8 responses so far ↓

• 1 Elliott // Oct 29, 2002 at 4:07 pm

  Oh my God.

  What an invitation to self-indulgence. I am rewinding a tape I made in college and found a few months ago so that I can document it. I will post the titles later.

  Nothing I have ever done or heard will ever top my high-school buddy Jason Peckham’s mix from Pearls Are a Nusiance -> Straight, No Chaser, by Theolonius Monk, then Sweet Little Hi-Fi, by Pussy Galore

• 2 Elliott // Oct 29, 2002 at 8:09 pm

  As promised:

  Bullshit Plays
  Side A
  Car Jam- The Clash
  Johnny Come Home- The Fine Young Cannibals
  When Iris Sleeps Over- The Breeders
  The Girls Want to be with the Girls- The Talking Heads
  Birthday- The Sugar Cubes
  Teenage Riot- Sonic Youth
  Done Changed My Way of Livin’- Taj Mahal
  Subbacultcha- The Pixies
  Train Kept a Rollin’- Aerosmith
  Everytime I Go Around Here- Frank Black
  Chicago Breakdown- Louis Armstrong
  Groove Holmes (Live vs The Biz)- Beastie Boys / Biz Markee

  Side B
  Schizophrenia- Sonic Youth
  China Pig- Captain Beefheart
  Me, Jill – Hendrix/Cosby- Ciccione Youth
  This Very Night- Gilbert & Sullivan, HMS Pinafore
  Lime House- The Breeders
  Cookie Puss- The Beastie Boys
  Third Stone from the Sun- Jimi Hendrix
  Planet of Sound- The Pixies
  Places Named after Numbers- Frank Black
  Awesome Sound (45 RPM)- Ween
  Magick Power- Opal
  Caribou- The Pixies

  Sadly, this tape was part of a set. I believe I have lost the sister tape “The Angel Aquarium”, which was awesome.

  Scott made some of the best mixed tapes I have ever heard, with an exquisite sense of timing flawlessly executed. Again, sadly, I had two of Scott’s tapes that mysteriously dissapeared (read: were stolen). Both rocked supreme and were in heavy rotation in my world.

• 3 Scotty The Body // Oct 29, 2002 at 11:36 pm

  Thanks for the props. I used to take my mix tapes very seriously, and was actually thinking of writing a little post about mix tapes just yesterday.

  Now that the cassette is nearly a goner, I’m having a really hard time adjusting to the mix CD. It’s a totally different feel, and I either end up feeling ripped off due to the lack of space (1 CD), or I get over-ambitious and the quality starts to severely suck (like Robin’s 8 or 9 CD Crowswenberg’s Musical Menu).

  The movie “High Fidelity” gives a little lip service to quality mix tapes, but takes a romatic, expressing-yourself-through-others approach. That puts too much pressure on the maker; the real joy is in building a flow that causes the listener to sit through something they may never listen to otherwise, and taking the audience on a little musical journey.

  I find that the best mix tapes push a few buttons—they have to have emotional appeal, some soul, a little bit of rowdy music, a nostalgic or personally historical element, and a bit of full-on wackiness.

  The last mix tape I made was truly the pinnacle of my compilation tape career—and I made it in 1997 or so for Rachel Moore and it was called something like “My Halo’s Down” in reference to a Verbena song. It was stupendous and I wish I could find the play list. It was the only tape I ever made with my fully unified music collection (all stored LP’s, cassette tapes, CD’s). It didn’t try to tell a story, it just served up some delicious music in digestible chunks and was custom-designed for an intellectual girl to use while driving to Denver.

  Since then, I’ve had no tape deck, and began making mix CDs. None have been that great as the sources are too disorganized (huge disk drives full of MP3 files), and the format is just not tactile enough.

  With records and my old tape deck, I mastered the art of the Precision Pause Cut, which allowed me, for example, to remix an entire Beastie Boys song with snippets from the 12” version, LP version and the albums from which the samples were lifted—all without any discernable loss of beat. All of that was done on maybe $50 worth of garage sale and goodwill electronics.

  I wanted to be able to do that again, and invested in some wheels of steel and a mixer and decided I was going to practice mixing live to tape. I don’t have the time to sit for an entire evening, or maybe even several, concocting the perfect mix. Plus, my records are on a wall sitting with the spines out, my least favorite method of record storage, and it’s difficult to find inspiration staring at those spines. I need the flip and the cover.

  Come to think of it, that tape deck kicked ass.

• 4 47hinge // Oct 30, 2002 at 10:41 am

  For me, making mix tapes is much more time consuming and much more effective than mix CDs because I actually listen to the tunes and get a feel for them, then make the selection of what comes next based on the feeling of the song I just heard. Dragging and dropping a bunch of mp3 files into a window and hitting Burn is so out of touch.

  I did manage to make a decent Latin Groove mix CD for my mom a couple weeks ago. Began with Willie Nelson’s beautiful 18 second “Ou Es-Tu, Mon Amour?” guitar solo slammed into some kicking Afro-Cuban Allstars. Good stuff, but that was only pulled off because of hardcore familiarity and luck, and the rest of the mix was spotty.

  Speaking of Scotty, the KBDCD he slid me for birthday 2K is still in good rotation and has some killer eye-opening stuff on it (Air, Trans Am, Del the FH). He pulled that one off on CD format, uh huh.

• 5 Scotty The Body // Nov 1, 2002 at 8:56 pm

  Elliott: I think I remember that tape! It rocked. I also remember your stereo, which, no offense to anybody else with kickass stereos at my college, sounded amazing—very earthy and warm.

  You know what’s weird, I JUST got the first “real” stereo I’ve ever owned THIS year.

  Maybe I should invest in a tape deck for it and begin making mix tapes. But my buddy Jon Sherman in Nola has a CD recorder that rolls like tape, and I think Kenny does as well. THAT may be the future—live mixing to recordable CD!

• 6 Scotty The Body // Nov 12, 2002 at 5:42 pm

  quite honestly, my tapes only got really good when my collection was unified. Before that, my sources were very limited… Right after Jason brought back about 50 of Elliott’s records things started to get really interesting…

• 7 Elliott // Nov 12, 2002 at 6:17 pm

  Do you have my “Diver Down” LP?

• 8 Scotty the Body // Feb 13, 2003 at 7:06 pm

  No. I have “Diver Down”, but it features a “Gracy’s of Aspen” price tag of $1.00. I bought it in 1994.

  However, I DO have:

  1) Tone’s Brand New Heavies CD

  2) Jason Bowers’s Minor Threat CD.

  I’d give ‘em back, but I think I’ve lost the cases. I also have one of Mike Scagliotti’s CD’s—Ruins, I believe…