Dec.7
2009
Stop. Hey. What's That Sound?
My wife and I were having a discussion last night about the Eno/Branca thing (that we talked about in the comments of
this post,) and she brought up an interesting point. She said the way to combat the pervasiveness of microtaste in the past was mixtapes. You made a tape for your prospective significant other, or your friend, or whatever, and that tape was a good indication of the fundamental nature of You.
Now, the person you gave it to might not like every song, but since they were theoretically compatible with you in some way, they'd like most of them, and in the process of liking most of them, you'd turn them on to something new, perhaps. But then there would be a demonstrable collection of two people that liked the same group of songs, which makes a microtaste (which is inherently singular in nature) in to a macrotaste, and a movement is born.
Anyhow, Elle was postulating that it would be interesting to have a scenario wherein you created a mixtape of some sort, sent it in some fashion to a central clearing house, and got one in return. Being older, we were dwelling on the concept of sending in a CD-R and getting one in return, as the transient nature of the internet doesn't lend itself to this sort of thing, in our opinion. Anyhow, you'd make a CD-R full of the songs that described you, and sent it off, and a couple weeks later, from some other utterly random person, you'd get a completely unrelated CD-R, full of songs that described them. In this fashion, you could get out of your normal self-created shell that the current state of the music industry creates.
This Global Mixtape is just the meme of an idea, and if there's a service or something already existing that does this sort of thing, I'd love to hear about it. Obviously, just doing it as the idea stands now is impossible. There would be massive costs associated with the disparity in postage rates alone, never mind the time associated with actually physically doing the swap. However, I'd love to flesh this idea out in to something that could actually occur, so if anyone has any thoughts on the subject, lay 'em out.
Comments:
last.fm's "neighbours radio" does that for me. it plays what people with a taste similar to mine listen to, so it's people driven, but only by people that generally like what i like (hence neighbours). i've found quite some new and interesting music that way.

posted December 8, 2009 by
zerobae
Finding diamonds in the rough is always part of the process, but I think the challenge here is to find some sort of medium that lowers the inherently large shit-to-diamonds ratio that would happen with a random exchange.
I agree with the whole communication aspect though. that's definitely half of the fun with mixtapes.
Of note, I always find the "what new music should I be listening to" threads on here to be a good source of a few gems. They're always appreciated.
posted December 8, 2009 by afreshcupofjoe
...like the one right now at CDM? I find myself ferquenting Mr. Kirn's site less and less. No, sorry, a box with 64 lighted buttons on it is not the most important musical innovation of this century.

posted December 8, 2009 by
Darren "Gaylord" Halm
I used to organise something akin to this on an old forum and it would work pretty well within the constraints of that forum, which was generally that less than 75 people signed up for any particular go-round. Of those 75 people, on average about 15% would flake out.
The other thing that makes the mixtape as a form significantly different from services like last.fm is the opportunity to sequence stuff in ways that are special or revealing. I received a tape once that followed ten minutes of Tim Hecker's opiated sturm-und-drone with a Shelagh McDonald song ("Stargazer") that predated the former by at least thirty years. As much as each piece was appealing in its own right, the transition from gauzy billows of DSP screech to a there-in-the-room late-60s Brit-folk sound was itself a remarkable part of the experience.
posted December 9, 2009 by dfglove
This is already being done by groups of people. I belong a "mixtape club." You sign up and get the address of a new person to trade with each month. If you fail to send out a cd or cassette one month, you are off the list for good.

posted December 9, 2009 by
neyko
For me, part of what made the process of making a mixtape/cd interesting is having to think not only about "what music do I really like right now?" but "what would this person/these people find particularly interesting?" and particularly "what can I get this person interested in that they might not otherwise dig?", so it felt more like communication instead of a general top ten list. Likewise, the best mixes I got were not always full of songs I loved, but had some kind of additional context -- songs that I wouldn't like on their own became interesting when placed among certain other songs, and there's a lot of bands I would never have been able to get into without that context -- for example, sunshiney '70s psych-pop that I would have never been able to get into were it not for getting mix cds which worked as a kind of inoculation, almost like a trojan horse, and that sort of thing really does take a bit of craft to pull off. That specific sense of selection is key, and why "here's a hard drive full of shit I was interested in at some point" isn't the same thing at all -- like you said, part of what makes it interesting is not really knowing what you're gonna get while at the same time feeling like it wasn't just some random bunch of songs.

posted December 14, 2009 by
db
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