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You’re probably sick of reading about the best music of 2011 already but I got so inspired by Sara and decided to do yet another post which turned out a lot bigger than I’d originally planned. To be honest, this year I mostly kept losing track of new music. I was incredibly slow and uninformed, didn’t have enough patience to listen to all the new songs and on top of it all there weren’t any releases that totally blew my mind – or maybe I just didn’t let them grow on me. However, here’s my selection of 100 songs from the past year.

Disclaimer: I found it incredibly hard to remember which records actually came out this year so I had to trust Google and Wikipedia with it, and if a song is included in my list it means the record it is on came out in 2011 (even though the song might have been released earlier). And of course these tracks are not necessarily my all time favourite songs ever, I mean, it’s one hundred songs, but I tried to put together a nice compilation.

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Christmas is over, presents are exchanged, all food is eaten, most of the cookies are gone. And I’m so glad I still have a week left here which I am going to spend sleeping and being productive. When I’m here I usually stay up until around 6am which massively fucks up my sleeping pattern but for some reason I never get to sleep earlier. The fridge is full of weird fizzy drinks, all these bottles of liquids by fancy brands and in the evening I’m sitting in the living room in my pyjamas, stuffing myself with a box of Ferrero Rondnoirs, helping helping my brother with his website and playing around with mine, installing a new archive for instance and then going back to reading gossip communities on Livejournal. And this is the soundtrack:

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December 17, Saturday night and I’m staying in for a change, drinking hot chocolate in bed, watching videos, unable to sleep. One more week and I literally can’t wait to get on my flight and get out of the city, sleep in everyday, eat the most amazing food, sit in front of the fireplace, read, write, listen to music, go for walks and be in the city that now feels far away and still so very familiar. I need to recharge my batteries so badly. In the meantime, I put together another mixtape of songs I listen to at the moment, some dark, distorted and calm, yet pretty energetic tunes.

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This is probably the most random mixtape I ever put together but it’s one of my favourites so far. Inspired by long nights, escaping the summer, rainy days and lots of random thoughts. I’m having the whole month of July off which gives me time for some thinking, getting important things done, reading, tidying up the place & just sleeping. I’m exhausted and I have no idea why, I feel like packing my bags again and running away – not travelling in a discovering-new-places kinda way, just going away for a while. Luckily I’m off to London on Wednesday to escape the big city for an even bigger one.

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Spring is the right time for a mixtape because the good weather is still all fresh and makes you feel like going out and doing things, it reminds you of the good times you had outside, in parks, summer open airs with music and then there’s all these evenings at home when someone puts on music. Nostalgic and anticipating at the same time. No matter how old or new the songs are, whether they’re acoustic or electronic, I just love collecting music to capture the feel of a certain time.

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Dirty Doering – I Would. The Dø – Slippery Slope. Solomun – The Way Back. Lykke Li – I Follow Rivers (The Magician Remix). Oliver Koletzki feat. Mieze Katz – This Is Leasure. Dapayk & Padberg feat. Caro – Island (Noze Remix). YUCK – Get Away. Bibio – Light Sleep. Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros – Home. Xiu Xiu – Chocolate Makes You Happy. The Maccabees – No Kind Words. Die Piratenbraut – 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 und 20. James Blake – Limit To Your Love. David Bowie – Changes. Metronomy – She Wants. Tocotronic – Explosion. Burial & Four Tet – Moth. Kleerup – Thank You For Nothing. Jamie T – Earth, Wind & Fire. The Grand Spectacular – Being A Dickhead’s Cool.

Since I temporarily moved into this guest house I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands. Don’t get me wrong, I chose to live isolated for a while, the only company being my family who I occasionally see for lunch and my computer which I mainly use for silly games, series, reading, Facebook chatting or music. It’s interesting since I had reached a point in the past where I simply wasn’t able to listen to music anymore. Every single tune I’d put on would immediately bring up some sort of memory, good, bad, mostly both, that would completely distract me from enjoying it. I was unable to just lie down, listen to a song and enjoy the simple brilliance of it and get lost in the music. At least not on my own and sober. I don’t even remember how it happened, but after a week of almost complete social isolation I eventually decided to put on a song again, “Station To Station”, one of my favourites by David Bowie and I spent the past days listening to him again continuously. It’s that kind of music that seems too classic to even talk about it and yet it became my perfect soundtrack for this time and restored my ability to do nothing but listen to music. I’d love to be born earlier and absorb the whole feeling of different generations coined by their music. Like the film-version of Christiane F. who runs away from the police through a shopping centre at night time, accompanied by the German version of “Heroes” and eventually ends up seeing her idol live, the unapproachable Thin White Duke. Not a cinematic masterpiece if you ask me although Tarantino supposedly called that one scene one of the best concert scenes in movies. But regardless of the film that mainly romanticised heroin, and regardless of the fact I clearly write my weirdest posts at night after most of my senses have left me, David Bowie’s records definitely contain some of the most amazing music I’ve ever come across and I’m so glad some time on my own has finally got me into the brilliance of the music again that I’ve loved for such a long time.