Music blogging has its pitfalls, to be sure. It doesn’t pay the bills. Wandering from the reservation gets you in serious hot water. Your work output suffers. And everyone is a critic, even when you’re the critic.

But none of those pitfalls are as gravely serious as the song mash. We’ve all been there, starting one track while totally oblivious to the fact that another track is already loading in another window, e voilà: accordion meets hard rock. Hip-hop meets strum-strum. Post rock’s bewildering miscellany meets outlaw folk’s singleness of purpose.

Sometimes the combination sounds groundbreaking, at other times, like a calamitous mess. But it’s always unexpected, it always takes a minute to sort things out. Today’s song mash is explicitly Patrick’s fault, submitting as he did the new 3.1 video to this blog’s most dedicated Apse fan (does it go without saying that you’ll need to open that page in a new tab?). The track comes from 2009′s “Best of” candidate Climb Up. His timing was exquisite, since “God Bless the Ottoman Empire” — a track of almost identical length — was queued up and ready to play. That second track is from A Hawk and a Hacksaw’s 2006 LP The Way The Wind Blows. Sample it below.

There are three ways to hear a song mash: first, track A is dominant, B is accent. Second, track B is dominant, track A is accent. Third: mano a mano death match, in which the volume knobs are set to 11 on both tracks. If the present correspondent can add a brief moment of the first person singular, I much prefer Apse set to 8, and AHAAH set to, say, 6. Go to town.

PS, If you have trouble getting two videos to play in separate windows, try also this free MP3 download of 3.1.