I think it's time to admit that I'm done doing the mixtapes.

I got busy and fell behind, and suddenly a month had gone by. Every weekend since I've said to myself, "yeah, this week for sure" and it just keeps not happening. Oh well. I'd have liked to have gone to a rounder number like 99, but I guess 75 isn't a bad run.

The lack of comments always made it feel like only five people were listening anyway.*

* No, this is not me trolling for you to say "I listened! I just had nothing to say!"

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 075. Another queued dump from the SXSW torrents. My queue. Let me dump you it.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 074. This is the second mixtape culled from the 2009 SXSW torrents. I put it together before I left, but I did manage to see five of these bands, some of them by accident...

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 073. This is late because I actually lost track of what day of the week it is. I'm at SXSW, and once again this year I slogged through the corresponding torrents. This time I passed snap judgements on 1187 tracks. This has been described as being "entirely too thorough." Be that as it may, my suffering is your gain, and this is the first batch of those snap judgements. All of these songs are from the torrents, and hopefully I will manage to see at least some of these bands this week. Wish me luck.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 072.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 071.

Today is a good day for staying inside.

And, of course, for donating to the DNA Lounge legal defense fund.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 070.

By Appointment to His Majesty, Norton I, please enjoy jwz mixtape 069.

It's crassly childish and predictable, but then, so am I.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 068. Which shares a certain something with mixtape 014.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 067.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 066.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 065.

So that first track, The Mercy Beat. An old favorite, but it got its hooks into me in a big way recently, and I must have listened to it a hundred times in the last two weeks. I'd be sitting there listening to music, and think, "Wait, this doesn't sound right. This doesn't sound like The Mercy Beat". Then I'd listen to it another dozen times in a row. This doesn't happen to me that often. (I considered just putting 20 copies of The Mercy Beat on this mixtape, but I'm pretty sure I'd be the only one who would have thought that was funny.)

Also: I feel compelled to point out that tonight at Super Ego (every 3rd Saturday at DNA Lounge), for the first 40 minutes or so that I was there, every song played was a discoed-up remix of a track by one of the bands on the best-of-2008 mixtape 064. So if you're into that sort of thing, you might be in to that sort of thing.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 064b!

That's right, I said 064b! I built and approximation of mixtape 064 out of Youtube videos, like I did for mixtape 047. Some entries on 064b have been replaced by other tracks by the same band, and a few are missing, because I couldn't find any videos...

Also, I have some Youtube hate:

• Dear Warner Music Group, please die in a fire.

• Dear nearly-every-record-label, why do you post all your videos with "embedding disabled"? All that does is make it so that I cannot include your videos in a playlist, and thus cannot promote your artists for you. It also doesn't really work, since I just have to go three pages deep in the search results to find someone else who posted a crappy television rip of it. Instead of your almost-as-crappy rip of it.

• Dear teenagers who post still-frame video as a way of sharing the audio: knock that shit off! There are real videos of all of these songs, and you're just cluttering up the damned search results.

• Dear Youtube: add some god damned options to your search engine, so I can search for only videos that are embeddable, and/or only videos that are high quality. (Bonus points if there's a checkbox for "videos that contain video"! Omit the ones where the frame rate is less than 1 FPS.)

  A checkbox for "leave out the ones where 80% of the audio is clipping" would be cool, too.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 064.

There was no mixtape last week because I intended to finish my year-end wrap-up post and then make a mixtape derived from that, but I was late, and I don't have any in the queue right now. Shameful, I know. You should demand a refund. I thought about doing a re-run of an old mixtape to fill the gap, but that seemed lame.

Three disclaimers: This mixtape breaks protocol by being very long (let's call it a C90 plus a bonus C60) because I included one track from each of the albums on my 2008 list. Also, it doesn't necessarily flow very well, since I just put them on in list order. And finally, I made only a token effort to avoid duplicating tracks with previous mixtapes, the main goal being to include one of my favorite tracks from each album.

Make this worth my time, people. Talk about music in the comments.

Update: An approximation of this mixtape now also exists in video form!

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 063.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 062. Two of the songs on this mixtape steal shamelessly from other songs. Can you spot them? Also, some robots.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 061.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 060.

Please enjoy jwz mixtape 059. It is, as has become typical, mostly new stuff with a smattering of old stuff that the new stuff reminded me of. I'll let you in on a little secret: usually I have one or two mixtapes in the queue, because that's less pressure. Yeah, I post the one I prepared last week, and then work on the one two weeks out. Does that make you feel cheated? Well, this time I drained the queue* and so this week's mixtape was actually made this very afternoon. Perhaps you will find it more "authentic". Anyway, I did subject it to the "nap test", where I played it very loud while taking an hour and a half nap before a night of drinking. I found that it passed that test very nicely. I hope you agree. What will next week's mixtape hold? EVEN I DON'T KNOW. Blue sky, people. Blue sky.

* That's what she said.

My sinuses were so clogged -- how clogged were they? -- they were so clogged that I forgot to post this week's mixtape. Please enjoy jwz mixtape 058, a few days behind schedule.