Good Morning Friends! I have been planning some nonsense for awhile now and today represents the first day of a new series on this blog. As a GenXer I come from the golden age of the Mixtape, and was one of those people who would create lots of them and often times hand out to friends. The thing that has been lost in the age of the single and iTunes is that there used to be an intelligence to the placement of songs on an album. There were various bands that had what I used to call a “listen through” experience, where the flow of the music would happen in just the right way to have high points and low points and provide an experience that was greater than the sum of its parts.
When I used to build mixtapes for my friends, or as an often times failed vehicle for flirtation… I attempted to apply this same sort of care to the placement of songs. The majority of my life I always had some sort of soundtrack to my activities that would be playing in the background. I would associate songs with places and people and now listening back to any of those invokes this tapestry of feelings and memories along with a very concrete sense of time and place. However for the majority of the past decade this has been absent in my life and replaced with a combination of NPR and podcasts. Very recently I have been immersing myself in music and it is like a sense that I had once lost came rushing back to me.
Along with this has come the desire to start building mixtapes once again. I’ve cobbled together a number of these and I decided that the best way to share them with you my friends… is to do a weekly column of sorts. I am notoriously bad at keeping this sort of thing going for very long, but for until I get distracted by some other shiny object… I will be posting a new mixtape every Monday morning.
Contours of Indecision
This first mix tape has more of an industrial bent. I often times gave my mixtapes pretentious names, so I figured I would start off this process with a doozy. I spent hours adding and removing songs from the list until I ended up with a balanced product that sorta fades in on a strong note and releases you on a very melancholy and reflective note. There are a lot of what I would consider rarities on this specific mix tape, or places where an artist is acting in a manner other than what we expect from them. I hope you enjoy, here is the manifest:
Burn – The Cure
Everything’s Ruined – Faith No More
All Wrong – God Lives Underwater
Eye – Smashing Pumpkins
I’m Afraid of Americans – David Bowie and Trent Reznor
The Witch – The Cult
Ruiner – Nine Inch Nails
Animal – Prick
Down – Gravity Kills
Army of Me – Bjork
Trip Like I Do – Filter with Crystal Method
Girl – Beck
Tech Noir – Gunship
For those without Access to Spotify, I also have provided this in a YouTube Playlist, with the key difference being you won’t get my custom album artwork.
