Artists

The only thing better than listening to a song you love, is playing that song for someone else you THINK will love it and being right! For several years in a row, my girlfriend and I have spent New Years Eve just sitting around a couple bottles of wine and taking turns playing songs for each other that we love and think the other person maybe hasnt heard. Passionate speeches ABOUT the song and why we love it or think its important is a BIG part of the presentation. Thats what this list is! Its me playing you tracks that have had a huge impact on me, and telling you WHY theyre so important to me (or why theyre important more generally). Its QUITE varied, so I doubt youll like it all, but I am sure that almost everyone who listens to this will find at least one song they love that the didnt know before!

There are some styles of music that get codified early on, and then musicians play by certain rules in order to fit in with a group of artists and succeed in their genre’s community. But that’s not the case with black experimental music, where it’s best to surrender to your musical intuition instead of relying on a definition. I, for one, listen for creativity, off-kilter sounds, and anything and everything that veers away from popular aesthetics. Sure, it’s possible for black experimental musicians to cross over to the mainstream—like Funkadelic, Outkast, Erykah Badu, and even Kendrick Lamar—but that popularity doesn’t deter those artists from continuing to shun musical norms and cultivate music from their own imagination.The way I became a vocal proponent of black experimental music was by loosening my own reins as a music critic. Experimental music reveals itself to the world—it finds you and pulls you in. Those nuances of strangeness—the tiny surprises of beats, reverbed whispers, overlaid vocals, and sounds that don’t quite make sense—call out to you, and these artists ask you to listen on a deeper level. This Black Experimental Mixtape Series exists for that purpose. I’m not here to tell you what I know, but to share the sounds that come out of the deepest recesses of black artists’ psyches and creative inner worlds.

On Nov. 3, Portland indie-rockers Blitzen Trapper return with their ninth album, Wild and Reckless, a record that finds frontman Eric Earley examining the turbulent state of the world… which, naturally, has him itching to get on the first space shuttle outta here. There are the tunes he’d play to achieve lift-off. “When things down here on planet earth get too shitty, the socials and all the feeds got you down, sometimes you need to zoom on out into the void and get some perspective before coming back down to earth and making change. Here are some songs by artists that contemplate space travel—always looking forward, never looking back.”—Eric Earley, Blitzen Trapper

Angel Olsens approach to rock—a little bit of folk, a little bit of fuzz, a whole lot of white-knuckle honesty—has made her one of its most exciting artists. But while the North Carolina-based crooners been at the vanguard of the indie since she first struck out on her own, the records that helped create her sound are the sorts of dusty albums that populate crate-diggers dreams. Her headiest songs are influenced by what she calls "blood harmonies," those chords that can only come from groups of vocalists who are somehow related, like The Everly Brothers, while her matter-of-fact poetry derives its influences from soul titans like Donny Hathaway and American bards like Bob Dylan.

Masked electro-rock assassin Sir Bob Cornelius Rifo—a.k.a. The Bloody Beetroots—is back with another blast of riffed-up and roughed-up EDM, The Great Electronic Swindle (Last Gang/eOne), which features cameos from the likes of Perry Farrell and Gallows’ Wade MacNeil. But while the album is an ideal soundtrack for late-night mayhem, Sir Bob has kindly provided The Dowsers with this mix to help you get back on your feet in the morning. “This is the music I listen to during my workout of the day... including recovery times, Enjoy!"—Sir Bob Cornelius Rifo

When I need to bask in the genius of Bob Dylan I listen to a record; I don’t read his lyrics like a book of poetry. This is why his winning the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature doesn’t validate a damn thing. To reduce his lyrics to text is to miss the most important aspect: their delivery. Along with Jimi Hendrix’s guitar and Miles Davis’ trumpet, Dylan’s voice is one of the most immersive, soulful, and psychologically complex instruments in the history of American music. And much like Frank Sinatra, he’s shrewdly turned the wear and tear that comes with time into an advantage. When the culture-wrecking roar ‘n’ whine of the 1960s and ’70s became a physical impossibility, he reinvented himself as an ancient ghost with a deliciously sandpapered groan that can flip between ageless truth and sneering insolence at the drop of a hat. While you’ll certainly encounter a handful of classics, my playlist isn’t a greatest hits mix. Rather, I’ve pulled together a bunch of songs — some recorded live, many deep cuts, all personal faves — that I feel show off Dylan’s power, range, and utter eccentricity as a vocalist.

Most people take the apocalypse as an article of faith, but what exactly the apocalypse entails is in the eye of the beholder. Will the universe dissolve and all matter cease to exist, or will the pillaging be more localized? Perhaps the sun will explode. Or, more specifically (and likely), the oceans might rise and drown large swaths of humanity Or maybe the opposite is true, and we’ll simply run out of water like in Mad Max? There are also health issues to consider. What if we develop a mutation that makes a certain portion of society both resistant to death and hungry for human flesh? This seems like a very popular (if scientifically) scenario. Or perhaps it’s a more mundane: maybe we’ll just stop producing babies. Or maybe we’ll slip into a computer-generated virtual reality simulation, with our robot overlords overseeing out inert sleeping bodies. Honestly, I don’t really know how it all will end, and I haven’t given it that much thought, to be honest. But I know someone who has: Bob Dylan. Over the course of his nearly 60 years career, Dylan has written very extensively about extinction events, though his take is always evolving. Initially, Dylan seem to look at the upside of the end of the world. “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” is at-times terrifying in its depiction of the dire aftermath of the Cuban missile crisis, but it also left room for the emergence of a visionary poet who would serve as a sortof bohemian Moses to lead his people out of the wilderness (spoiler: the poet is Dylan). The track “When the Ship Comes In” sounds downright celebratory as it imagines a post-racial society, until you realize that this society exists in the ashes of traditional Western civilization. During the mid-‘60s, as Dylan forsook folk for fock n’ roll, the bard imagined the apocalypse as a weird mash-up of Cold War terror, religious zealotry, and pop culture schizophrenia. Tracks such as “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again” and “Highway 61 Revisited” are gleeful, language-melting odes our impending dome. They imagined a society standing on the precipice of mass confusion. In the context of the chaos of the ‘60s social upheaval, these songs were considered prophetic.As the ‘60s wore on, his vision of the apocalypse grew at turns mournful (“All Along the Watchtower) and menacing (“Wheels on Fire”), but it was never far from his mind. In the time sense, he bends the apocalyptic to help further his own pet projects and theories. Doomsday provided great grist for the mill when Dylan was a fire-and-brimstone preached in the late-70s and early 80s. And, when Dylan released a string of brilliant mid-life-sad-sack records in the late 90s and early aughts, apocalyptic imagery helped illuminate the full range of his personal malaise.

Justin Vernon’s 2016 full-length as Bon Iver, 22, A Million, isn’t just a career-jarring reboot of his sound; it’s a radical revision of the singer-songwriter template. Instead of the guitar-based meditations of previous efforts, the musician erects alien constructions from cyborg falsetto, Auto-Tune-smeared soul, baroque electronica, and bass drops splitting the difference between post-dubstep and modern R&B. Man and machine, nervous system and motherboard — their differences fall by the wayside with each successive cut. In hopes of deepening listeners’ appreciation of this profoundly mutant offering, I’ve put together a mix of key inspirations (Kanye West, Arthur Russell), peers exploring similar ideas (Frank Ocean, James Blake), and illuminating examples of sampled source material (Mahalia Jackson, Sharon Van Etten). Hopefully, you’ll find our playlist to be as deliciously novel and immersive as 22, A Million itself.

Bradford Coxs music with Deerhunter and Atlas Sound has been rooted the more noisy sectors of modern American indie music, but his playlist for Spotify is much more expansive. It draws from everything from the classic pop of Dee Clark and Elvis Presley to the Cuban fusion of Bola De Nieve and Lo Borges. The African balladry of Ballaké and J Omwami is particularly beautiful. This is delicate and sublime music, and while it doesnt necessarily reflect Coxs specific aesthetics, it does reveal something of the emotional texture he sometimes injects into his music, especially his "solo" work with Atlas Sound.

As a pillar of SoCal desert rock, Brant Bjork -- the seminal drummer for Kyuss, a propelling force in Fu Manchu, and a solo singer/guitarist -- clearly has a rooted history with the fuzzy, dazed, rock & roll sounds of the region, and the subsequent movement that broke out in the early 90s. On his newest album (his 13th!), 2018s Mankind Woman, he continues to further the reach of that heavy-yet-laid-back vibe in incorporating the groove of blues, funk and jazz with his desert rock foundation. To celebrate this release, we asked him to make us a playlist, and found that when it comes to history, its not just his own that Bjork has to boast. Check out his playlist dissecting what was truly heavy in 1968 and see what he had to say about it below.Explains Bjork: "1968 was the year that shattered America. The war in Vietnam had officially become the countrys worst nightmare, The Civil Rights Movement was in full effect after the assassination of both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and American women and students had basically lost all faith in the establishment. Music has always been an extension in one way or another of its surrounding environment. Music is spiritual and recordings are modern magic capturing the moment. Music heals and it communicates essential ideas and feelings that arent always easy to express. Especially in time of crisis. In a catastrophic year like 1968, the music that is left for us to absorb with wonder is a true gift. The courage of these artists and their songs cant be understated and taken for granted. Its 2018. the 50 year anniversary of 1968. Its Pretty Hairy to see what weve accomplished since...and what we havent. Dig this music. Dig deep and imagine carrying this load. 1968 was the birth of Heavy."