This year, I’m attempting to distil the essentials out of my unwieldy music collection into a couple of new mix series. No surprise that one of the subjects will be the ever-present 'cosmic' tag.
Cosmic music (for me) is the genre between all genres, a vibe that can be found everywhere from folk to goth to disco. The centre of gravity around which it all orbits is the 1980s, & there is definitely a new wave/post punk/leftfield disco idea at the heart of it, but when combing through everything I've tagged 'cosmic', there's more than that. It's not just that 100bpm balearic tropical disco thing. But it does have something to do with viewing everything as dance music, be the tempo fast or slow, the beat upfront or barely present.
Compiling chronologically seems against the cosmic grain, as often it works best when apparently disparate tracks are dropped next to each other, but I needed some arbitrary system to get things going. Plus it's interesting to hear things develop over time.
