Good Morning Folks! I hope you all had a wonderful weekend. This Mixtape is a week late because, quite honestly, last Monday I forgot entirely that I had one sitting waiting in the pocket to be released. However, it seems like destiny might have shone upon me because this morning is going to be a bit of a mess as I have a very early medical appointment, and don’t really have time to bang out a proper blog post. I am hoping to return to weekly releases after this one again, because I enjoy making these and honestly… I end up listening to them as much as any of you might. Now, to preface my explainer as to why I make these… I have always loved the craft of placing songs in a specific order to create a unique mix that matches a specific mood or theme. Oftentimes, these end up with an anchor song and then attempt to make something that flows together with that single song. Others, like today, are more just that I have been in a specific mood and chose songs to go with that mood. I’ve explained this theory a bunch of times by now, but I don’t necessarily take for granted that someone has read every blog post, or honestly ANY of the previous Mixtape Mondays posts.
27 – Fear Loathing Flesh
If you have consumed any of my posts to date, you might have gleaned that I am dealing with a colorectal cancer diagnosis. It’s really hard waking up every morning and seemingly hearing about another person who has died from this disease, and it feels really prevalent. I am sure this is just selection bias… for example, I had never noticed a Nissan Quest on the road until my sister-in-law got one, and then I saw them constantly. Brains are great at pattern recognition when you are looking for something specific. I’ve been ina pretty dark place over the last few weeks because I am effectively in a holding pattern with no forward momentum yet… and what feels like a ticking time bomb inside of me. As a result, I have been listening to much darker music lately, and this is a mix that more or less fits that mood. This mix honestly caused me to find a song that was completely new to me, because none of the US streaming options seemed to have Melt by Front 242, so instead I substituted a really interesting cover by Helalyn Flowers. Probably my favorite thing is when one of these Mixtapes turns someone on to a new song or musician that they had never heard of before, and I feel like maybe this one has more chance of that given that it is crossing a few different musical worlds.
The funny thing about this Mix particularly, is that it has what I would consider to be a “phantom anchor”, because this did start off with Down In It by Nine Inch Nails being a sort of thread that I was pulling upon. However, the more songs that fell in place, the less and less that song really felt like it fit anymore. So I removed it and replaced it with Reptile that seemed to fit much more neatly into the emerging theme. I am pretty sure this is not the first time I have attempted to make a mix with that song, but I never actually ended up creating anything that flowed in the way that I wanted it to. Tomorrow is probably going to be an emotional post, because it has been a while since I have done one of my big dumb dumps of feels posts. So be forewarned. I did not sleep super well last night because Gracie has decided that she needs to scream instead of going to sleep, and I know that I did not get proper sleep until after midnight. After wrapping this up, I am going to start getting ready to leave the house and go off to my early morning appointment. I hope you all have a wonderful week, and one way or another, this is going to be a bit of a week of reckoning for me and my “cancer boy” journey.
As always, however, you can find the full list of Mixtapes over on my Archives, and I love it when people listen to them and comment about them. Hopefully, I will have yet another new mix next Monday.
Mixtape Mondays Archive
The post Mixtape Mondays: Fear Loathing Flesh appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! This is an exceptionally busy morning for me. I have a pretty early doctor’s appointment and will have to fight road construction to get there. So as a result, I got up quite a bit earlier than I had normally been getting up, largely so that I could roll this post out without issue. This week represents the third week in this new series of Mixtapes, and the twenty-sixth in total since beginning this series during the pandemic lockdown. If you are tuning in for the first time, Mixtapes are really important to me on a personal level. I’ve always loved the art of constructing just the right mix of music for the right mood. There are a lot of things that have inspired me to make mixtapes in the past, but I think part of this is that I mourn the art of crafting albums. There were so many musicians that I grew up listening to that fully understood the way an album flows… is more important than the individual songs on it. While I am entering my “Cancer Boy” era, I am finding it more important to do little things that allow me to stake a creative claim on the world, and this mixtape nonsense is just a small part of this.
26 – Willowy Weary Wise
These mixtapes start for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes they are inspired by lived experience, other times are built around a specific song, and in the case of today’s mix, are a bit of a remix of someone else’s playlist. On February 6th, my friend Mallow shared a playlist on bsky, and given that I like Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, I clicked through and gave it a bit of a listen. One of my favorite things about social media is when you find out one of your existing friends has relatively “drift compatible” musical tastes. Collectively, there is a lot of really great stuff on that list, but I was floored by how well a very specific block worked together. Namely, how Red Right Hand, Down by the Water, and Tear You Apart flowed together perfectly and set a very specific tone for the entire outing. Individually, they are all great songs, and I have been a massive fan of PJ Harvey since she was thrust into my life initially with 50Ft Queenie. So that gave me the tapestry with which to weave another mix, and I anchored that block in the middle of a fifteen-song mix designed to exploit that same sort of feeling. The mixtape itself was named in honor of Mallow herself, since I am effectively copying her homework for my own creation. I am hoping you will enjoy my own spin, and also check out her own playlist, so you can see two different takes on the same idea.
Track List
01 – Dead Souls – Nine Inch Nails
02 – Cirice – Ghost
03 – This Corrosion – The Sisters of Mercy
04 – People Are People – Depeche Mode
05 – Bela Lugosi’s Dead (The Hunger Mix) – Bauhaus
This represents three weeks in a row that I have released a new mixtape on Monday. I know that I will probably not be able to keep this up indefinitely, especially as my whole “Cancer Boy” journey ramps up. However, I do like that this gives me at least a small amount of creative control over my world. Similarly, I am trying to arrange a time to sit down and record with “The Librarian” and do what will honestly probably be the most revealing and personal episode of “Bel Folks Stuff” that I have ever done. I kind of love that I have given them this ominous-sounding moniker at the same time they are themselves struggling to decide their own identity going forward. I have a few nuggets of playlists floating around in my head, or at least anchor songs that I want to build around. One of the big self-imposed challenges for me is that I do not want to use the same songs that I have ever used before in a playlist, and similarly, I do not want to repeat the same musicians more than once in the same playlist. For example, this week I might have gone with the Ghost version of Stay, but went with the original to keep from violating my own self-imposed rule. These mixtapes are yet another way I am trying to declare that I still live and am still trying to be a creative human.
As always, you can see the full list of mixes over on my archives, and in many cases, I release the new mix a bit early there so it is staged and ready for Monday morning.
Mixtape Mondays Archive
The post Mixtape Mondays: Willowy Weary Wise appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Welcome to the second week in a row of this new series of Mixtapes. For those who have not followed this series, essentially the idea is that each Monday morning, I share a new mix of songs with you. Growing up, mixtapes were very important to my existence. I was blessed with a stereo that had a double cassette deck, and I quickly realized that I could remix my favorite albums into combinations that made sense for me personally. Later on, I would share these mixes with friends, and occasionally love interests… that rarely seemed to appreciate the gravity of what I was giving them. For me, each mix is like a little chunk of my soul that I am carving off to share with you, and everything about them was labored over, from the choice of songs to the order in which they appear. During the pandemic lockdown era I started sharing these takes with you, my readers, and more recently, while dealing with my “cancer boy” era, I have started this back up, and while I am sure I will miss the occasional Monda,y I am hoping to keep this feature of my blog rolling for a while. As of this morning, there are twenty-five different mixtapes available, and you can find all of them on the archives page.
25 – Some Jokes Kill
Oftentimes, one of my mixes starts with a specific song that serves as the anchor. I then built the mix around that song, with it buried somewhere in the middle. This week’s spark of inspiration is Heathens by Twenty One Pilots, and was heard on Edge 104.5 while running some errands. I’ve always liked this song because it was so interesting and largely denied trying to place it in any clean category musically. This made it all the more challenging to build a mix of songs that evokes the same sort of feelings, because it doesn’t neatly fit into a box. This song was used in the soundtrack for Suicide Squad, and while piecing this together, a subtheme of the Joker started creeping in around the edges. While I don’t exactly love the Jared Leto Joker, when I think of the Suicide Squad movie, I think of Joker as a character in general. When I think of The Joker, however, I think of The Killing Joke, which is what ultimately inspired the album cover for this one. At face value, this is a weird mix of tracks, but it flows together far better than it might seem. I’m pretty happy with the end result and proud of this one.
Two weeks in a row, friends… let’s see if I can keep it going for a third week. I’m never terribly great at keeping a feature going for the long haul. At some point, I tend to run out of inspiration, and I know that I will either be dealing with Chemo/Radiation or a Surgery soon… which will probably knock the wind out of my sails a bit. I have the first several songs for the next mix ready to go, because it was inspired by one of my friends. This one took a bit of doing to make it work, so I am hoping since I already have three songs that fit together neatly that the next mix will come together easier. If you are enjoying the return of Mixtape Mondays drop me a line below. If you have listened through all of my Mixtapes, pat yourself on the back for being a true pal… but still drop me a line because I am curious if anyone has done this thing. As always, you can find all of the mixtapes… often times ahead of my Monday morning post over on the archive. I tend to stage things ahead of time so I can share them with friends to help beta test them a bit.
Mixtape Mondays Archive
The post Mixtape Mondays: Some Jokes Kill appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! Long time readers of my blog might remember a reoccurring feature called Mixtape Mondays, and in theory I am hoping to bring it back. Essentially growing up the creation of Mixtapes was very important to me. I would painstakingly spend hours going over specific tracks and dubbing them onto a cassette with my stereo until I had crafted the perfect flow of songs that followed a sequence and more or less fit a theme. I would give them to friends… and attempt to bestow them upon lovers, who so rarely appreciated them. However that was not the important part. The important part was crafting what I felt was the perfect sequence of songs that fit into the album format, and more importantly than anything… looped in a way that made sense to be able to listen to it over and over. Over the course of April 19th, 2021 through May 9th, 2022 I released twenty three of these mixtapes, and you can see the entire archive over on the dedicated page. These all sort of represent a piece of my soul, and if you ever want to know anything about me as a person… they are written clearly in these assemblages.
Erasure Shaped Box
I’ve talked a bit about my romantic interest on this blog a few times with the code word of “Erasure”, this is in large part because she really likes that band. I gave her some hopeless homework some time ago, where I asked her to listen through my mixtapes as a way of understanding me a bit better. Unfortunately she is not the sort of person who really listens to disparate assemblages of music, but instead prefers to listen to the same song over and over until it is worn out… before moving on to the next song. So I set out with a rather hopeless mission, of trying to craft a mixtape that I thought she might like. Turns out she did enjoy it mostly, or at least enjoys some of the songs on it. However it was more thought experiment than anything else. Could I craft a mixtape that I also enjoyed centered around a song from Erasure the band, not the person… and make something I would enjoy listening to. I think at least in the later mission I succeeded because I have been listening to this one quite a bit lately. The catalyst was Chains of Love, and then I worked forward and backwards from that song trying to assemble a sequence that makes sense.
Track List
01 – Lips Like Sugar – Echo and the Bunnymen
02 – Space Age Love Song – A Flock of Seagulls
03 – Why Can’t I Be You? – The Cure
04 – World In My Eyes – Depeche Mode
05 – International Bright Young Thing – Jesus Jones
That brings to a close the first of this new batch of Mixtapes. I have no clue how long I will keep this run going, because I have a ton of things going on in my life right now. However there is something about crafting a Mixtape that I find deeply satisfying. I usually start with 30-40 songs and then whittle it down to just the right blend of 13-15 while trying to perfect a sequence in which they flow together nicely. I was driving home yesterday from a trip to Harbor Freight and heard a song on the radio that I have not heard in years, and I think that is probably going to serve as the nugget for the next mix. I would love for this to regularly return to my blog, but I am never certain how much inspiration I will be able to keep going. As always however you can see the entire sequence of all of my mixtapes over on the archive.
