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rocketsandrayguns:

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I’ve been wanting to create this mix for a while as a reaction to all the ’90s retro hoopla bouncing around at the moment. Reading Neil Kulkarni’s A New Nineties series at The Quietus finally motivated me to do it. (And yes, I’ve cheated by including a couple of tracks from 1989.) This mix is not intended to represent a complete view of what I listened to in ’90s, although you can assume Nirvana wasn’t on my CD player. As a useful metric, I own exactly three of the eighty records listed on this ’90s alt.rock mix. At the start of that decade I was still listening to lots of classic 4AD, Kate Bush, David Sylvian, and plenty of shoegaze. And buy the later half of the decade I was ingesting epic amounts of IDM. Instead, I created this mix to help myself define a certain corner of ’90s music, with a specific feel. I don’t know what to call it, exactly. It’s at the blurry intersection of pop, shoegaze, IDM, post-rock, and ambient. I usually just call it post-pop.

1. Autechre - Silverside (1994)
2. Seefeel - Spangle (1994)
3. Spoonfed Hybrid - Somehow Some Other Life (1993)
4. Slowdive - Miranda (1995)
5. His Name Is Alive - Very Bad A Bitter Hand (1991)
6. Hugo Largo - Turtle Song (1989)
7. Insides - Bent Double (1993)
8. Northern Picture Library - Insecure (1993)
9. The Ecstasy Of Saint Theresa - Vacuum Blow (1994)
10. Labradford - Soft Return (1993)
11. A.C. Marias - To Sleep (1989)
12. The Durutti Column - Future Perfect (1996)
13. Amp - Tomorrow (1997)
14. Disco Inferno - Footprints In Snow (1994)
15. To Rococo Rot - Lift (Denso) (1997)
16. Microstoria - Sleepy People/Network Down (1996)

A few random notes:

• This Autechre track is the first of theirs I heard, and it changed my listening direction in a huge way for the next ten years.
• I remember when Seefeel signed to Warp and all the shoegaze fans went nuts, scared they would “go techno”.
• Spoonfed Hybrid and Insides were both released on Guenrnica, Ivo’s 4AD sub-label for one-off releases.
• I saw Hugo Largo play at the 930 Club in DC, with a very few other attendees.
• Northern Picture Library is Bobby Wratten’s slightly experimental post-Field Mice project.
• A.C. Marias features Wire’s Bruce Gilbert.
• This Durutti Column track was released by Les Disques Du Créspecule, not by Factory (or Factory Too).
• Microstoria is a collaboration between Mouse On Mars’s Jan St. Werner and Oval’s Markus Popp, released by the famously collapsed Mille Plateaux label.