Well it's Christmas time in Columbia Heights

Mom’s cookin’ chicken & basmati rice

In yer earbuds dig the analog

Never have never will drink egg nog

CHEER IS THE MINDKILLER—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVI [Side A]

My 2021 holiday mixtape, Cheer Is the Mind-Killer, has arrived. It’s the sixteenth installment in what has become a venerable holiday tradition that invariably makes me feel unhinged in the final few months of each year. Sixteen! They grow up so fast.

A DEGREE ABSOLUTE!

CHEER IS THE MINDKILLER—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVI [Side B]

The yulemix enters its Pierce Brosnan era with this seventeenth senses-shattering installment! It's another paradoxically digital yule (ana)log, optimized to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. Each side will conveniently fit onto a one side of a 100-minute cassette. Break off those recording tabs and commence hall-decking, revelers!

The Airborne Yuletide Event

THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVII [Side A]

The yulemix enters its Pierce Brosnan era with this seventeenth senses-shattering installment! It's another paradoxically digital yule (ana)log, optimized to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. One side will conveniently fit onto a one side of a 100-minute cassette. This one will not! Break off those recording tabs and commence hall-decking, revelers!

THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVII [Side B]

Merry Christtmas With the Moms and Dads: Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable — Hall Deckening, Part One

Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVIII — Hall Deckening, Part One

Ooooooh, D'Angelo just returned from exile with a surprise album dropped online in the back half of December! Big deal; I too do situps, sometimes, and I too have release a surprise December album. It's my ninth surprise album in nine consecutive Decembers. Kindly react with due awe.

One thing remains as apparent as ever: I am obsessed with antiquity. The Yule Analog – Vol. 9 in my apparently unkillable Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, subtitled Cowboy Santa Claus – is imbued with the music and radio and pop culture of the 1940s through the 1970s. The last song I chose – a song I loved the first time I heard it on KCRW in 2001 and then forgot about for years until I heard John Hodgman play it at Aimee Mann's Christmas show at The Birchmere last night – is just barely from the current century. My mixtape makes a few reluctant sops to the present day, but only a few. I am The Ghost of Christmas Long, Long Past.

The Yule Analog - Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable No. 9: Cowboy Santa Claus [Side B]

Ooooooh, D'Angelo just returned from exile with a surprise album dropped online in the back half of December! Big deal; I too do situps, sometimes, and I too have release a surprise December album. It's my ninth surprise album in nine consecutive Decembers. Kindly react with due awe.

One thing remains as apparent as ever: I am obsessed with old shit. The Yule Analog – Vol. 9 in my apparently unkillable Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, subtitled Cowboy Santa Claus – is imbued with the music and radio and pop culture of the 1940s through the 1970s. The last song I chose – a song I loved the first time I heard it on KCRW in 2001 and then forgot about for years until I heard John Hodgman play it at Aimee Mann's Christmas show at The Birchmere last night – is just barely from the current century. My mixtape makes a few reluctant sops to the present day, but only a few. I am The Ghost of Christmas Long, Long Past.

The Yule Analog - Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable No. 9: Cowboy Santa Claus [Side A]

The yulemix reaches its Charlie XIXth installment! It's another paradoxically digital yule (ana)log, optimized to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season.

CHRISTMAS TO CHRISTMAS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIX: Kid Santa Claus, or Project Dec. 25

ONE JINGLE AFTER ANOTHER—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XX: A Christmas Adventurers Adventure

I am your hall-decking mixtape daddy. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.

The Christmas Force Awakens — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Perfect X: Final Sequence

The Christmas Force Awakens — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Perfect X: Final Sequence [Side A]

The tenth and mightiest installment in my Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, optimized to illuminate and obfuscate your holiday season. May your days be shiny and chrome, and may the Christmas Force be with you.

The Christmas Force Awakens — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Perfect X: Final Sequence [Side B]

Yippie kai yay, Christmas lovers! I've overcome my Electoral Affective Disorder to compile another mood-elevating, hall-decking, merry-making, glad-tidings-shouting mostly-analog masterpiece. No. 11 in an unrelenting series. Fits on a 90-minute cassette tape.

The Christmas Hack: Yuletunes Eclictic & Inexplicable No. 11 - One More Louder

The Christmas Hack — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XI: One More Louder (Side A)

Yippie kai yay, Christmas lovers! I've overcome my Electoral Affective Disorder to compile another mood-elevating, hall-decking, merry-making, glad-tidings-shouting mostly-analog masterpiece. No. 11 in an unrelenting series. Fits on a 90-minute cassette tape. Nearly.

The Christmas Hack: Yuletunes Eclictic & Inexplicable No. 11 - One More Louder

The Christmas Hack — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XI: One More Louder (Side B)

My audio Christmas card, compiled and edited with respect and affection for you, the listener.

Hark Hark Deck Deck - Yule-Tunes Eclectic Team VI: The NOW SOUND of Christmas [Side A]

Unite the Twelve! With the release of my newest yulemix, you've got one mixtape for each day of Christmas. This one is FULLY GUARANTEED to optimize your hall-decking, and to pass the melancholy hours of your road trip/flight delay/journey by rail/sea voyage/sleepless night in contemplation of your sins.

Noel Means Noel—Yuletunes Eclectic& Inexplicable Vol. 12: A Fully Consensual Listening Experience of Christmas

Noel Means Noel — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XII: A Consensual Xmas Xperience [Side A]

NOEL MEANS NOEL—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XII: A Consuensual Xmas Xperience [Side B]

I can't tell you how thrilled I was to learn one of my boyhood heroes -- seven-time Mr. Olympia, five-time Mr. Universe, living tissue-over-a-microprocessor-controlled-hyperalloy-combat chassis former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger -- was available and willing to serve as master of ceremonies for this year's yulmemix.

Stay Hungry to Feed the World - Yule-Tunes Eclectic & Inexplicable 007: Arnold's Bible

Stay Hungry to Feed the World - Yule-Tunes Eclectic & Inexplicable 007: Arnold's Bible [Side B]

My only real goal this year was to keep the mix short and tight. An hour seemed reasonable. Hey, Peace on Earth sounds reasonable, too. May this keep you in good company on your long road trips and flights and sleepless nights.

Children, Go Where I Send Thee! Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Hard Eight: The Desolation of Nog

2013: Children, Go Where I Send Thee! Yule-Tunes Eclectic & Inexplicable VIII [Side A]

Yippe kai yay, Christmas lovers! My sixth annual audio Christmas card has arrived to illuminate and/or obfuscate your yule! At two hour(ish)-long sides, this is the longest yulemix ever. Remember those 120-minute blank cassettes introduced in the twilight of the analog era that allowed you to record more music at lesser quality and were highly prone to breakage?

Excessive? No doubt. But people who prefer tasteful restraint in their holidays are really big on Arbor Day. Christmas is for the rest of us. I hope that listeners who don't celebrate Christmas will still dig this as an examination of the weirdness of how our secular observation of a religious holiday has evolved in these ocean-rising times, or perhaps as an antidote to the numbing, overfamiliar holiday music you've been bitching about for a month already.

Hark Hark Deck Deck - Yule-Tunes Eclectic & Inexplicable Team VI: The NOW SOUND of Christmas

HARK HARK, DECK DECK - YULE-TUNES ECLECTIC & INEXPLICABLE TEAM VI: THE NOW SOUND OF CHRISTMAS

Seasonal cuts so deep they'll give you the bends, and yet so Prime Jeff Bezos will deliver them to your door for free.

Blue Wave Christmas — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIII: Santa Is a B-Boy [Side A]

Holiday ephemera and etcetera. 

Seasonal exotica and erotica. 

Cuts so deep they’ll give you the bends. 

Cuts so Prime Jeff Bezos would deliver them to your door with two-day shipping, free, if I hadn’t already given them to you instantaneously and at my own expense.

Blue Wave Christmas

Blue Wave Christmas — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIII: Santa Is a B-Boy [Side B]

BLUE WAVE CHRISTMAS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIII: Santa Is a B-Boy

Blue Wave Christmas — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIII: Santa Is a B-Boy [Side C]

Holiday ephemera and etcetera.

Seasonal exotica and erotica.

Cuts so deep they’ll give you the bends.

Cuts so Prime Jeff Bezos would deliver them to your door with two-day shipping, free, if I hadn’t already given them to you instantaneously and at my own expense.

Blue Wave Christmas — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIII: Santa Is a B-Boy [Side D]

My fourth Christmas compilation, from 2009, is still the one I love best. Even though this one caused me a lot of trouble; more than you would believe.

That Means Christmas to Some People - Yuletunes Eclectic IV: The Quest for Peace [side A]

Tags: Christmas holiday old-time-radio

My fourth Christmas compilation, from 2009, is still the one I love best. Even though this one caused me a lot of trouble; more than you would believe.

That Means Christmas to Some People - Yuletunes Eclectic IV: The Quest for Peace [side B]

The lucky 007th installment in my perpetually inflating series of audio Christmas cards, compiled and edited with respect and affection for you, the listener.


Stay Hungry to Feed the World - Yule-Tunes Eclectic & Inexplicable 007: Arnold's Bible [Side A]

Seasonal selections undimmed by excess familiarity or treacle. Since 2006 A.D.

Let's Talk About Christmas!

Let's Talk About CHRISTMAS! — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIV: Jupiter and Beyond [Side A]

Let's Talk About CHRISTMAS! — Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XIV: Jupiter and Beyond [Side B]

FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XVI: 2020 Can't Become Hindsight Soon Enough

FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS—Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable XV [Side A]

Just in time to save Christmas, it's the long-awaited second side of my 2020 yulemix! It's the perfectly imperfect soundtrack to your somber, shelter-in-place holiday.

ctklimek

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