That's not a complete non-sequitur - he's giving away the mix to celebrate the end of his toddling years and his imminent departure to infant's school.

You know who Blackdown is - he writes one of the best urban music blogs about, and is one of the few that knows and respects the history of what he's talking about.  It's funny to mention this now, as just yesterday me and Bao were chatting about the state of music journalism / music writing these days.  Any old codger like me can tell you how good the dance music mags were, back in the 1990s:  proper, in depth features, often running several pages, and usually going into a lot of detail.  These days, however Mixmag and DJ are full-on 'lifestyle' mags - nothing wrong with that, if you like that kind of thing, but it would seem that all the decent writing has gone either to The Wire or online to blogs like Blackdown's or Simon Reynolds.  Does that mean that decent dance music writing is less popular these days, that people don't really want to be doing with it when they could be reading about the latest £40 T-shirt?  Is it less relevant, or do people just think it's over-intellectualising something that is essentially disposable (until, perhaps, you add it up to a 'scene' level)?  There's a Baudrillard / Hyperreality argument to be had there, but D-Bridge is on Rinse so I'm f*cked if I'm getting into it now.  

Do you, dear reader, give a flying one about in-depth dance music writing these days?

Anyway, Blackdown's blog gets more popular by the day, so it's clear that some people certainly do, myself included.  Happy Birthday.

And so to the Hatcha mix.  2002(ish) era 2-steppy, post-garage, pre-dubstep, sub-breakstep mashup.  It's bloody great.  Get on it.

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i.d.