Music recommendations (2025)

As we complete another lap around the sun, I take stock of what has happened this year and filter my favourite music from the thousands of tracks I’ve listened to throughout 2025. Let’s go!

Suspended in a beam of sunlight

After my 2024 year end DJ mix (which I listen to a lot and am really proud of!) I produced a handful of other mixes throughout the year. I use the fantastic DJ.Studio app and a few other tools.

2025: over 4,000 tracks from over 600 releases, with a total listening time of over 30,000 minutes.

This mix saw me start out with 82 tracks totalling more than 5 hours of music, which over the course of a few days were whittled down to the final running order. I wanted to use samples to add some vibes, similar to my “Blade Runner” dnb mix. After a bit of back and forth I settled on Carl Sagan talking wistfully about the cosmos and our place within it, taken from “Pale Blue Dot” and “Cosmos”.

To get the vocal samples I saved the audio from YouTube, split it into stems to isolate the vocals, then cut and arranged them in DJ Studio taking care to either quantise, or not, to get a specific pacing of delivery. I ended up going with quite philosophical snippets. The most difficult aspect was the need to tweak the EQ of samples from different sources so they sounded like the same person.

Listen on MixCloud.

24 tracks with a duration of 1h12m22s.

Playlists

Catch the Vibe

If you want to listen to a couple of tracks that gives the vibe of this mix try these:

“Music For Tonight” by MPC GIRL USAGI (2025)

“Diamonds” by B FROM E (2025)

…and my song of the year:

“otozure” by iri (2025)

Bonus: music of the year