Black Sky Black Snow - a FG winter mix

This here's a mix I made about this time last year, a ballet about a man lost on foot in a mountain forest during a severe blizzard. Don't worry, the narrative's totally legible.
Stay cold:

Black Sky Black Snow by ForestGospel
Black Sky Black Snow from Mediafire

tracklist, as best I can:
Mouthus - "The Duration Myth"
Zs - "Concert Black"
Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse - "Dark Night of the Soul"
Tom Waits - "Falling Down"
The See Through Boy - "Interview"
John Wiese - "Circle Snare"
Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky - "Act I: Scene and Waltz of the Snowflakes"
Mount Eerie - "Wind Speaks"
The Fun Years - "The Surge is Working"
Mount Eerie - "Lost Wisdom pt. 2"
Frog Eyes - "Bushels"
David Lynch and Alan R. Splet - "In Heaven (Lady in the Radiator Song)"

Dixie's Death Pool - The Man with Flowering Hands

(Drip Audio, 2011)

Beautifully, Dixie's Death Pool's The Man with Flowering Hands, the sole 2011 release from the absolutely amazing Drip Audio label, is, like sunlight, a revelation.  Dixie's Death Pool is a collagist's dream, interweaving gorgeous psych-country balladry and ghostly, drug-addled folk-pop with an improvisatory sensibility.  Based around four or five perfectly composed songs, the band, a hodge-podge assortment of musically blessed criminals and specters and cowboys and, perhaps most accurately, Canadians (all lead by one Lee Hultzulak), quilt the album together with a wonderfully bewilderingly avant garde jazz featuring blustery electronics, chugging percussion, spectre-traced textures and other creepy atmospherics.  It is a fluid concoction, equal parts dark and light, inviting and menacing (read: menacingly inviting), and the best of what might be termed, loosely, as avant-country (or some such similar genre title).  My attempts to wrap words around this album are destined to fall short.  It's viscerally engaging, magnetic and unassumingly memorable.  Amidst contemporaries like Califone and Skygreen Leopards and Vibracathedral Orchestra and Jackie-O Samuel L. Jackson, Dixie's Death Pool's The Man with Flowering Hands is a volcanic, essential work. 

Dixie's Death Pool - Sunlight Is Collecting On My Face by Drip Audio
Dixie's Death Pool - The Man With Flowering Hands by Drip Audio

Fleet Foxes - "The Shrine/An Argument"

Reed Danziger

Blackout Beach - Fuck Death

(Dead Oceans, 2011)

Long-term hypothetical boyfriend, Carey Mercer, dismisses death, cusses, takes our relationship to the next level.

Blackout Beach "Beautiful Burning Desire" by DOJAGSC

Emuul - The Drawing of the Line

(Digitalis, 2011)

The Drawing of the Line is simple, like drawing a line; though, as it is for me, an effortlessly beautiful line isn't so easy to accomplish.  Drawing one.  And what seems simple, Emuul baby-stepping a low grade incline, a mountain ridge, curtained with fizzling grains of earth-wobbling feedback, is actually quite a feat: not overly constructed/layered but never dulling and absent.  Making something akin to what I imagine it sounds like when mountains speak to one another, sped up 10,000X.  It's a beautiful language and Emuul produces wonderful conversations: a motherly mountain training her son, counseling erosion, rock-slide, volcano.  There are a lot of drone-based records out there trying to strike a perfect balance between minimalist composition and voluble maximalism.  Few of them strike so closely as Emuul has here.

Eli Keszler's "Cold Pin" installation

Val Britton

Zs - 33

(Northern Spy, 2011)

Two seven-inches: four side of palette cleansing, junkyard raking, free-shoveled abrstractionism from the almighty Zs.  This is the doom-laden interlude to the forthcoming Northern Spy onslaught, I assume, Zs being new to the roster.  And I can't wait.  The band, fresh off their monstrous beastly best, New Slaves, seen here stretching, popping the joints in their neck, cracking knuckles, rolling out the bones in their collective shoulders, rumbling clatterously: take heed, the beast is awake...

33~ - Zs by Northern Spy Records

RxRy - Alpha

(Sweat Lodge Guru, 2011)

Hyper-ambient wonder-kid, Not Noah Lennox, or some couple of dudes now (people seem to be thinking ("Neither Noah Lennox?")), RxRy, finally, after three bedroom-churned bliss-outs (and some EPs)--freely distributed--can now be heard where it was appropriate he/they should be heard from all along: etched into a vinyl plate.  Alpha finds RxRy perpetuating the crumbling pulse-heavy astro-electronics of previous albums, only this time with a healthy dose of ADHD.  Clocking in somewhere between an EP and a full-length, Alpha is headphone candy of the brain-burstingly serene variety, in as much as the two can coexist.  The step up to a physical format is much deserved.  Hopefully the first in a long line RxRy tunes pressed to wax.

rxry - alpha (album preview) by experimedia

Stephanie Augustine

John Wiese - Seven of Wands

(PAN, 2011)

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John Wiese 'Scorpion Immobilization Sleeve' (PAN 22) by •PAN•