I've been listening to a lot of mixtapes in the last year and a half - meaning podcast mixes…. None has quite inspired me as much as the recent Hidden Orchestra Flight mixtape. So much so that for the first time in over a year I took the time to lay down with no other distractions to listen to the mix through headphones. And once I had done that, I had to write about it. It's that amazing...

The Flight Mixtape feels more like an ode than a simple mix. There's none of the one-song-after-the-next you usually get on mixes, the quality determined by how obsute a remix you can find or how well you can smash up to tunes. Instead, this feels like a surprisingly intimate journey through a loved audio scrapbook.

The artistic souls behind Hidden Orchestra have a keen appreciation of texture, of deep but not necessarily dense sounds. The attention to sound texture is also apparent in the recorded spoken segments, and the quote "an ugly sound in a beautiful context" leaps to mind (though I find very little "ugly sound" in the mix). There is clearly a love of alternative hip hop, and perhaps borne from that a fine tuned ear for the texture of snare drums. The mix is an almost endless journey of shuffling drums layered on top of each other that is the jazz-meets-drum-n-bass syncopation characteristic of Hidden Orchestra.

Listening to this mix reminds me of how I felt the first time I listened to DJ Shadow's Entroducing… I'm similarly awestruck at the meld of sounds that worked impossibly together against the odds; the conscious nods to jazz poetry via Shake Green (or Amiri Baraka in the former); and the glorious possibility evoked in great mixing.

The mix is available via the equally awesome (and for me, nowadays, local) ParisDJs.com site. And while you're at it, check out the other two Hidden Orchestra mixes - Night Walks and Outlook Festival.