DOWNLOAD: Mixtape Muse's August 2011 Mixtape

The day has finally arrived. You can now download our first ever mixtape, simply titled "August 2011 Mixtape" -- because any title I came up with past that just sounded like I was trying too hard. Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD: Drop Electric - Finding Color In the Ashes

Photo by Jeanine Caron

One of the hardest things to process is the unexpected death of a loved one – and it’s even harder when it’s not the loss of one person but the loss of an entire family. Life is defined by one’s own set of concrete facts and beliefs – those things that help a person make sense of the world. Losing that sense of understanding is utterly devastating as the world you knew is no longer a home but a new, almost foreign place. It’s one of the harder lessons that life deals out, and something that provokes both change and maturation.

In 2008, Washington, D.C.-based Drop Electric were forced to make sense out of a horrible, shocking tragedy. That year, the family of the band’s now former lead singer, Padma Soundararajan, died in a terrible car accident while on pilgrimage in India. The relationship that’s forged between the individuals that make up a band is an incredibly close one; your bandmates are not just friends, they are a second family. So, when Soundararajan learned what had happened to her family in India, Ramtin Arablouei (drums), David Garber (keys), Neel Singh (guitar), Sho Fujiwara (guitar) and Patrick Morris (visuals) all felt connected to the loss. Her pain and troubling emotions were, by extension, felt by all of Drop Electric.