Throughout the week, a whole lot of material gets posted here on XLR8R. And while we know—and love—that some hardcore readers will eagerly pour over every single news story, interview, podcast, video, and MP3 download that appears on the site, we also realize that for most people, it’s impossible to see everything, which means that some quality XLR8R content is likely to get missed in the hustle and bustle of everyone’s daily lives. In the interest of making it easier for everyone to catch up, every Friday we present The Lowdown, a weekly wrap-up of the top 10 tidbits from our site.

1. UK duo Disclosure (pictured above) put together an exclusive mix for the final XLR8R podcast of 2012. The mix was so popular that it temporarily crashed our website when it went live on Tuesday morning.

2. Southern California beatmaker Nosaj Thing let us poke around his music lair and snap photos of all his gear for the latest edition of our In the Studio series.

3. Ben UFO, Untold, Tiga, Ben Klock, and T. Williams gave us their thoughts on the current state of the mix-CD format in a feature we simply titled The Art of the Mix CD.

4. Our Best of 2012 coverage begins next week, and this year we’d like the XLR8R audience to also have its say, so we’ve unveiled an official Readers Poll. Voting is still open, so let us know what you did—and didn’t—like during the past 12 months.

5. As we do every time the calendar flips, we compiled a list of the previous month’s most popular tunes from our Downloads section. Check out the Top 20 Downloads of November.

6. Germany’s Motor City Drum Ensemble has been relatively quiet in 2012, but he’s going to kick off 2013 by dropping a new EP in January.

7. We were sad to hear that UK producer Ewan Roberts (a.k.a. Offshore) unexpectedly passed away this week.

8. In what may very well be the wildest tale to ever appear on XLR8R, the latest installment of our Trainwreck series found DVA recounting a harrowing weekend of robbery, police brutality, and moped accidents in Ayia Napia.

9. For the third time this year, shadowy producer Burial suddenly announced the impending release of a new 12″. The two-track effort will hit shops later this month.

10. In a week full of surprises, NY’s Percussion Lab crew suddenly dropped a star-studded compilation, Cambio, which offered new tunes from Sepalcure, Machinedrum, Daedelus, XI, and others. They also passed along Shigeto’s contribution, “Friends and Lovers,” as a free download.

An expanded version of the The Lowdown is also available via a weekly email newsletter. Those interested in an even more in-depth round-up of XLR8R content, including a complete listing of all the free downloads we’ve offered in the past seven days, should sign up by entering their email address below.

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