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Whether you’re currently in the area of a mountain town or just living that #mountownlife mindset somewhere else (I know I’ve done both), it's always nice to have some quality musical soundtracks at the ready. Because music keeps nicely through space & time and because sometimes there is no good signal to be found in this life (am, fm, wifi, mixed), so it's nice to be able to magically pull a cool soundtrack out of your pocket whenever the mood hits—no matter how deep into the bush you’ve pushed, whether that be metaphorically or literally (hashtag offline listening).

So, with the above logic in mind, a Highway 95a (dot ca, eh) transplant “music blogger” has been human-curating a bunch of ongoing ‘95 tracks from 95 different artists’ mixtape cd playlists that can be used as the diy programming for a ‘pretend, for real’ mountain town radio station called MOUN.TOWN/FM — (say what now?) — but all you really need to know is that you can tune-in to MOUN.TOWN/FM whenever & wherever you are or whatever… no matter how far off the trail you’ve wandered: all you need is a Spotify account (but there are also available-on-Bandcamp archives kept on Buy Music Club for each mix cd playlist), you also need a different way of thinking about how you can tune into a “radio station” these days + an interest in both listening to AND discovering music that somebody who isn’t an algorithm has thought: “hey… this song is worth another listen, eh?”

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FOR EXAMPLE, THERE’S THE

YOUR WEEKLY 9(TO)5 EH

WHICH YOU CAN PRESS PLAY ON NOW, IF YOU FANCY:

The above YOUR WEEKLY 9(to)5 EH playlist is updated EVERY week by shuffling up the pot of ALL the music that @HI54LOFI has collected over the years of successfully running an unsuccessful music blog & then putting together, by hand/ear, a new shuffle update mix cd to place at the top of this ever-evolving digital mega-mix cd… with older tracks removed from the bottom to keep everything at an even 95 total tracks/artists at all times. Why 95? Well, because 95 is a good track/artist number for a playlist to be worth re-visiting multiple times while still hearing new things to discover (especially when the playlist is updated on the weekly like this one, which you can heart/follow over on Spotify or listen + check out the ‘available on Bandcamp’ list & MORE over on the weekly updated blog post). Oh yeah, and also 95 is a good number for this playlist because there’s that whole nearby highway 95/a/eh connection with where the signal is being sent out from, eh?

This weekly updated 5+ hour ‘radio program’ is the kind of multi-genre, multi-decade mix you can listen to from top-to-bottom and then come back & listen again on shuffle (not to mention all the tangent discoveries to be made when further checking out albums/artists that catch your ears the most). I’ve even made sure to not include any tracks that are marked with the explicit ‘E’, so, hopefully, you can feel safe to try listening with whatever you’re getting up to for a 9-to-5 these days (wherever/whenever you’re getting up to that), without worrying about having to run to hit ‘next track’ or grab the headphone ear muffs.

Now, you might not like every song you hear (that’s the cost of different people liking different things differently at different stages of their lives), BUT, if you let YOUR WEEKLY 9(to)5 EH play long enough & if you let the music do its thing (remember: music is other people’s art and it’s supposed to make you stop & think/feel and say “wait… who/what is this?” every now & again, as opposed to just being a background mood/vibe accessory), I bet that ‘For Every 9 songs You REALLY Listen to, You’ll Like AT LEAST 5 Songs or More!’… and that’s the HIGH FIVE FOR… 95EH guarantee!*

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But if the above weekly-updated YOUR WEEKLY 9(to)5 EH shuffle is not the frequency you want to tune-in to right now, or if you just want to explore a program/vibe that’s a bit more towards what your ears are looking for right now, don’t you fret just yet, because you can actually find a whole bunch of curated ‘#HI54MIXCDS on MOUN.TOWN/FM’ playlists available for soundtracking a decent sized chunk of whatever kind of stretch you’d like the next part of your day to sound like…

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FOR EXAMPLE:

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OR MAYBE YOU’D LIKE TO TIME TRAVEL VIA HITS OF AUDIO NOSTALGIA?

BECAUSE, NO MATTER THE DISTINCTLY DIFFERENT DECADE FLAVOURS YOU GREW UP AROUND, EVERY YEAR SINCE FOREVER HAS BEEN PUTTING OUT ALL KINDS OF NICE MUSIC, AND NICE MUSIC NEVER EXPIRES (JUST GIVE IT A SNIFF FIRST). SO WHY NOT sample some ‘Hits Of Nostalgia’ FOR A BIT:

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OR MAYBE YOU’D PREFER A MORE SPECIFIC VIBE?

(although, I should mention we’re entering territory where I can’t guarantee playlists won’t contain songs with the Explicit ‘E’ markings anymore (which is a thing I try to maintain with the above playlists, but shit-ups happen) — but there’s a setting in Spotify you can use if Explicit ‘E’ marked songs popping up are a concern, so here’s a link for more info on how to turn on/off that function for those who aren’t just listening to MOUN.TOWN/FM on their headphones or home alone on the bluetooth speakers whilst doing the dishes or etc)

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OR MAYBE YOU’D LIKE TO HOP AROUND THE GLOBE VIA THE POWER OF LISTENING TO MUSIC THAT CAME FROM CERTAIN PARTS OF THE WORLD?

WELL, HAVE A FLICK THROUGH THE SECONDHAND MUSICAL ATLAS BELOW TO CHECK OUT SOME playlists featuring tracks/artists FROM ALL OVER THE MAP, BOTH NEAR AND FAR AWAY (DEPENDING ON YOUR CURRENT LOCATION):

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SPEAKING OF CURRENT LOCATION:

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MOUN.TOWN/FM is broadcast from the same wifi signal that 95EH.CA shares with HI54.BLOG in their shared apartment office space / living room in Kimberley BC, which is a mountain town that can be found in the British Columbia region often referred to as the Kootenays (East Kootenays, more specifically for Hwy 95/a). Kimberley, BC is also one of those mountain towns that often comes with an asterisk-doing-A-LOT-of-work quietly recognizing that the area is also “the unceded traditional territory of the Ktunaxa (?amak?is) Nation” (North America, innit). ANYWAYS, somewhere back in the collectively weird year that was 2020/2021, inspired by the fun of putting together some Provincial Playlists (aka: 95 tracks from 95 artists from each of the 10 Canadian provinces), I challenged myself to get a ‘95 tracks from 95 artists’ playlist going for not just where I live, British Columbia, but by going even more regional to create one for the Kootenays (East & West… that’s music from artists based in/around: Kimberley, Cranbrook, Nelson, Kaslo, Revelstoke, Golden, Castlegar, Trail, Fernie, Rossland, Creston and the et cetera area — which is a large land area, but population wise we’re looking at around 200,000 people, if my quick google research was correct / still accurate).

And with the help of some helpful suggestions when posting on the local social media (Instagram, Facebook, Reddit) + a lot of googling (and Bandcamp tag exploring) and memory recall from running a free local Kimberley/Cranbrook events calendar for a couple years before events got literally cancelled by covid for a couple more years — well, that local Kootenays area playlist is now at ‘95 tracks from 95 different Kootenays-based artists’ (who also have music available on Spotify) — and you can listen to the latest edition of “Big Shiny Koots” over on Spotify or on the MOUN.TOWN/FM embed below:

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And, like with all MOUN.TOWN/FM mix cd playlists, I also try to gather any Bandcamp links for any of the tracks featured in the Spotify playlist in the individual blog posts for each #MountownFM program — because artists don’t get paid well/fairly by streaming companies, especially smaller artists, but Bandcamp is a very artist-friendly site that lets you buy music directly from the artists/labels at prices the artists/labels set themselves — and that upkeep also includes keeping a Buy Music Club archive going for each #MountownFM program, so here is THE KOOTENAY 95, EH tracks that are also available on Bandcamp if you’re looking to brighten a local area artist’s day by purchasing a track/album directly from them:

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And this would maybe be a good place to talk about the reality that MOUN.TOWN/FM cannot share every track by every artist, or be everything for everyone (because that’s not possible). Music taste is subjective and there is a never-ending amount of music out there. But the fact that MOUN.TOWN/FM is sharing ‘95 tracks from 95 different artists’ with a large variety of different filters/genres applied to the non-algorithm’d curation, I think if you concentrate on the large amount of music/artists that are being shared, and that overall good vibes connected to the music/artists that are currently being featured in numerous places, there’s plenty of positive connections & discoveries & possibilities that can happen organically if everybody agrees to not get too caught up in all the ego stuff that goes into “what doesn’t get shared” or “who didn’t get included” or et cetera on the surface level. Also, these playlists are not meant to be ‘best of’ lists nor are they usually in any order other than the order of what sounds good when played together (more info on playlist philosophy here).

Because, even if you zoom in to only include tracks/artists from just the East/West Kootenays, even when featuring 95 artists at a time, you still end up with a playlist where you have to take someone off in order to put someone else on (or where you have to decide between not putting someone on because you’d have to then take someone else off). And it’s an impossible task to do where everybody ends up pleased, because you either just make a playlist that includes anyone who submits to it (which no one wants to listen to) or you create a playlist that has some consistent sound & subjective quality to it that you can “trust” (and that involves having to decide what to include and what not to include, which often complicates people’s feelings about whether what was included is a nice listen on its own terms, or whether the site sharing all the music is just a pretentious jerk who should go kick rocks — plus also who has got the time to listen to all this stuff that there isn’t even enough time to listen to anyways because there is literally too much stuff). As someone who has been sent THOUSANDS of music submissions over the years of sharing music my ears like online, I eventually realized that the only way to deal with this impossible situation is to just stop accepting music submissions altogether (I wrote about the decision over here if you fancy reading more).

Which is a long way around to say: there is a process around what music gets included in which playlists, and a lot of it is based around the subjective tastes of one set of ears, which is limited to available time/energy & lack of earned income for unpaid work, and some of it is based on the randomness of putting together a finite mix with whatever music fits best and feels right — PLUS — there is also the reality that you literally can’t listen to and/or share EVERYTHING by EVERYONE.

But, if you focus on the music that is currently in the playlists and not on the music that isn’t currently in the playlists, I think you might find your ears enjoying/discovering a whole bunch of great stuff that you can take back to your own orbit/s for your own use (and that’s a pretty good deal, all things considered).

I do plan on having a think about whether or not I bring some kind of request/suggestion process for people to submit music for MOUN.TOWN/FM mix cd playlist consideration (you might be able to find a working example/experiment somewhere in my ‘British Columbia’ mix cd playlist) — BUT — I also know about the can of worms that is opening oneself up for dealing with music submissions, so I’ll probably first wait to see if people are even interested in supporting the “listening to the music that gets played” bit more first (or maybe finding ways to get the work that goes into keeping all this “music blog” stuff going supported in ‘pay rent, eat food’ ways is the more accurate way to describe the problem that needs solving first).

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AND ON THAT NOTE… IF YOU HAVEN’T ALREADY FOUND SOMETHING TO PRESS PLAY ON, HERE’S 9 (5+4) MORE ‘95 TRACKS FROM 95 DIFFERENT ARTISTS’ #HI54mixcdS playlists TO CHECK OUT & SEE IF ANYTHING CATCHES YOUR FANCY:

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OR, also, oh yeah… I’ve been experimenting with putting together custom human-made modern mix cds (aka: playlists) to be played in physical locations where humans gather (for example, at a cozy local cocktail lounge like The Hourglass in Kimberley, BC), and after the playlists get played, the playlists then get shared for anyone else to listen to it whenever/wherever or whatever.

Click on an event poster below to listen on Spotify…

…and please feel strongly encouraged to reach out to ‘hey@95eh.ca’ if you would also like to try doing some kind of playlist/event thing with this ‘pretend, for real’ mountain town radio that is MOUN.TOWN/FM

And since we’ve now wandered slightly away from the idea of playlists that contain ‘95 tracks from 95 artists’ with those “socially distant dj sets”, I’ll just mention that there is also a monthly updated playlist (monthly updated with a new 54-track mix cd at the top) that contains ‘420 tracks from 420 artists’ at all times — which you can listen to / follow over on Spotify (or click over to the monthly updated blog post for more listening options + ongoing available-on-Bandcamp archive & more — and you can see the latest Shuffle Up’d 8 below:

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Why 420 total tracks/artists? Well, because 420 tracks guarantees that a playlist will play for 24hrs straight without ever repeating a track/artist once (things you discover while running internet radio stations) + also marijuana is legal in Canada now and there is that whole 42o connotation PLUS ALSO music often sounds even better when partaking in, wait… what was the question again?

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So I guess the main idea behind this whole ‘#HI54MIXCDS on MOUN.TOWN/FM’ thing is:

I metaphorically burn a bunch of ‘playlists-as-mix-cds-as-radio-programs’, which I keep in a public digital cd folder where anyone can grab one of the burned mix cd playlists to listen to whenever/wherever they are. To sweeten the deal, I update the mix cd playlists on the regular, putting new additions at the top and removing older tracks from the bottom to keep things fresh, and anyone who is following along get the musical updates auto-magically (and hopefully a few ears pass things on to friends with similar kind of ears because I have an unproven theory I’d like to test out about how passing on good music amongst ourselves often lead to more good things happening in our intersecting orbits).

At the very least, it sure beats lugging around a real cd folder of scratched silver discs or putting on the radio and having to hear a bunch of commercials in between the radio still playing the same songs over and over again. Especially when we’re able to access the same massive music catalogues the mainstream radios used to only have at their fingertips.

So for those looking to go even further into a mix cd playlist deep dive, I have a bunch of playlists that are either fairly new, or they’re playlist topics that my ears need to spend more time with in order to get up to the #HI54MIXCDS on MOUN.TOWN/FM required 95 tracks/artists per playlist “rule” — and you find those playlists over in the 'Still Baking’ section of HI54.BLOG:

I’ve also got a bunch of playlists that are a lot bigger than 95 tracks/artists. For example, there’s that yearly end-of-year tradition I do where I put together playlists based on the math that happens when you put a multiplication ‘x’ in the middle of the year (so, for example, 2022 becomes 20X22 which becomes a playlist of 440 tracks from the year 2022):

And then there are the ‘HI54 archive’ playlists:

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And let’s not forget about the ‘Guest Mixes’ that have no set rules on song counts / song selection besides whatever the guest chooses:

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OK… BUT HOW EXACTLY DO I LISTEN TO MOUNTOWN FM WHEREVER I GO, WHEREVER I AM, OR WHATEVER?

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Well, the short answer is, at the moment, you kinda need a Spotify account in order to get the *full* Mountown FM listening experience.

Now, before you go "f that… I'm not signing up for a Spotify account", please keep in mind that Spotify does offer FREE accounts. So if all you're after is some playlists to jam around to at home or at work (aka whilst connected to wifi), the inserted commercials that come with the free Spotify account are not much different than the commercials you get on the traditional AM/FM dials. And, it is worth noting, getting a Spotify account also comes with access to almost every album ever released, so besides being able to follow these nice human-curated Mountown FM playlists, your overall options for never-ending music discovery is just a lot higher with a Spotify account than any of the commercial radio stations you might currently tune into (also, Spotify is pretty good for podcasts).

If you want to be able to save any Spotify playlist for offline listening though (aka listening that doesn’t require a wifi connection or use any data), you’ll need to get a Premium Spotify account for about $10 a month or Spotify also offers a pretty decent Family Plan for multiple accounts in the same household.

But I’m not trying to sell you on Spotify, they’re just the streaming service I preferred ‘functionally’ more than all the other streaming options + as far as the listener side of things goes, Spotify is a pretty amazing thing to carry around in your pocket. BUT, like with a lot of big tech companies (or just big companies in general), the amount you pay for your consumer convenience on Spotify is not fairly distributed to all the artists providing the music. I’ve written about what working towards a fairer streaming model might look like over on my music blog back in 2020 if interested in the topic, but the TL;DR version is that Spotify (and the other streaming companies) are a great upgrade on the limited music discovery that was provided by traditional radio back before the internet existed (which I am old enough to vouch for), but the Spotifys of the world have not replaced the importance of still buying music and directly supporting the people who make the music that keep our lives nicely soundtracked.

And, unfortunately unsurprisingly, corporate streaming exploits the work of artists. Which sucks… but, thankfully, there are sites like Bandcamp that exist at the same time (while not perfect, they’re exponentially more artist-minded —although Bandcamp being bought by a megacorp that owns a part of Spotify took some wind out of my sails).

So it is here that I would like to inform you that Hype Machine made a handy online tool that will try and find the Bandcamp links for all the tracks in any given Spotify playlist — so just grab the link for any Spotify playlist that you’d like to see which artists you can directly support on Bandcamp, and then pop that link into the Merch Table.

Unfortunately, not all the tracks from a Spotify playlist will be available on Bandcamp, as some modern artists/labels still don’t have their music available on Bandcamp (for… reasons? 🤷‍♂️) + the Merch Table search is not 100% perfect in its searching. So, if Hype Machine’s tool didn’t find a track on Bandcamp that you were really keen on supporting, always remember that “Artist Name Track Name Bandcamp” is a pretty fast & reliable online detective too. Even just giving the artist a follow and/or shout-out on the socials goes a long way.

Also, since 2021, I’ve been keeping BuyMusic.Club lists going for all the tracks that get featured in a MountownFM Spotify playlist that are also available on Bandcamp (at the time of me checking) — so go give all the ‘get it on Bandcamp’ lists a browse over on BuyMusic.Club whenever you find yourself wanting to reward your ears while also sending back support directly to those who actually made the stuff.

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Ok, But what about…

Look, I 100% agree that streaming is currently not working properly for artists. And it’s a problem. But, like most things in capitalism, the wrong hands got into the pie and now the group that should be earning the most (ie. the creators) are only getting crumbs. This, like most things in capitalism, sucks and is stupid that we keep letting things work that way.

This is also way too big a topic to try and get into on a page where I am actively promoting streaming playlists. The conversation is important and we can do better (and should), but also:

I grew up pre-internet in a small town where the only access to “new music” was what they played on the corporate radio station. So as imperfect as streaming is working right now, on a whole I think the world is a better place the more accessible music is. Like, as broken as some things are, it really used to be way worse before the internet.

So, while we wait for better/fairer streaming options (still have my fingers crossed that Bandcamp will make some moves in this area), we have to at least use the streaming we have now to discover/listen to/share as much good music as we can and not let the Al Gore Rhythms decide who gets all the $treams.

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Because the world needs more human-generated shit and a hand-picked playlist done right (like the kind you'll find on #HI54MIXCDS / MIX CD RADIO) beats the hell out of the computer and actual payola generated versions you’ll find on the mainstream home pages. So if you hear something you like while checking out the Mix CDs on this site, hit the follow / subscribe buttons and tell a friend to do the same. And then go track down and support the artists outside of the streaming garden (ie. buy their music on Bandcamp, go to a live show, follow on socials, etc).

And if you’d like to submit your music for HI54 consideration, you can see what the latest submission details are over at hi54.blog/submit (although, the latest update to my ‘submission process’ is that I’m not accepting music submissions anymore)— and if you have any thoughts/compliments or etc, you can holler at me out on the socials:

#HI54MIXCDS on MOUN.TOWN/FM

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Jeremy // @HI54LOFI