Welcome to our annual-but-only-when-I-feel-like-it-late-December/Hanukkah/Christmas/year-end-wrap-up post here at HHIR, the final Digital Crates post of the year, at least. I’d like to take this early opportunity to wish you and yours a sweet 2026.
It was a tumultuous 2025 for yours truly. Los Angeles was set ablaze on just the second week of the year. Thankfully my neighborhood wasn’t directly affected, but the sight in the sky was apocalyptic. I drowned out the sounds of wailing LAFD sirens with music, as I breezed through a slew of my ol’ west coast sample sets, soaking up soulful and fonky sounds, re-upping and repackaging them for Digital Crates 013. Then, I recapped every track from 2024 that featured one or more Griselda artist with… Griselda 2024. (I’ve amassed so much Conway/Benny/Gunn/Stove/Rome/Boldy MP3s over the years, it’s borderline comically absurd.) Later, I combined Freddie Gibbs and Alchemist’s Alfredo I and II albums into a singular, action-packed, Godfatheresque double-feature/standalone-saga. Next, and for whatever reason, I got deeper into my bootleg cassette bag and merged two BAD albums from 1987 into, again, one single tape. Also in September, just after Young Noble left the physical plane in July, I traveled back to 1996 and compiled all of Noble’s studio collabs with his big brother 2Pac. It was around that time, too, when Raekwon dropped The Emperor’s New Clothes, which I probably played more than any other 2025 Mass Appeal project. I extended TENC’s runtime with my Killa Bee-Sides Edition, and later compiled and released plenty more Chef tracks that I’d accumulated during my diggings. And finally, to wrap up 2025, I decided instead to head into a throwback state of mind, and I took it back to ’95.
Like I said, it was a tumultuous 2025. Really, a tumultuous few years over here. As I may have mentioned earlier on the site, or elsewhere on social media, my grandmother fell ill a few years ago. This prompted me to start a Patreon page to gauge whether folks would be willing to support the site, and by extension at the time, supplementally assist me in providing nurse case for my grandmother. Lemme just say right now: thank you to the generous patrons - backers for what I’m still trying to do here at HHIR - for providing not just financial, but communal encouragement and support. Sadly, my grandmother passed away earlier this year. May her memory be a blessing. With few exceptions, because of the sadness brought upon by her passing, I ain’t wanna play new music, my Abuela died. So instead, I took to clearing and cleaning various external hard drives. Coping mechanism? Not necessarily. This is a project that’s been a work in progress for quite a while. I call it… Digital Crates.
What even is Digital Crates? I never explained it. Better late than never. And that’s actually the philosophy, really! My external hard drive…s…sssss… took over my life at a certain point. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But I’ve always tried to be meticulous with ID3 tagging. (You know, to make sure that the music I’m listening to has the correct titles for songs, albums, artists, etc.) Well, my ‘Unsorted’ folder..s…sssss… are just too dambed big. But with Digital Crates, I have an opportunity to move my music files from Unsorted to Sorted piles. Sisyphean af. Navigating my labyrinthian hard drives is no joke. And here at HHIR, there’s always been a twofold approach to sharing music with the masses: 1. Sharing music, duh. But first: 2. I’ve gotta organize it properly! I know that seems somewhat passé in the streaming era, but I’m still a music hoarder/pirate at heart, and the Digital Crates initiative gives me the opportunity to re-assess, re-organize my troves of music, and sometimes develop those fascinations and machinations into a passion project in and of itself. As all of this pertains to Digital Crates 015 specifically: I decided to dig up all of my UNSORTED 1995 singles. After cleaning them all up, they looked like this:
Like I said, it was a tumultuous 2025. Really, a tumultuous few years over here. As I may have mentioned earlier on the site, or elsewhere on social media, my grandmother fell ill a few years ago. This prompted me to start a Patreon page to gauge whether folks would be willing to support the site, and by extension at the time, supplementally assist me in providing nurse case for my grandmother. Lemme just say right now: thank you to the generous patrons - backers for what I’m still trying to do here at HHIR - for providing not just financial, but communal encouragement and support. Sadly, my grandmother passed away earlier this year. May her memory be a blessing. With few exceptions, because of the sadness brought upon by her passing, I ain’t wanna play new music, my Abuela died. So instead, I took to clearing and cleaning various external hard drives. Coping mechanism? Not necessarily. This is a project that’s been a work in progress for quite a while. I call it… Digital Crates.
What even is Digital Crates? I never explained it. Better late than never. And that’s actually the philosophy, really! My external hard drive…s…sssss… took over my life at a certain point. Okay, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. But I’ve always tried to be meticulous with ID3 tagging. (You know, to make sure that the music I’m listening to has the correct titles for songs, albums, artists, etc.) Well, my ‘Unsorted’ folder..s…sssss… are just too dambed big. But with Digital Crates, I have an opportunity to move my music files from Unsorted to Sorted piles. Sisyphean af. Navigating my labyrinthian hard drives is no joke. And here at HHIR, there’s always been a twofold approach to sharing music with the masses: 1. Sharing music, duh. But first: 2. I’ve gotta organize it properly! I know that seems somewhat passé in the streaming era, but I’m still a music hoarder/pirate at heart, and the Digital Crates initiative gives me the opportunity to re-assess, re-organize my troves of music, and sometimes develop those fascinations and machinations into a passion project in and of itself. As all of this pertains to Digital Crates 015 specifically: I decided to dig up all of my UNSORTED 1995 singles. After cleaning them all up, they looked like this:
Turn It Up!!
🎧
