Completing THE AIRBORNE YULETIDE EVENT!

Halldeckers! Merrymakers! Gay Apparel-donners! It’s been another exhausting journey, but my 2022 yulemix, The Airborne Yuletide Event, is now complete in its two-sided analog entirety. And I only cheated on the length a little.

Longtime listeners may spot nods to installments past here and there, because to neglect such a long and rich and long and storied and long history would be ungrateful, somehow. But the vast majority of these 103 minutes — 54 percent of the run-time of Avatar: The Way of Water by volume — are comprised of entirely new old material. There’re even four actually new, released-in-2022 yuletunes strategically sprinkled throughout this most festive and beguiling of sonic canvases.

Listen close, my dear ones, and listen loud. Merry Christmas.

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

Cheer is the Mind-killer (Side B) Cometh

In this second half of my XVIth senses-shattering installment in the apparently unkillable Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, I attempts penance for appropriating the podfeed of A Degree Absolute! to give listeners an album they never asked for, U2-style, by roping in my co-host Glen & our theme song singer-arranger Casey in for some festive preamble before we get to the damn tape. I beg your forbearance.

Cheer is the Mind-killer (Side A) Cometh

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 couple of months of each year. Sixteen! They grow up so fast. The Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable compilation series, most installments of which remain available to stream via the Christmas Mixtapes drop-down menu at the top of the page, is now as licensed to drive as any Cory. In the chronology of the EON Productions James Bond film series, it is Licence-d (sic) to Kill.

Side B TK!

Talking Yuletunes on All Things Considered

I didn’t put quite as much muscle behind promoting my yulemix this year as I have in years past, but I was very glad to get an invitation to talk to All Things Considered’s Ailsa Chang about some of the selections featured on my 2020 compilation, Four Seasons Total Greetings. The show suggested I choose three new-for-2020 recordings and one of the surprising deep cuts I uncovered in the prior year, which is how I got to talk about The Shades’ recorded-in-1966-but-eerily-topical “Prancer’s Got Some Red Spots” and also sneak a little bit of Canadian country singer Hank Snow’s “Christmas Wants” in at the outro.

We recorded this conversation in mid-December, and there was enough dire news in the days after that that I assumed this piece would be axed. It was my old boyhood pal Chip Goines who notified me, via Twitter, that the piece was airing on Christmas Eve, just as I was loading up to drive to my parents’ house in Virginia (after two weeks in quarantine) for the holiday. The bar for Christmas miracles has rarely been lower, but I’ll take it. God bless us, everyone!

Hark! "FOUR SEASONS TOTAL GREETINGS," my XVth fabulous #yulemix, hath arrived to delight your senses. One of them, anyway!

It’s the most puzzling tiiiiiiiiiiiiime of the year.

One knee operation, one global pandemic, three No Time to Die release dates, and one harrowing but un-fradulent presidential election later, your favorite foul-weather friend has returned to soundtrack (verb) your regrettably antisocial holidaze with another lovingly curated set of yulejams, yulehyms, and yulbrenners. Golly! HARK your herald angels and DECK whatever halls you’ve got, because this multidenominaltional multitrack is the funkiest yulestew in the multiverse. It’s got more hooks than Jan Hooks and more riffs than Ron Rifkin. Masked singers only, please.

Side B TK, OK?

ctklimek · 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.

Let's Continue to Talk About "Let's Talk About Christmas!" (Side B)

Comprising fifty (50) more minutes of buoyant-if-occasionally-baffling yuletunes to obfuscate and illuminate your holiday season. It’s all so fresh, and I have so many other deadlines that’ve languished unmet while I’ve been making this, that I can’t think of one doggone thing to say about it. Just press Play.

Let's Talk About "Let's Talk About Christmas!" (Side A)

It’s quarter ‘til eight p.m. Eastern on Thanksgiving Day, so let’s talk turkey: The first side of the fourteenth mighty installment in my inexhaustible Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series is now available to provide a seasonal, tuneful, treacle-free, and generally baffling soundtrack to your Record Store Day cratedigging and any attendant treetrimming and/or halldecking. I believe this is the earliest in the season I’ve ever dropped one of these, and I expect you, Dear Listener, to give your own merrymaking operations a commensurate boost. Side A of Let’s Talk About Christmas! runs precisely 50 minutes, as shall Side B, so you can preserve this seasonal salgamundi on a single 100-minute high-bias cassette. Unless I deem it necessary to follow-up with a third or even a fourth side later. Stranger things have happened.

The Great Work Concludes: Side D of "Blue Wave Christmas" Hath Dropped

Here’s a rainy New Year’s Eve bonus for you, merrymakers: Side D of Blue Wave Christmas, the yule-mitzvah edition of my longstanding Yuletunes Eclectic & Inexplicable series, has arrived, marking the conclusion of the most ambitious mixtape I’ve yet made. It’s long on merriment, long on obscurity, and long on length. That’s why I had to serve it to you incrementally. With this vestigal-tail chapter, some of the familiar voices from prior iterations have returned after mostly keeping mum so far this year. There are by my reckoning at least seven days of Christmas remaining, so I’ll leave you to it. You can find all four sides on this page. I wish for all of us a better 2019.

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.