Every month The Mixtape Club, a project started by Micah Panama and Brian Thomas, publishes ten tapes contributed by guests from around the music world. The results are difficult to predict (this time they range from Alejandro Jodorowsky to the Beatnuts): but then everyone seems to have their own rules for the construction of these somehow ceremonial mixes. On their info page, they quote Nick Hornby’s book High Fidelity: “A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker, to hold the attention and then you’ve got to up it a notch, or cool it a notch, …” Many of my old pals insisted there could only be one song per artist, or that the ideal length was a 45-minute, or a 30-minute side, or that there ought to be some sort of comprehensible message. In the film version of High Fidelity, the protagonist characterizes this as “using someone else’s poetry to express yourself.” I dunno; that sentiment is something I’ve always found to be pretty specious, and probably undesirable. The songs keep their own poetry: that’s why you want to listen to them.

For the July episode of the Mixtape Club, I sent Micah the second half of a tape I made about a year ago, Always Crashing In The Same Car. The night time complement to a brighter, more trebly first half, it chugs from the early Tears for Fears through a forest of 70s and 80s synthesizers before arriving at the present with the Chromatics’ cover of “Running Up That Hill,” originally by Kate Bush. Ever since I started dubbing things onto Maxell XLIIs in fourth grade, I’ve tended to engineer these things for roadtrips or late-night car rides. Originally they were heterogenous to a fault, leaning heavily on Graceland and dipping into contemporary alt-radio hits from the time, but sometimes would bafflingly digress into a crackly Vladimir Horowitz performance or some other passing fancy. That formula took a turn when I started driving (and discovered girls). This one draws its lineage from that later era, when the midnight drive home called for something that stayed a course, but still took you from one place to another.

Comments

1. ↩ aileen / 2 July 2010

   what a fitting graphic!