Black Magik is a cumulative playlist spawned from the past four years of Halloween rituals and parties. My favorite time of celebration so there is a lot of passion for curating these songs and including all genres. What started with a Halloween DJ set at Plush became one of the local Cocktail comunities' key parties of the year. Since “The Dead Can Dance” there have been two other playlists specifically for this event. “Drop Dead Gorgeous!” and “Halloween Masquerade”. In 2019 I decided that continuing to summon new playlists every year means we might be losing great songs from previous years so I combined all the previous playlists and updated them with 5 hours of new material. Even though the plague kept us from gathering in 2020 for our usual dark rites I still included another 5-hour update of new material. Bringing the total for this monstrous playlist to 326 songs and 21+ hours of spooky songs to raise the dead. Don’t worry, I’m already conjuring new spirits to add for 2021.
Tonebreaker & Noctum - America's Ghostwriters
If you notice between the last mix and this one was a five-year gap, six years from the last Libations and Oscillations mix. It’s not that the duo of Tonebreaker and Noctum split, or that I attempted to “retire” from music again. It’s just that sometimes life happens. During lockdown orders in this extremely unusual year, Tonebreaker reached out to me with an idea. A mixtape to raise funds for charity. I was completely down with this idea. The charity we found was Music by Black Composers, a project of the Rachel Barton Pine Foundation.
On a personal note as we explored this mix we also decided to lay the Libations & Oscillations moniker to rest. So much had changed since the last time we touched that moniker. This time we released this simply as Tonebreaker and Noctum.
Music is one of the tapestries by which humanity tells its stories. From Congo Square in New Orleans to CBGB in New York, personal expression and culture have always been socialized to a soundtrack. As contemporary electronic musicians ourselves, we wanted to raise money for this charity to honor the rich and diverse musical roots that came before.