Download The Hood Internet's 10th Anniversary Mixtape

By Tankboy in Arts & Entertainment on Mar 30, 2017 3:27PM

The Hood Internet gets ready to boot up at Lollapalooza in 2009, photo by Jim Kopeny / Tankboy.

It was ten years ago that The Hood Internet—Chicago duo of Steve Reidell (STV SLV) and Aaron Brink (ABX)—started dropping their mash-ups of indie rock bands and hip-hop/pop artists. They had a music blog where they posted new songs almost daily, and it was mainly a side project for the two men, who were playing together in Chicago band May Or May Not at the time. In fact, at the outset, The Hood Internet hadn't really considered themselves as a live entity. That changed later that year, when I asked the group to play Chicagoists third (?!) anniversary show. Reidell recalls:

We finished the first Hood Internet mixtape—a best-of what we’d made thus far—days before our first live show, which was less of a show and moreso lowbrow performance art: we blasted The Mixtape Volume One through the venue’s in-house mixer, and pretended to load vinyl records into our laptops for an hour.

It's been a pretty wild trip for the duo since then, including national tours, major headlining slots and numerous music festival appearances. They still crank out the mash-ups but they've done a number of collaborations with other artists, and even got around to releasing an album full of the group's original material, lest you think they're merely wizards at beat-matching two incongruent seeming pre-existing songs.

In honor of this, The Hood Internet has released a new mixtape. Reidell sums it up nicely:

It’s now 2017 and here we are with The Mixtape Volume Ten, aaaand wait. What’s with the subtitle—Best of The Hood Internet—is this some sort of greatest hits album from, uh, a website that DJs? Really? Yes. It is exactly that. Much like the first mixtape was a best-of everything we’d made to that point, this ten-year retrospective is 50 of our best blends (blends! there’s another synonym for you) from the catalog that we’ve willed into existence over the last decade.

Stream this trip down memory lane below, or click through the player to their Soundcloud page and download the mix as a keepsake of this milestone.