A few weeks ago I got an email from a Chicago DJ named Chrissy Murderbot announcing a new project: a year's worth of weekly themed mixtape. My Year of Mixtapes sounded kind of cute, but there's a lot of music out there, especially in the form of mixtapes and/or podcasts. I can barely keep up with the weekly podcast from the techno site Resident Advisor and the two offered Mondays and Fridays by London's FACT Magazine. That's not to mention both sites regularly point to other DJ sets, and that's not to mention this monster of an archive, which offers some 25,000 archived sets.

So what's one more project got to offer? In Chrissy Murderbot's case, a lot.

I haven't played all 12 of the mixes yet, though I'm working on it: finishing up no. 5, New Jack Swing, as I type this. It's fantastic—37 tracks in 67 minutes, the whole thing as smooth (or maybe I mean smoove) as that herky-jerkiest of R&B styles can be. New jack swing, after all, was the music that first merged R&B songwriting and harmonizing with hip-hop beats, and the meld could be awkward—have snares ever clattered so much in any pop style? But it sounds innocent now in a way no one at the time could have predicted—or, given how much coarser pop culture has grown in the decades since, necessarily have wanted to. Either way, the mix is great; special props for including Redhead Kingpin & the F.B.I.'s "Pump It Hottie," with its coda featuring Kingpin telling each hottie on the floor who they're going to pump it up for:

The other Murderbot mixes alternate between period and sonic through-lines, as with Week 1: Tin Pan Tape (juicy turn-of-the-'90s dancehall) and Week 9: Ambient Jungle (can't wait to A-B this with Woebot's wondrous FACT Mix 61), and thematic mixes such as Week 2: Robot Love, which contains maybe my favorite segue of the year so far: James Brown's "Sex Machine" sliding slowly into the Pointer Sisters' "Automatic." I've loved both songs for ages, and never thought in 100 years they'd work together so well—much less for the half-minute or so Murderbot uses to join them. Don't just take my word for it.