Summertime Mixtape Vol. 5 – Danny Garcia ‘Inhabitants’

Danny Garcia’s curtains-drawing part in ‘Mosaic’ somewhat was the Guy Mariano ‘Mouse’ part to Stefan Janoski’s preceding Eric Koston position, but by the time Habitat came with ‘Inhabitants’ four years later Danny Garcia was transitioning from hubba-gracing gentle giant to brooding, button-up troubadour. His flick though remained among the best on the market, regular, switch, toe or heel, and his early embrace of colourful socks and surf-loose trucks extends this part’s shelf life such that someone could release it today and generally remain in step with where things stand, similar to former Lakai compadre Anthony Pappalardo’s ‘Fully Flared’ section. Few dudes then or now can hand a switch heelflip with such grace, and dudes still aren’t that much doing frontside shove-it backside nosegrind reverts both regular and switch in the same parts. Even as he turned up the lilting psychadelia and the cruising, and dialed back on the thunder gaps, you can now and then glimpse Danny Garcia’s All City roots, like in that loading dock line with the switch shove-it nosegrind revert.

Summertime Mixtape Vol. 5 – Ryan Nix ‘The Good Life’

From the dungeons of the dearly-missed Joe Perrin’s body of work comes this snapshot in time of Ryan Nix, after his seven-minute Bootleg 3000 opener but before his industry exit, where his skating was peaking. This ender part in Westside’s seminal ‘Good Life’ vid cribs some musical supervision from the Blind section in ‘Trilogy’ for the deeply Floridian Ryan Nix to push some heavy frontside noseslides, ride out a window-rattling switch 360 flip, and step to celebrated spots across Philadelphia and other eastern seaboard locales; did anybody else hit that Boston gap to rail besides PJ Ladd? Whereas much is made of the current ‘anything goes’ era in terms of tricks and approach, in the five-panel heyday of 2006, Ryan Nix put out there a part with both a switch varial flip and a street switch stalefish.