Moon Cities (Ryan) and Scholastics (Fred) are proud to present our new mixtape. We’re trying to offer a better value for the mixtape this time around, although we have the same number of tracks as our previous mixtape, The Elephant Gambit has DOUBLE the cover art and DOUBLE the commentary. Both people gave their thoughts on each song (with the person who selected the song coming first), and we both did album covers, although Ryan handled the typography for both.

Scholastics + Moon Cities – The Elephant Gambit

1. DM Stith – Pity Dance

Fred: DM Stith’s debut album leapt onto my list of top albums of 2009 about 4 and a half minutes into it, which corresponds to the stunning line which closes this song. The song is a microcosm of the album, which manages to balance the personal against the universal, to be both majestic and intimate without sounding ridiculous. I chose the song in order to pull us in a more substantive and difficult direction than the last mixtape. There’s nothing wrong or inferior about being light and poppy, I just wanted to reflect a different facet of what I (and Ryan) listen to.

Ryan: This album has been at the top of my list for most of the year as well. Devastatingly haunting, it certainly sets the mood for the mixtape. This was an intimidating choice for a first track–there are so many different sounds to latch onto, it took me several tries to find the right track to follow.

2. Celestine Ukwu & His Philosophers National – Okwukwe Na Nchekwube

Ryan: My goal was to keep the same haunted vein running, but to inject some quick variety into the mix. I love to jump between genres while maintaining a thread of continuity. This song, off Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-6, has that same melancholy tone winding through it.

Fred: My parents are from Ghana, so I grew up listening to a lot of highlife music from this era. I don’t know what makes this song so luminous and longing without becoming ethereal. I love how late the vocals come in, almost as a coda rather than the center of the song. I liked that effect so much that I upped it by ending the song a bit early.

3. Kate Bush – Pull Out The Pin

Fred: The weird history of Kate Bush’s career is too long to be told here, but suffice it to say that when she used the artistic license granted to her by the studio because of her successful career as soft-rock singer-songwriter to make her self-produced magnum opus The Dreaming, everyone thought she’d lost her mind. And I guess she kind of had. This song was a standout on an epiphany of an album: so totally deranged and uncompromising that it took me about 10 listens to realize what the song was about. And on some levels, subject matter is irrelevant in the face of such a tour de force.

Ryan: This song took me completely by surprise. I have not listened too hard to The Dreaming (I’m more of a Hounds of Love fan) but this song threw me for a loop. It’s one of the great things about doing a split mixtape like this–being so completely surprised and going with it.

4. Animal Collective – Peacebone

Ryan: This is the first song I ever consciously heard by Animal Collective. It’s a sound baffling for anyone who is uninitiated–driving bass and drums, bubbling synths, sing-song vocals and screamy bits. There’s a lot of different elements of the music from my youth going on in this song, and it’s so joyful with just a hint of something darker. Running with the Kate Bush song, I decided to persue an undercurrent of crazy from here on out.

Fred: I can still remember when and where I heard Animal Collective for the first time, oddly enough. I don’t know what track it was, but it was as we were exiting the freeway on the way to Food 4 Less (this was our go-to grocery store during college). I didn’t know what to make of it, and at some level, I still don’t. It’s ramshackle pop that sounds like it’s always right on the edge of total incoherence, but they manage to make it work about 85% of the time. And when it does, you get songs like Peacebone .
5. Yeasayer – Ambling Alp

Fred: Man, this song is great. I was actually all set with a totally different song when this single from the forthcoming album came out. And I knew immediately that the song I had selected had to go. It’s no coincidence that Animal Collective and Yeasayer are our two holdouts from our last mixtape, although we decided to go in a completely different direction. It’s no mystery why, either. Both of these bands are able to recontextualize pop jams in an art rock frame, making songs that are both challenging and catchy. Try to frown while listening to this song. You can’t.

Ryan: We send this mixtape back and forth as we add songs. I don’t do a lot of music listening in front of my computer, so I had loaded the most recent iteration of our mixtape (ending with this song) on my iPod. I also had noticed the new Yeasayer single and added it to my iPod (but I hadn’t yet heard it). So, when this song came on the mixtape, I was taken aback. I hadn’t heard it before, but I knew enough to deduce that it was the new Yeasayer single. It was frustrating when I skipped back to hear it again and heard the mixtape starting over. Also, the horns in the breakdown of this song will break your neck.

6. Madvillain – Money Folder (Four Tet remix)

Ryan: With the song immediately preceeding, I knew I had to switch up the styles because I wouldn’t be able to top Yeasayer. The crazy carnival keyboards at the end of Ambling Alp drew me to this off-kilter remix. MF Doom’s flow is so unique and humorous while the backing track is dark enough that it fits well with the sequence. I especially love Four Tet’s contribution to this track–his free-jazz breakdown fits in the “crazy” secret theme I ran through this mixtape, and I have an irrational love for beats that coalesce from utter chaos.

Fred: Doom is one of my favorite MCs, and this Four Tet track matches his unhinged, yet classical take on hip hop. Even though he’s stringing together ridiculous non-sequiturs, there’s not too much about his style that’s foreign to rap – he just takes things to their logical conclusion, rapping over the breaks and stuffing every verse rhymes. Four Tet’s track matches this style perfect, custom made for Doom’s sensibility. The tinny drum machine and weirdo synths are a stone’s throw from Afrika Bambaataa, and the weirdo free-jazz bridge? Just think of it as a breakbeat.

7. El-P – The Moore Overly Dramatic Truth

Fred: This even more grammatically challenged version of the original El-P song was assembled by coupling the acapella with RJD2’s beat, Mooore, which was made for Aceyalone’s LP Magnificent City. The song reins in the chaos of the last couple tracks a bit, the clean minimalist beat providing a less histronic bed for the emotional disintegration of this song. I was beginning work on the sequel to my last solo mixtape (shameless plug), and this song was a bit of an outtake from that – as well as it works, it didn’t fit the mood I was going for. So I modified the beginning of it to make a cleaner segue (and took out the swears to make it a bit less abrasive), and here we are.

Ryan: A mashup in the middle of our mixtape?! It surprises me that this is an RJD2 beat. While he’s certainly not a maximalist, this is a stark difference from his Since We Last Spoke beats (my go-to RJD2 album). El-P waxes angrily, injured, punctuating his statement with “You still think I’m here to save?” I think the song loses a little edge with the swears removed, but I asked for the removal–this track was already pretty raw without them.

8. David Bazan – Hard to Be

Ryan: I came up with this segue and immediately told Fred that it would blow his mind. I am a devotee of David Bazan and though we don’t always see eye to eye theologically, he makes some serious points on this song and his recent full length (the first under his own name). It seems many feel he has moved to the “dark side” recently, but this song and album made me think and pray a lot more than almost anything else out this year. His delivery, like El-P’s in the last song, gives off a deep scent of vulnerability and hurt indignation, and the swirling synthesizers under the hard-hitting drums back that up with more emotional punch.

Fred: Well, he was right – it did blow my mind. Musically, it absolutely should not work, but somehow, it does. Curse Your Branches is the album of Bazan’s life. It hits me in the gut every time.

9. Wolf Parade – I’ll Believe in Anything

Fred: I am relatively sure that there are few songs that can match the conflicted emotional and spriritual tenor of “Hard to Be”, but this Wolf Parade does it perfectly. Almost so perfectly that I half-jokingly remarked to Ryan that this segue would probably make people think I had abandoned my faith. I’d like to take this opportunity to assure concerned listeners that I’m still a Christian. Feel free to pray for me, though, that’s what this song and the last one make me want to do.

Ryan: I’d never considered this song anything other than purely joyous until Fred joked about the combination of this and the Bazan song vis-à-vis his faith. To me it’s a riotous “crazy in love” song laden with “I want to run away with you forever” feelings. Maybe I just haven’t read enough into the lyrics, but I’m not really interested in abandoning my interpretation. This song was absolutely my favorite song a few years ago, but I hadn’t heard it in a while and was pretty surprised when it popped up here.

10. Jookabox - You Cried Me

Ryan: That last song is so wild and unhinged that the only thing I could do to top or even just follow it was to pull out the big guns of feral madness. Jookabox tear it up in this little ukelele ditty, delivering an unexpectedly huge stomp despite (or because of?) some yodeling. All the zombie and vampire talk can bee seen as a pretty silly juxtaposition to the serious talk that Bazan espouses, but I think the emotional tenor and escapism are in line with the Wolf Parade song. How perfect of a fall/winter song is this, by the way? I can only imagine this song being played in the dead of night, everyone in gloves, hats, and coats, with bare light bulbs as the only lighting.

Fred: Depending on how you interpret the last song, this song is either a logical continuation of the last, or a left turn to change the complexion of the mixtape, which was probably getting too dour for its own good. Either way, it works. I didnt really dig his first release, when he still had “Grampall” appended to the front of his name. But this song, primal and energetic, will make me take a second look.

11. Talking Heads – Found a Job

Fred: I heard a little bit of the influence of the art rock legends in the shoestring stomp and driving guitars, and took the opportunity to put this song in our mix. What more can be said about this band that has not already been said?

Ryan: I’m going to be honest with you: the lyrical content of this song bums me out. David Byrne’s thesis in the song is summed up in the last verse: “If your work isn’t what you love, then something isn’t right.” Well, sometimes the work you love isn’t the work that pays the bills and provides the insurance for your family. And maybe sometimes you do love it, but the joy has been so thoroughly crushed out of it that it’s becoming an inescapable soul-sucking grind. And it’s inescapable in the sense that you’re unwilling to put your family through the instability that would be associated with your happiness. So, thanks for that knife in my side, Fred and David. Also the piano on top of the beat, bass and guitar during the coda is icing on the cake of a great classic sound.

12. Helado Negro – Awe

Ryan: Talking Heads’ David Byrne is well known for having an appreciation of Latin musical flavors, so I went ahead and drew that out of the end of the last song with this mellow experimental/ambient/latin groove from Helado Negro. Though this is a departure from the punky energy of the Heads, it does have a bit of their peculiar jangle. It’s calm but not so calm that it negates the wildness that preceeds it, and it soothes enough to bookend with DM Stith’s opening coos.

Fred: This song is sort of a slant rhyme with Found a Job, not really matching the manic energy of that particular Talking Heads song, but instead finding a kinship with the quieter, more contemplative Heads of “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)” or “Listening Wind”. There’s a sort of yearning and ambivalence about the main riff in this song that hearkens back to the beginning of the mixtape, sums up what has come before. An excellent way to close us out.