Believe it or not Young Traveller, there used to be far less context herein this info highway.
There was always hypertext, the platform for this platform, but the application (not the app, but the method itself) was altogether simpler: a beauty in what was marked-up not what was presented. Most then were mere tables of contents (often marked-up as tables as well) with a:unvisited blue links connecting us not with suss sites of click-through quizzes etc (the game being the big unlock, where that clicky-headline would be wrapped in Dumbot targeted ads) but rather to a diary entry containing exactly zero-metadata, beginning mid-tale, or full-flight, like you're witnessing the second of a tri-act performance. Or, if we were extremely fortunate on that day, some richer media: an image, or further rewarding, some sort of audio.
Music served online in this era was most commonly harshly compressed at near-cassette quality, twas such a hungry thing, a real byte-devourer that was ready to jump (unprompted) from some non-CDN enclosure, some over-heating rack-of-servers somewhere, down to your own non-portable device. Forty to forty-five minutes later we had the four megabytes of mystery: some weird latin thing with an electro beat, a yesteryear yelping punk 'n' trash thing, some terrible 1992 euro-pop thing or the best music we'd ever heard? That was the constant beautiful gamble of those years.
But time passed, as it does, and music blogs were hijacked by the gambling overlords or (more commonly) beaten down to irrelevance by the pros: a select few publications mirroring themselves on the failed print publications of the previous era. All loaded up with degrees in sentence structure, all about expertise and nerdery, and always unloading heaps of context. Snuck in amongst the 400mb car video advertisements, we get Wiki-bios of every whos-who six degrees from the subject, vast generation-hopping, genre-travelling hyperbole without word limits, whereby the once-anon author is freely able to parade their impressive level of detail (and vast array of research interns) for all the wwworld to behold. Bytes that woulda been better served by a simple well-placed hyperlink to a 128kb mp3.
Refreshing then that in a world of over-wordy music websites (oh, the internet without irony) there remain a select few forging through as everything rapidly evolves around them, those far more focused on feels than facts, happy to dance about architecture etc. Such is the beautiful world of 20 Jazz Funk Greats (XXJFG).
Not long ago XXJFG had a unique dystopian theme, with scenes randomly ripped from unread sci-fi fiction and then wrestled into position alongside some streamable, always interesting, rarely over-hyped music. More recently, it's gone more direct, and even personal arts-section critique at times, yet one constant remains: it's about the personal relationship with the music.
All good and swell (some proper passion alongside some inventive art will always be "my jam", as they say) but back on theme: context. Which comes to relevance for our chat here via XXJFG's weekly mixes, where there's no track-listing, practically no (valuable) description of the genre or theme and, most significantly, no explanation of the content contained within. Aside from the bloated CSS theme and ready-to-stream embedded player we're back in the aforementioned glory days of the early-web, yet now also with the added luxury of always-listening devices and clever software to assist us in identifying any particular unknown track that demands a deeper dive (rather than the early days approach of emailing the webmaster, via a cheeky non-anon whois look-up, for any details they might have.)
Most importantly though, the mixes are bloody great, both in quality and their format as a treasure-trove of unknown. Yet, much like the standalone single track posts, there's clear genre touch-points, putting them on the right side of the interesting/weird ratio. Perfect to set-n-forget ahead of a long drive west, meditative lie-down, code hole exhibition etc (what else is there in life.)
There's no specific archive for the site, let alone the 'Saturday Mixes' sub-category, but you can dig through some crates here.
This month's instalment (mp3 link, fittingly) is a decent starting point: all scrappy pop-facing punk at the start before slipping into some space-edge, minimal blips and blaps and plenty of other unidentifiables ahead of the standout moment - a wild, elongated gospel track. Blissful.