Mittwoch Mixes - Memento Mori 2026 - Part 1

Each year I celebrate my birthday with some now traditional Memento Mori mixes and this year will be no different...

I am starting this blast from the past off with I was an Angry Teenage Weirdo Vol. 2, picking up where the first volume left off, providing thirteen more tracks that were on repeat on my disc-man when I was 16-18. Feel ancient with me as you realize that all of these songs are over a quarter century old...

#	Artist	Track
1	Pigface	Asphole
2	MDFMK	Gasoline
3	Gravity Kills	Guilty (Juno Reactor Mix)
4	KMFDM	Flesh
5	Hate Dept.	Hit Back
6	Skinny Puppy	Assimilate
7	Atari Teenage Riot	Delete Yourself [You Got No Chance to Win!]
8	Pig	SAVE ME
9	Stabbing Westward	Save Yourself
10	Nine Inch Nails	Please
11	Nitzer Ebb	Kick It
12	Sister Machine Gun	What Do You Want from Me
13	Machines of Loving Grace	Suicide King

Next, continuing the inexorable march of time, a cover mix of Nine Inch Nails now that they're firmly ensconced in the Dad Rock pantheon and hitting the point of having albums hit thirty year anniversaries...

#	Artist	Track
1	The Lion’s Daughter	Mr. Self Destruct
2	Bella Lune	Into the Void
3	Unwoman	Every Day Is Exactly the Same
4	The Body & Thou	Terrible Lie
5	Nonexistent Night	The Perfect Drug
6	George Sara and Lara Peterson	Something I Can Never Have (Bleak Mix)
7	Espi Kvlt	reptile
8	Pig	Head Like a Hole
9	Allie Goertz	Ruiner
10	Camille O’Sullivan	Hurt
11	Bussy Kween Power Trip	Bish
12	Nine Inch Nails & Boys Noize	Closer (Nine Inch Noize Version)
13	Pigface	Suck (Live)

Mittwoch Mixes - November 2025

A pair of mixes for November before I descend deep into Xmas music season...

The first is hwæt! Still Life in an Apocalypse - Which serves as the second volume of my Brick Wall Mix series. Composed of a set mix of songs that make me feel like I could run through a Goddamn Brick Wall. High energy and featuring a healthy dollop of righteous anger.

#	Artist	Track
1	Herzschlager	Kill Your Heroes
2	Transgressive	A Unified War Cry
3	healthyliving	To the Gallows
4	King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard	Planet B
5	Acumen Nation	Gun Lover
6	Sister Machine Gun	Voices / Machine
7	The Damage Manual	Stateless (Delusional Mix)
8	Cocksure	Cold Dick
9	Error	Nothing’s Working
10	Boris & Uniform	No
11	Allfather	Citadels (Live)
12	Glacial Tomb	Fuck Nazi Sympathy
13	Ashenspire	Cable Street Again

The second mix is hwæt! I PAID TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FOR A LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE AT A PRIVATE COLLEGE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS MIX… 

I graduated from college back in the halcyon days of 2005, over twenty years ago now, and when I was putting together the Not A Place of Honor mix, I was reminded of how my musical taste was shaped by my student years as Die Warzau and Big Black were both groups I discovered while spelunking among the light-less shelves of my college radio station. 

Even in the early 2000's, even at a tiny college that was smaller than my high school, no one really wanted to let me inflict my musical taste upon the public at large, so when I submitted my applications with the lists of artists and songs I wanted to play I was invariably assigned slots that began at midnight at the earliest. One semester I memorably got the 'coveted' 2am to 4am Saturday morning slot...

Still, I didn't care because it meant I had access to the thousands and thousands of CDs in the collection letting me fall down rabbit holes and discover obscure bands that my suburban corporate music stores would never bring to me or to enjoy the deep well of music from the 80s and 90s that I had missed. My only regret is that during my initial orientation the record player was broken so I never learned how to use it.

College was also my first access to high speed internet connections (such as they were back then) which also meant my musical tastes and access expanded in ways that anyone around my age knows very well... Meaning that I could get my hands on say, Schwein, the Japan based Pig side project.

This mix also serves as a follow-up to my I was an Angry Teenage Weirdo Mix, charting how as I transformed from nerdy teen to pretentiously academic English major to eccentric middle-aged hipster. Just like that mix, it's not necessarily my favorite music from that period, but a slightly thematic selection of bands that I either discovered or really got into during my college time. 

#	Artist	Track
1	The Sisters of Mercy	Lucretia My Reflection
2	Test Dept.	Sweet Sedation
3	Killing Joke	Millennium
4	Big Black	The Ugly American
5	Cabaret Voltaire	Big Funk
6	Pop Will Eat Itself	Ich Bin Ein Auslander
7	haloblack	it’s bizarre
8	Peace Love & Pitbulls	White White White (Finished Already Mix)
9	Schwein	World’s Junk
10	Chemlab	Binary Nation
11	Acumen Nation	Chameleon Skin
12	Die Warzau	King of Rock and Roll
13	The Legendary Pink Dots	Abracadabra zzzz

The source image for the cover art for hwæt! I PAID TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS FOR A LIBERAL ARTS DEGREE AT A PRIVATE COLLEGE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS MIX… is https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Beloit_College_Middle_College.jpg originally by Robin Zebrowski and was edited and modified under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

Mittwoch Mix - I was an Angry Teenage Weirdo

 

Long before I was an eccentric middle-aged hipster, I was an angry teenage weirdo—in honor of the Thanksgiving tradition of revisiting yr. hometown, here is a mix of the music I was listening to at 16-17 . An audio snapshot of the disaffected youth certain he’d never escape the tedium of school or the conformist hell of the ‘burbs… Soak in the awkward rage of a nerdy suburban boy of the late 90’s, at least his musical taste showed promise.

#	Artist	Track
1	Nine Inch Nails	Wish (Remixed by J.G. Thirlwell)
2	Skinny Puppy	Dig It – Mark Walk remix
3	Atari Teenage Riot	Delete Yourself (You Got No Chance to Win)
4	Gravity Kills	Drown
5	Pig	The Sick
6	Stabbing Westward	Ungod
7	Front Line Assembly	Millennium
8	MDFMK	Be Like Me
9	Snake River Conspiracy	Somebody Hates You
10	Hate Dept.	Little Let Down
11	Ministry	So What
12	Nitzer Ebb	in decline
13	The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets	Big Robot Dinosaur

Notes:

These weren't necessarily my favorite songs during high school, but looking back many of these songs were songs that I felt (or wanted to feel) deeply attached to. There was many a between period break where I'd blast "Little Let Down" or "Be Like Me" on my portable CD player before angrily slumping into another uncomfortable school desk. Maybe at another time I'll try to fit myself back into the headspace to figure out my favorite songs from high school and there's definitely a mix to be made about songs/albums/artists that shaped my musical taste, but these are songs that mostly strike to the core of how angry and out of place I felt.