Two degrees of separation

Each year I give away a CD’s worth of music to my friends at the end of the year. Not so much a compilation of the year’s best, it is merely a collection of the music I enjoyed this year regardless of when it was released. Since I give it away at a party the tracks are largely uptempo. This year I tried my hand at mixing the whole shebang into one continuous track using Traktor, a simple program of shocking complexity. I wasn’t completely successful, but the experience did add one more bullet item to my growing list of resolutions for 2005: learn to match beats so as not to create music that sounds like an EKG pinging cardiac arrhythmia. (Full list of resolutions coming soon.)

My pal Len Perez also released a mix for his friends this year — four CD’s to my one — so I thought it interesting to note the overlaps. Granted our tastes are similar, but this very small scale collaborative filtering is still notable given that we receive our musical inputs from different sources.

So, the overlap: Orbital, Sasha, Mr. Projectile. Orbital released their last album this year; Sasha his first (studio album, that is). Mr. Projectile is the one to watch — perhaps the most promising artist of his genre this year.