The Travails of the Astounding!

Ever hear, or even worse find yourself saying that music isnt as good as it used to be? As if instruments or musicians were in short supply, or ways to get that music scarce and secret (incidentally I often hear this said about film too). Whenever I encounter this sentiment my knee jerk reaction is to rattle off the dozen or so artists that are endlessly cycled in my 'Nuke Ule' playlist (New + Cool). So towards the end of last year I decided that I would take a survey of the most interesting tracks from the best albums of 2005 and stick em onto a CD to quash this silly debate. However by the time I had finished the mix I noticed that I still had 90 amazing tracks left over, and so it came to be that my twenty track mix became a three disk compilation.
Here is a link to Year of the Rooster: Disc One. More so than the other two 'discs', Disc One in many ways most closely follows my eclectic music taste and faithfully reflects my sense of what makes a good music collection. It's energetic, snappy, sprawling and whimsical. Once again I've taken a cue from Izzy and decided to post the tracks without any identifying information. I want you to be surprised by what you hear, and I can guarantee that no matter how savvy you are there will be plenty here to surprise you, hopefully pleasantly. Tomorrow I'll post the second disk of the mix, and on Friday the last disc. Mid next week I'll upload a complete tracklist with cover art.
As with any creative endeavor I thrive on your critique and comments. I'd especially like to hear about any track you heard on the mix that reminds you of something else that I havent included, although you might want to wait till the end of the week to do that. A few notes on the structure of Year of the Rooster as a whole; first is that the mix was created to be enjoyed as one long compilation. Most of my friends have ipods and wont have a problem with a 65 track playlist, however the mix has been broken up into three parts (each under 80 minutes) and although theyre referred to as 'Discs' they are more like movements or acts. Each has its own identity however and its easy to see how people with certain musical tastes will prefer some Discs to others. Finally, the main idea here was exposure, to bring a plethora of musical talent to your brain, to overload you with the newness and goodness of it all, and so no artist has been repeated, however one album in particular has had three songs pulled and evenly placed throughout the mix. This is the only album to appear more than once on the entire compilation. Holy moly, this is a lot of words to describe something you should already be listening to. Go on, get outta here!