It is that time again to do the roundup of notable musical moments of passing year. It wasn't a bad one for de'fchild productions. Work and play officially moved from Montréal to SF, our first two vinyl 12" records have done very well and things are looking bright for 2006!

Maybe it was the move and the new daily commute that had me listening to a lot of 1+ hour chunks of music on my portable players or maybe it was the prominence of portals such as de:bug pod, p45, oseao and blentwell in my browser history!! Nevertheless, I listened to a *lot* of mixtapes, blends and dj sets, more so than individual tracks or un-mixed albums. So this year, I scrapped the list of acquired albums and fave singles. Rather I present some of the better blends that moved and grooved me this year:

• The mother of all motherloads: The kind folks over at dubstep.blogspot have utterly outdone themselves and just about everybody else with the quantity, quality and sheer amount of great music in this post. In short, they've gone completely hog wild! It took me about 4 hours on a super highspeed broadband connection to download all these puppies. All in all about 6 gigabytes of love. Check the tracklistings at the bottom of the post.

• Last march, DJ Joe nice from gourmetbeats, dished up a stunning dubstep mix while down with the flu! Killer tracks by all the usual suspects, Digital Myztikz, Kode9 and Loefah. Check out the brilliant Monsoon remix by Loefah about 29 minutes into the blend! Massive!

• p45 radio with host DJ new.com from comfort noise productions, Zurich features a consistently super tight monthly 4 hour radio show highlighting new deepdubtech sounds from around the planet! Check out the archives under the ->radio rubric.

• this one is computerised is a super short and sweet grime-y set, blended on da computer. Absolutely no turntables were greased up in this production. haha. Its all good from riddim.ca.

• Houston So Real gave us this recording of Dizze Rascal, DJ Wonder and the GRiT Boys on Damage Control Radio. In-depth interview with Dizzee and Wonder, who then take over the mics and drop serious freestyle knowledge over southern beats, tag-teaming with the GRiT Boys. Freestylin' southern raps, grime & crunk for quick minds.

• Sami Koivikko, the illustrious finnish producer on shitkatapult, pretty much single-handely takes home the minimal tech mixtape accolades with his batch of high quality mixtapes. Lots of great stuff for all tastes techno & haus.

• DEEPVOL1-4. Four very serious grime and bassline mixes brought to you by DJ Lioness. I recommend listening to them sequentially, at least once, as there is mad meta-coherence in betwixt the volumes!

• Blue Beats for Longing by DJ Flack. Awesome instrumental beats. Love your gal/guy/pet/cookie-jar long time to this one!

Woebot has completely outdone himself in his recent post on his top 100 records of all time! And I'm not alone in being largely ignorant of a lot of the music that he talks about. But that is okay and makes for rich & fertile ground for explorations in da new year.

Pic taken from the live painting by the HVW8 crew at the December 21 dubout party @ Salon Daomé.

Check out the latest show (archived under the radio link) by selectors DJ new.com and special guests over at comfort noise productions as they tear up the decks with their usual deftness!

Also just announced, Ruoho Ruotsi will be doing a liveset for the January 2006 p45 show featuring a blend of deepdubtech delights thursday, January 19th, 2006 from 8 to 12 p.m. GMT + 1.

Blackdown soundboy over the last week or so has featured a tasty selection of producers like Kode9 and Plasticman (grime), critics like Sherburne (techno) and DJs such as Joe Nice (dubstep), etc ... all coming atcha direct with takes on the passing year and their respective best-of-zz. Correct!!

A must tonite over @ Rx Gallery, Broker/Dealer will be dropping mad knowledge live and direct @ POP.

Check this deeply reverberant and sonorous 2 hour set by Deadbeat, live at the Space Lab Yellow in Tokyo!