experience so it wasn't until after college that the idea of an unbreakable mix even came into view. i like the freedom to explore and repeat and skip tracks rather than drive at someone else's speed i suppose. it's a limitation on my part!

Oh my goodness I will be spending some time with these

So did someone send back a copy of 1981 to you?

Yeah! My friend (in real life) A.M./Ettiem who is an ILMer send me a copy of the 1st edition pre-ILM. So cool of him!

Haha very good!

A q

A quick reminder--the full '1981' box including the 'briefcase' has been up for a year for anybody who didn't get a physical copy back in 2005!

https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2017/04/04/post-punk-1981-complete-collection-including-the-briefcase/

And for those who did get one 13 years ago--we're old now! ; ) 1981 was 22 years in the past when I started the project. Which means there's some young person out there now making a '1996' box set!

There is literally an entire new listening generation out there since I made this box who get to discover post-punk/new wave--so pass it on!

And while I didn't ever really make the non-post-punk 1981 box--this set has a lot of great 1981 non-pp music, for those who might be interested:

https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2018/04/03/tribute-to-brian-eno-translucence/

And in addition to the '1979' follow-up set, there's annother post-punk box for those who might be interested, with a 1-hr sampler mix: 'Post-Punk 2007-2017'

https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2017/10/24/post-punk2007-2017/

Sorry--having some tech difficulties with my phone. This is the set with non-pp 1981 music:

https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2017/11/14/le-monde-du-funk-1970-1985/

Which means there's some young person out there now making a '1996' box set!
We can but pity them.

Us kids don’t want your old fogie “new wave” music gramps. We like Post Malone and Silento

A project like this for the early/mid-’90s would actually be great (’96 is a bit past the curve).

Or I could just listen to my old CMJ samplers, I guess...

I was fortunate enough to get a physical copy back then. From time to time I glance at my shelf wondering when the CD-Rs will degrade and thinking I should rip them before they do (and while I still have something to rip them with!)

But now I don't have to rip them. Thanks!

I was fortunate enough to get a physical copy back then. From time to time I glance at my shelf wondering when the CD-Rs will degrade and thinking I should rip them before they do (and while I still have something to rip them with!)

But now I don't have to rip them. Thanks!

― fajita seas, Sunday, April 15, 2018 4:15 PM

I've wondered, too, whether those CD-Rs still work after so many years! Supposedly they were the very best in blank white CDs at the time. . .

But glad I could save you the trouble of ripping! Hope you enjoy them anew (and the follow-up sets, too).

Coming January 1, with any luck. . .

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Post-Punk-1980_GIF_Medium.gif?w=900

Dun dun dunnnnnn

👍🏼

Dun dun dun indeed!

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/folder.jpg?w=1024

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2018/12/Post-Punk-1980_GIF_Medium.gif?w=624&zoom=2

POST PUNK 198O

The final link in a trilogy of post-punk/new wave box sets, following up on the original '1981' box set from 2004-2005, and the '1979' set from 2017. This is an eight-mix (all roughly C-90 in length) set covering the year I'd filed away as the breather between the huge statements of 1979 and the massive explosion of creativity of 1981. Turns out, it's just as strong, just as varied, just as exciting.

Featuring:

A Certain Ratio · Animals & Men · The Associates · Au Pairs · Bauhaus · The Beat · The Blackouts · Blondie · Blancmange · David Bowie · Bow Wow Wow · The Boys Next Door · Glenn Branca · The Breakers · Buggles · Buzzcocks · The Cars · Chris Carter · Alex Chilton · Chrome · Colored Minds · The Comsat Angels · Elvis Costello & The Attractions · The Cramps · The Cure · Dalek I · Delta 5 · Deutsch Amerikanische Freundshaftt · Devo · The Diagram Brothers · Din a Testbild · Doctor Mix & The Remix · Dome · Dow Jones & The Industrials · The Durutti Column · Essendon Airport · Factrix · Fad Gadget · Family Fodder · The Feelies · Final Program · Fire Engines · Flowers · Flying Lizard · Free Agents · Friction · John Foxx · Peter Gabriel · Gang of Four · Girls At Our Best · The Gist · The Go-Go’s · The Gordons · Half Japanese · The Human League · Husker Du · Ike Yard · Implog · Indoor LifeIn Camera · INXS · The Jam · Japan · Grace Jones · Josef K · Joy Division · Kid Creole & The Coconuts · Killing Joke · Krisma · Lizard · Ludus · Magazine · Manicured Noise · Marilyn · Martha & The Muffins · Material · Minutemen · Missing Persons · Mission of Burma · Mr. Partridge · Moderne · The Mo-Dettes · The Monchrome Set · Pauline Murray & The Invisible Girls · MX-80 Sound · Nasmak · Neonbabies · New Musik · Colin Newman · Gary Numan · Iggy Pop · The Only Ones · Orange Juice · Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark · Our Daughter’s Wedding · Pink Military · Pink Section · Plastics · Polyrock · Poly Styrene · The Pop Group · Pretenders · Prince · Psychedelic Furs · Pylon · Reptile Ranch · Martin Rev · Reversible Cords · Rinder & Lewis · The Room · Roxy Music · Ryuichi Sakamoto · The Selecter · Simple Minds · Siouxsie & The Banshees · The Slits · Smokey · Sods · Soft Cell · The Sound · The Specials · Squeeze · Richard Strange · The Stranglers · Swell Maps · Talking Heads · Teardrop Explodes · Television Personalities · Telex · This Heat · Tuxedomoon · Ultravox · Units · Urban Verbs · Les Vampyrettes · The Vapors · Alan Vega · Virgin Prunes · Visage · Scott WIlk & The Wall · Wipers · Xex · XTC · Yello · Y Pants · Yellow Magic Orchestra · Young Marble Giants

Download/stream here: https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2019/01/01/post-punk-1980-box-set/

If you want to check out just the tracklist, check it here.

What, no "Effortless" by Athletico Spizz 80?

Just kidding (maybe).

Good work as ever, sir. And the colour scheme for this one is spot on - exactly how I felt about the music at the time. There was an awful lot of grey or silvery grey sleeve art around, mind, which didn't help.

Not the full-on box-set treatment, I'm afraid, but here's as close as I've come to a follow-up for 1982:

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/musicophilia_00_various_-_joy-vol-2-post-punk_1982_cover-a-front.jpg?w=1024

https://musicophilia.files.wordpress.com/2020/04/musicophilia_00_various_-_joy-vol-2-post-punk_1982_cover-b-back.jpg?w=1024

'Joy! Volume 2: Post-Punk 1982'

01 [0:00:00] The Raincoats- “No One’s Little Girl” (‘Running Away’ 7″)
02 [0:04:30] Rip Rig & Panic- “You’re My Kind of Climate” (‘You’re My Kind…’ EP)
03 [0:10:20] African Head Charge – “High Protein Snack” (‘Environmental Studies’)
04 [0:13:40] Haircut 100 – “Favourite Shirt (Boy Meets Girl)” (‘Pelican West’)
05 [0:16:40] Family Fodder – “The Big Dig” (‘The Big Dig’ 7″)
06 [0:19:35] Our Daughter’s Wedding – “Buildings” (‘Moving Windows’)
07 [0:23:30] The Stick Men- “Personality Pollination” (‘This Is The Master Brew’)
08 [0:25:10] Pigbag – “Wiggling” (‘Dr. Heckle and Mister Jive’)
09 [0:30:15] Antena – “Camino del Sol” (‘Camino del Sol’ EP)
10 [0:33:55] Shriekback – “My Spine is the Bassline” (‘My Spine is the Bassline’ EP)

11 [0:37:55] Pylon – “Beep” (‘Beep’ 7″)
12 [0:41:15] Scritti Politti – “The Sweetest Girl” (‘Songs To Remember’)
13 [0:46:20] Sonic Youth – “The Burning Spear” (‘Sonic Youth’ EP)
14 [0:49:40] Delta 5 – “Powerlines” (‘Powerlines’ 7″)
15 [0:52:45] Maximum Joy – “Dancing On My Boomerang” (‘Station MXJY’)
16 [0:55:55] Weekend – “Summerdays” (‘La Verite’)
17 [0:58:45] R.E.M. – “1,000,000” (‘Chronic Town’ EP)
18 [1:01:50] Dog Eat Dog – “Rollover” (unreleased)
19 [1:04:45] Lora Logic – “Martian Man” (‘Pedigree Charm’)
20 [1:09:05] Tones On Tail – “Now We Lustre” (‘There’s Only One’ 7″)

21 [1:13:25] 48 Chairs – “Rhino Whip” (‘70% Paranoid’)
22 [1:17:10] Pere Ubu – “A Day Such As This” (‘Song of the Bailing Man’)
23 [1:20:45] Psychic TV – “Just Drifting” (‘Force The Hand’)
24 [1:24:25] ESG – “The Beat” (‘ESG Says Dance to the Beat of Moody’ EP)
25 [1:26:35] A Certain Ratio – “Touch” (‘I’d Like To See You Again’)
26 [1:31:35] The Gist – “Love At First Sight” (‘Embrace the Herd’)
27 [1:35:00] Special AKA & Rico – “Easter Island” (‘Jungle Music’ EP)
28 [1:39:05] Orange Juice – “L.O.V.E. Love” (‘You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever’)
29 [1:42:35] Yasuaki Shimizu – “Dots” (‘Kakashi’)
30 [1:45:30] Comsat Angels – “After the Rain” (‘Fiction’)

Download/stream here: https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2020/04/01/post-punk-1982/

The original '1981' set is back up--now in much better audio quality, but as mixed mp3s (not single tracks):

40 years since the post-punk of 1981, 17 years since I made '1981,' a definitive box-set of nine themed mixes spanning the canonized to the unknown. And it still sounds like tomorrow. https://t.co/ePWUOHce9K

Higher quality, as mixed mp3s. Dive in, share, and please BUY MUSIC! pic.twitter.com/ZM90ZOneY6

— Musicophilia (@musicophiliamix) January 5, 2021

Thanks, just now re-tweeted!

When I first shared these mixes on ILM, bith I and the music were a spritely 24 years old. Now we're both 40! But I think the music is aging (or not aging, really) far better than me. In that it hasn't aged a day, vs. I fell down my stairs a few weeks ago...

To celebrate 40 years since 1981, and over 17 since I started making the mixes, they're up in much higher quality here:

https://musicophilia.wordpress.com/2021/01/04/1981-post-punk/

The original box still sits proudly with my other box sets.

These are very much appreciated!

Still love these mixes, particularly the personality behind the songs that are picked. They're often either not my favorites or wouldn't have been my personal picks, but that's the whole point of mixes. It forces me to listen to these songs in a fresh context which in turn flavors how I hear them.

Thanks, all! I definitely often ended up picking tracks that weren't my favorites per se, but instead tracks that fit the vibe and flow of the mixes--so lead to some idiosyncratic choices. But always was the hope, and is now, that folks will hear things they didn't know, and hear those they already knew in a new context.

WFMU's Give the Drummer Radio stream is doing a fun thing today -- all four of today's live shows are playing only music from 1981. Tony Coulter (on now and for ~15 more minutes) focusing on postpunk/industrial/experimental. 12 hours total.