Here are the individual blurb booklets for each CD.

Volume One.
Volume Two.
Volume Three.
Volume Four.

Each booklet should be printed using double-sided (Duplex) printing, with the print setting set to "flip on short side".

Thanks to all you spudboys and spudgirls who participated in or otherwise contributed to the ILMiXor shenanigans. Now that we've finished Disc 4: Maximalism, we're going to take a break, and possibly pick up again over the summer, if the ILMiXmasters are recharged and ready for more.

To recap, if you haven't been following along: We've been doing a series of collaborative mix CDs in the form of an mp3 blog called ILMiXor. Ostensibly, a group of ILM-ers would assemble in a queue, and each of us would take a turn posting an mp3 relating to the chosen theme (using our own hosting space or borrowing someone else's), and writing a blurb about the track. It didn't always work out so neatly -- our final disc was pretty much a first-come-first-serve free-for-all from the get-go. Somehow we filled four 80-minute CDs, almost all of them to capacity.

Many of these mp3s are still available here; if you missed a few the first time around, I'll be posting the whole works as a zip file or a torrent or something. Stay tuned while I sort it out. Artwork and liner notes for Discs 3 and 4 will be up soon as well.

Special thanks to Austin Swinburn for the idea, Elvis Telecom for the cover design, and Mike T-Diva for assembling the blurbs into CD booklet form (.doc file).

Datach'i, "Memorandum (Mogwai Remix)"

Datach'i was something of an Autechre clone. His second album, "We Are Always Well, Thank You" contained multitudes of scatterbrained melodies and crunchy beats that would have been perfectly at home on Autechre's "LP5". The album was also relentlessly chaotic, featuring a crazed mishmash of soft synth sounds and rapidfire buckshot beats that would have been perfectly at home on Autechre's "Confield". Oh, except Datach'i released his album the year before "Confield". So maybe he wasn't such a clone after all.

Still, somebody thought that all of this needed to sound even more insane, so they drafted in the likes of Kid 606 and Mogwai for remix duty. All Mogwai did was deliver one of the best tracks ever associated with their name. They took a few basic elements of the original track and plastered a sensitive piano line with a migraine-inducing distorted bass line onto it. Then all hell breaks loose. A couple of tonality changes are thrown in, to heighten the drama I suppose.

Play it loud. It's good for you.

Brides of Funkenstein, "When You're Gone"

To say that this song reminds me of CBS’ classic sitcom, WKRP In Cincinnati, would be a vast understatement. Something about the strings (alternately wan and viscous), and the staggering desperation in Dawn Silva’s and Lynn Mabry’s voices when they sing, “In this world/all of my dreams/one by one/they all fell through”, really captures the sort of febrile weariness I felt while watching re-runs of the show as a kid. I would be lying if I said that, in listening to this song so intently over the past few days, I haven’t imagined intricate scenarios where Loni Anderson’s character, Jennifer Marlowe (covered in the perfume of loneliness), sings this song to a penitent and less sleazy Herb (WKRP’s advertising sales manager) amid a shower of Harvest Gold paint chip confetti (“When You’re Gone”: inspiration for delirious musings).

This is taken from the Brides’ (who were, pre-Funkenstein, backup singers for Sly Stone) 1978 debut LP, Funk Or Walk, produced by George Clinton. “When You’re Gone” is a piñata of a ballad, filled with thick, glossy fragments of guitar, bass (which throbs intermittently in such a big, yearning way), and wistful harmonies.

Elvis Presley, "Suspicious Minds"

Don't let the two near-silences (at the mid-point, near the crawling bridge, and the fake fade) fool you: All those strings, horns, chorines, and most of all the Big E himself at his most dripping-with-emotion are freaking massive. How else would he have made his comeback? By not doing what he'd always done only to greater excess and with more finesse than usual? Also chosen because one of the greatest moments in ILX history occurred when several board regulars sang along with this at a Lower East Side bar after collectively ditching some drunken jerk.