Regular readers know that for the last year and a half, I've been been re-acquainting myself with the global contemporary music scene, a good two decades after I was at the height of my contemporary music awareness (i.e. my undergraduate years, where at one point I was a DJ for two different college radio stations and a local danceclub simultaneously), mostly through the endless series of music blogs and "song of the day" podcasts that now exist. But this isn't the only way I keep up with modern music these days; I also subscribe to several podcasts devoted to dance-music "beat mixes," sometimes known as "board mixes" because of basically being recordings of DJs at their actual mixing board, complete with fades and beat-matching and the whole thing. Such mixes (usually lasting from a half-hour to two hours) are essentially like sitting down at a club and listening to your favorite DJ work their magic, only without having to go to the actual club; it's a situation my friends and I would've killed for back in my youth, as the shoebox in the back of my closet full of old fourth-generation board-dub cassettes from the late '80s can attest.

And one of my favorites is the simply titled Music For Midnight, a one-man operation produced and hosted by Austin Beeman. An Ohio-based media professional during the day, Beeman apparently caught the electronica bug during a stint in Europe when younger, and especially for the darker sounds of ambient, trance, triphop and more; every week, then, he puts out a new half-hour mix devoted to a specific theme or subject, and sometimes devotes an entire episode to an upcoming album by a single artist. The shows are sometimes hit-and-miss, frankly, but that's a big part of why I love it so much; that since these mixes are such a direct reflection of Beeman's individual tastes as a DJ, and since he goes so out of his way to find music that others aren't featuring, the episodes that click really do so in this profound way, even when by the nature of the situation, that comes with episodes that sometimes don't. Whatever the case, it's always a great little treat awaiting me in iTunes every week (and here's the podcast's iTunes listing, by the way), something that always feels perfect to listen to late at night while in a pensive mood; it makes me wonder whether the tagline Beeman uses to open each mix ("It is now one minute after midnight...") reflects the actual recording conditions, of whether it actually is late at night when he puts together these episodes to begin with. It comes highly recommended to all my fellow electronica fans.