tape club, tape four: an afternoon, an evening, a night.

I've been making the next mixtape for a really long time, which, if i'm honest, is too long. too long for all of you, too long for all of me. we all thought this was just a massive piece of procrastination. part of me is with you, but part of me is saying: fuck you, of course i would carry on! hey, lets just....let's just hug, and pretend this never happened.

Tape Club, tape four, part one - an afternoon, an evening, a night. by aveclaudenum

Tape Club, tape four, part two - there is no life without a double life by aveclaudenum

so the problem with this mixtape was the first half. after the last hemingway one, i realised that a constant overlapping of tracks was the right format for me to advertise everyone else's songs; but it was slightly annoying, having burned the compilation to a cd and having to fast-forward it to the place i left off. so, i started thinking about splitting the next tape into 'movements', to really get into that classical dialogue (if not the sound), and i thought four movements would be the perfect amount - like 'the four seasons' or something.

in the end, i rejected the four seasons in favour of two halves. me and amy have been watching a lot of older films recently - pictures that i watched a long time ago in some kind of college or uni-based film studies, or some just through that whole film noir craze that happened 'round these parts a few years back. tom bought a hitchcock boxset, where a lot of them have come from, but also things like chinatown and north by northwest, and brick and both the french connections (incidentally, the second french connection is actually as good (if not better) than the first, which is almost unique in the world of sequels) and soylent green, which i guess is "a detective film" in the weirder sense.

so i started thinking about songs to do with the police, and with crime, and with murder and detection and guns & knives...and if that combination in-and-of-itself isn't a good enough reason, watching old anti-heroes reminds you that solving a case and cutting someone's nostrils open are, more or less, the same thing. probably.

as i said at the beginning of this spiel (i'm really fighting off the urge to write this email in flat out hard-boiled dialogue), the problem was with the first half. the second half came together almost without my input - i went upstairs, sat down, and the tracks fell together just beautifully.

but the first half was a total bitch. i couldn't find the balance between the plodding detective themes and the fact that the music itself has to constantly hold interest; hard-boiled noir music is notoriously brilliant, but you wouldn't want to listen to a lot of it in a row. unless, maybe, it was ennio morricone.

so what we have here is a line of music interspersed with choice cuts of dialogue. i didn't want to intoxicate the mix with dialogue, because i'm always very aware of mixes that seem to use dialogue as a 'hook' to compensate for the poor quality of the cuts and fades. some of you will no doubt see my crime mix in this light - but i would draw your attention to the first crossfade. here, the morphine track (their best, in my opinion) cascades beautifully with the tension and dialogue pauses of chinatown - i placed the track almost randomly, and the resulting combination of light, tapping drums with dialogue and delicate violin was pure serendipity. it's the yellow brick road of mistake as creativity and, brothers and sisters, i believe in it.



here's the pitch for the first half:

The endless questioning (Who Told You This Room Exists?), the existential self-destruction in that one cafe, the gun-fight-car-chase (John Wayne), cocktails with the rat's wife (Only You), and the morning after (She's Gone)...the mysterious death of that sad mafioso (Miles Davis' Funeral), the obsessive collector, and that priceless McGuffin everyone is chasing (The Perfect Map); meeting the man in the white suit with a cigarette holder and a scarred lip, and, of course - the detective theme (M. Dagurre).

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And, like i said, the second part simply fell into place. i would suggest the tracks are more an implication rather than an outright accusation, in the way that they suggest crime without being necessarily related to it. for example, the title "the man with the shovel is the man i am going to marry" could imply a farmer rather than the mafia, if it wasn't for the given context. but the track itself is the sound of three hours of whisky - "buried under the influence", as someone once put it - submitting an experience that only a tortured man could stumble upon. that place where you exist as a secondary function to all of your senses, and to all other inhabitants of the city; where the music is duller, the words are smooth and blurry, and the lights are streaming. but, through this, we are not numbed: we are accelerated.




tracklists...

part one: an afternoon, an evening, a night - the story of a detective.
1. Audio clip from 'Chinatown'
2. Morphine - Miles Davis' Funeral
3. Tindersticks - She's Gone (BBC Session)
4. Boards of Canada - A Is To B As B Is To C
5. Electrelane - John Wayne
6. Rachel's - M. Daguerre
7. Belong - Who Told You This Room Exists?
8. Portishead - Only You
9. Audio clip from 'French Connection Two'
10. Thee More Shallows - The Perfect Map (BBC Session)
11. Audio clip from 'Soylent Green'

part two: "there is no life without a double life" - the criminal mind.
1. To Kill a Petty Bourgeoisie - The Man With the Shovel, Is the Man I'm Going to Marry
2. Murder Mystery - The Reason Why
3. Ennio Morricone - L'Uccello Con le Plume Di Cristallo
4. Blood Brothers - Crimes
5. Whitehouse - Dictator
6. HEALTH - Crimewave
7. The Cooper Temple Clause - Murder Song


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Tape Four is to be found here.

I've also reloaded the previous three mixes for the new people added to the list, so if any of you want them again, here's the linked list so far...

Tape 1: a beginner's guide to quiet noise
Tape 2: earthquake music
Tape 3: "...the stream."
Tape 4.1 & 4.2

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notes:
- 'Dictator' repeats, it slides in and out of the second half, like a little audio nightmare. personally, I like the track, along with most of the Whitehouse records...but I can appreciate everyone else's dislike. Both biases work here.

- The Ennio Morricone track is actually played forwards behind the end of the Murder Mystery Track, before being played backwards as a solo after that...and then this same pattern is reprised over the Cooper Temple Clause track and Dictator, with the whole piece ending on a failing heartbeat. It occurs so many times in this mix because I was amazed at the simple difference between the original track and the reverse - without going into too much detail, the simple reversal changed the audio connotations from that of an orgasm to that of a slow death.

- This reversing theme was repeated with the Soylent Green clip (if any of you haven't seen Soylent Green - forget this clip, and watch the film a few months afterwards), and the reversed sample is barely distinguishable above the end of The Perfect Map. I'm not sure about the technical aspect, but it made a really weird kind of deja vu, where everyone knows they've heard the (forward) clip before, but they're not sure quite where...i guess i tried to make the befuddlement worse by putting it at the end of the track, and making the role of the detective a role of the loss of understanding. with the detective unable to solve crimes, and the criminal haunted by the white noise of Dictator, the end of the mix is kind of bleak.

- I might make one of those long picture tracklists again, like the one for "the stream", but i thought i would just send out the actual music first.


So, hey! Bring me another whisky.


email me for any back-issue commentary emails. as always, forward this to anyone you think would like it, and send me their address to be added to the (sub)monthly instalment.



until we ride again,

--mike.x

tape club, tape three: the stream.

Hey, again. Too soon?

Tape Club, tape three - the stream. by aveclaudenum

First of all, I apologise for the way I 'get into' writing this email. I have been thinking/writing my dissertation all day (in between buying two records and changing money into other money), and I just can't seem to wind out of that theoretical thought-space. Two things will happen - I will either slip into the jug of wine groove, or I will remain in the fake theory groove. The wine groove will be good for you, because it will take away pretension and crippling self-consciousness and replace it with wild nudity (so to speak). The fake theory groove would be better for me, because I will be able to slide straight back into my dissertation tomorrow morning...but - keep this a secret - I'm with you. I'd rather slip into the wine groove. Let's make it happen, ok? Ok. Ok.

What follows is Hemingway's longest sentence.

"That something I cannot yet define completely but the feeling comes when you write well and truly of something and know impersonally you have written in that way and those who are paid to read it and report on it do not like the subject so they say it is all a fake, yet you know its value absolutely; or when you do something which people do not consider a serious occupation and yet you know truly, that it is as important and has always been as important as all the things that are in fashion, and when, on the sea, you are alone with it and know that this Gulf Stream you are living with, knowing, learning about, and loving, has moved, as it moves, since before man, and that it has gone by the shoreline of that long, beautiful, unhappy island since before Columbus sighted it and that the things you find out about it, and those that have always lived in it are permanent and of value because that stream will flow, as it has flowed, after the Indians, after the Spaniards, after the British, after the Americans and after all the Cubans and all the systems of governments, the richness, the poverty, the martyrdom, the sacrifice and the venality and the cruelty are all gone as the high-piled scow of garbage, bright-colored, white-flecked, ill-smelling, now tilted on its side, spills off its load into the blue water, turning it a pale green to a depth of four or five fathoms as the load spreads across the surface, the sinkable part going down and the flotsam of palm fronds, corks, bottles, and used electric light globes, seasoned with an occasional condom or a deep floating corset, the torn leaves of a student's exercise book, a well-inflated dog, the occasional rat, the no-longer-distinguished cat; all this well shepherded by the boats of the garbage pickers who pluck their prizes with long poles, as interested, as intelligent, and as accurate as historians; they have the viewpoint; the stream, with no visible flow, takes five loads of this a day when things are going well in La Habana and in ten miles along the coast it is as clear and blue and unimpressed as it was ever before the tug hauled out the scow; and the palm fronds of our victories, the worn light bulbs of our discoveries and the empty condoms of our great loves float with no significance against one single, lasting thing - the stream."



I first read this in a book called The Garden in the Machine, due to the fact that my dissertation is on ecocriticism. At first I thought, wow, that was amazing. That was amazing. But then, for a while, I thought I might've missed out on something - I didn't read it in the original context. I didn't read it on page 148 of The Green Hills of Africa. I didn't read it surrounded by Hemingway, who has (at least in A Farewell to Arms) a way of jumping through your conscious and unconscious reading habits (the way you drift in and out of a book) and piercing you in the throat (in true Hemingway-using-a-horse-as-a-shield fashion) with some subtly intense event, straight out of the blue.

But then I felt even better about reading it in this other book. I thought, "goddamn," in a book which had not so far provoked me to think in such a way, "goddamn, that was some awesome shit." Not that Garden in the Machine wasn't a really awesome book - because it was, and analysed Shoah and a load of Brakhage films, and 50 Feet of String...but it was as if just the inclusion of that Hemingway sentence made it so much more human. I guess.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, Hemingway's longest sentence jolts you, in any context. And, finally, here where i jump out of the pseudo-literary-critic thing and jump right into the bullshit-mix-tape-maker thing.


The title of the tape, 'the stream', draws attention to the last clause of the sentence, and it brings up some interesting questions in terms of what you feel when you're reading it. I read it, and I thought, yeh, ok. This is ok, and it's slightly impressive - if a little annoying - how he's stringing those clauses together. there's a part of you (of me) that just wants the sentence to give up. But - and this is the important part - you don't quite know where you want it to stop. And by the end, you forgive it. I guess it's a kind of really short Stockholm Syndrome.

I'm thinking, when I finish the sentence and I can still see the dash and '...the stream,' I'm thinking straight away that I want to make a mixtape out of this. But I have no idea how. I think, shit, he really did it there. He really brought it together: and even if you don't go back and analyse it (I didn't), you get the feeling that it was perfectly metered, even if you're just judging it on the dash before those last two words. The way the sentence is definitely finished, but the way that everything he talked about within the sentence is still continuing and resolved in that ending. I still have no idea how to do it, but there was a couple of ideas:

1. Do it all in one night.
2. Make one continuous track.


So...here's the result.


tape three, "- the stream." tracklist:
1. mum - abandoned ship bells/hu hviss
2. amina - skakka
3. lightning bug situation - beginning of the expedition
4. oceansize - savant
5. broken social scene - all my friends (kcrw acoustic)
6. the microphones - sand (eric's trip)
7. tim hecker - untitled, part ten
8. the national - cardinal song
9. stars of the lid - a meaningful moment through a meaning(less) process
10. sufjan stevens - seven swans
11. labradford - midrange
12. the dead texan - aegina airlines
13. arab strap - i would've liked me a lot last night
14. broadcast - tender buttons (bbc session)
15. grouper - down to the ocean
16. neutral milk hotel - two-headed boy, part two

...as always, you should be able to download it at this link.



notes:

a) It is my personal belief that every great mixtape will begin with a creaking sound. the tracks aren't divided up, so it's one continuous 56 minute mix. If that really pissed you off, there's a program which I think is called 'Medieval CUE Splitter' which I think you can use to split up the tracks, manually. Like recording to a minidisc! Remember those?


b) It's 3am now, which means i've been doing this for around six hours, I think...I didn't get all the songs I originally thought of on the mix, but I think it worked out anyway. I can't be sure where song instinct and a silent mind merge, but there was a weird moment at about half 1, where the candle relit itself after about half an hour of darkness.

There's such an awesome cavern in my wax right now.


c) The (long) little map attached to this email is the proper tracklist, where you can see the progression and overlaps in a bit more detail. The idea came from Godspeed's tracklist to Lift yr Skinny Fists...


It would probably work best to click the picture for the big version, and then download that and zoom in, or print it off.


d) The new Sliver Mount Zion album is some hot loud gas. Good gas.


enjoy,

--mikex.

tape club, tape two: earthquake music.

so, wow. did anyone feel that? here, it was a shaking and a low noise. i was lying at the wrong end of the bed, and had just drifted off, watching records spin. but i can't imagine not waking up - the whole house was actually shaking, noticeably creaking and vibrating, and the noise was like a low pulsing - like the engine of a bus. afterwards, we were awake, so we watched an old audrey hepburn film - in which she attempts to commit suicide with five cars turned on in a locked garage, and humphrey bogart shoots at indestructible plastic - which made the whole thing a bit more surreal. this is the great thing about knowing people in other places - what was it like?? i didn't take geography - are any of you near hull?

the idea for this one has been in my head since then, and i've held a few tracks in my head for a couple days. there's a feeling that i should send it out as soon as possible - to be as close as possible to the vague, "pseudo-aftermath" - but also because i'm trying to read some essays, and over the last 3 paragraphs, i noticed that i'd mentally written 4 or 5 paragraphs for this email instead. the specific words aren't here (which could be attributed to this extravagant glass jug of wine we're pouring from), but i hope the atmosphere is.

i've been getting into the habit of making playlists quickly; or if not quickly, at least not obviously. there was a bit of a rut (at least, i felt a bit restless) with the radio over the past couple months - i came home from work at the library, and we would have already thought of a theme, and we would simply search keywords pertaining to that theme on our combined digital-media based catalogue of music (i.e., my winamp and amy's itunes). this started to feel a bit shit, and a bit static, and a bit obvious and unexciting. ever since i started thinking seriously about mixtapes (in other words: since my first mixtape for someone else), i've tried to be aware of the dangerous 'clever' attitude; basically, in my own short-hand, the 'clever' attitude is the one where someone receives your mixtape, sees the song titles, and is impressed how cleverly you've connected the theme to the names of songs. i'm not saying that's never enjoyable - it is, especially when you've remembered that old song by that guy that no-one else has heard of who sung this one song that was called something to do with 'mountains' or 'fire' or 'animals' or whatever your theme is; or when the recipitent has to play a word game with the titles or the lyrics in order to figure out the connection. but, still, it's incredibly aesthetic. its: bam, here's your titles, and some songs i like.

so what i've been trying to do very consciously, recently, is to get the theme in the sound. i suppose i've always had that in mind to a certain extent, and hoped that the songs with the relevant titles would bring with them the sound - for example, that song called 'water' by that old american blues guy would sound like water rushing under your feet, or waves engulfing a stranger, or the huge ocean supporting a tiny boat. but that doesn't often cut it, and even when it does the title can often obscure the sound.

so what we have here, hopefully, is a document of sound rather than of titles and bands. sounds that evoke the shaking of the earth.

as a side note, a general though about these mixtapes: there are kind of two audiences i have in mind when making them, and they can often (infact, most of the time) be contained within the same person. first, there is the audience who knows the songs, and who is pleased with their inclusion on the tape because of the nostalgia or re-discovering of that awesome band. second (but not secondary) is the audience for whom these bands or songs are new and exciting - and if this is you, you should totally check out that band or get in contact with me for more of their stuff, because there is undoubtedly some more awesome stuff that you will want to engulf.

i realise that i'm analysing all this to a greater degree than i have licence to do but, again, i would like to draw your attention to the extravagant glass jug of wine: she is my 'cog', which is to say she is my achilles' heel in an obscure reference to a cartoon. (if anyone can get the obscure reference, i will make a personalised mixtape and actually send it to you in the real post, on a real tape and/or cd and with a real letter and a real piece of origami. no joke.)


slightly off the point: i hear some of you had problems with the last mixtape. that is all completely my fault - in sexual fetishistic terms, i am the 'enabler'. i should provide you with everything you need (and some thing you do not wish for, even in your darkest dreams), and this should not be a struggle for you...if we are to take the metaphor further, i should have slipped your the auditory rohypnol hours ago. i apologise - i understand that some of you even recieved the whole thing as one long piece of text, without lines between paragraphs (!!) or even lines between tracklists (!!!). i also understnad that someof you were confused by the '.zip' file. this, too, is my fault. for now, i'm going to ask you to download winzip (there's a free version on there), but in the future i will fix this.

if you were to (again, in your darkest, most masochistic moments) re-read this email, you could easily plot the destructive path of that "extravagant glass jug of wine". maybe, in fact, you could even note the points at which i took each sip - i tend to get increasingly regal as i get drunker. i wont deny that this is a sliding scale of advantages and disadvantages - when i am tipsy, i am wearing a smoking jacket and drinking cheap spirits from a charity shop brandy glass. when i am slurring my words, i am also delcaring my right to ride a horse down the acle straight. a few more glasses, and i am actually riding that white horse, naked (a symphony of moonlight and arsecheeks), apart from the smoking jacket, tied around my neck like a cape - a stolen fire poker in my right hand, my left hand gripping the stallion's silver mane.

ummm....

tracklist.

tape two - earthquake music.
1. carla bozulich - evangelista, part one
2. radiohead - i might be wrong
3. mogwai - 2 rights make 1 wrong
4. aidan john moffat - good morning
5. six by seven - european me
6. do make say think - bruce e kinesis
7. the album leaf - malmo
8. OOIOO - sai
9. frog eyes - the heart that felt its light
10. david lynch - ghost of love
11. bitcrush - prologue

...the tape should be available here...

remember to unzip it with winzip or something similar.


notes ("notes", he says! but what was that incoherent rant before the tracklist, may i ask?):

a) the mogwai track reminds me of skateboarding, although i was never very good at skateboarding, and only actually tried it once or twice.

b) it was a hard choice between radiohead's 'i might be wrong' and 'hunting bears', but i went for the first, hoping that the word 'wrong' would occur more in the titles. it didn't, but i think it might've in the vocals.

c) aidan john moffat was the singer for arab strap, and this song is the best from his new solo album of poetry. the lyrics are truer than many of us would like to believe, and the sample of the violin stuck under then needle makes it the best song on the album. amy bought it, and to be fair, the whole album definitely grows on you after you hear this song.

d) there is no doubt that the OOIOO track is 'different' from the rest. but, i think it's definitely 'important' to earthquakes and their motives.

e) frog eyes is always, always, always a beautiful apocalypse. i firmly believe and wish that the last song i will ever hear will be a frog eyes song.

f) the david lynch song is actually lynch singing, and it's from the 'inland empire' soundtrack. see inland empire, preferably in a small cinema.

g) i suppose this mix is mainly darker songs, but then, that might just be a product of my taste rather than a selection of it. i remember lewy charlton telling me, in middle school, that i only listened to depressing music.

h) as a final reflection, i think a lot of these songs (you'll figure out the ones that aren't) are supposed to represent a short aftermath - 10, 20, 30 seconds after the quake; when you know that in england (or canada, or wales) the earth shouldn't move. and you don't know what you are supposed to think, and there are no shitty cameraphone pictures on the internet or the television of some bus in london or some journalist telling you the levels of outcry or the levels of damage...just turn all the levels to eleven.



love,

--mike.


p.s. - does anyone have glen's/fred's/rob's email? plus anyone else you think would like this club...

p.p.s - i probably should have put this at the beginning, but for the people who are new to the club (i.e., who didn't get 'number one' - hi polly!, etc.) - i will probably send you an email about it. probably.

tape club, tape one: closer - a beginner's guide to quiet noise.

wow, i mean, how does anyone actually keep in contact? letters are great, but...i'm not even sure if half these addresses work anymore.

anyway, so, i was planning to start a (bi)monthly mixtape club, where i just send an (electronic) tape out every couple of weeks/months. i guess it came from being awake at night with a load of albums, and also from the lack of contact i have with people just in general. seriously, i have no idea how most of you are. i don't even know where most of you are! i mean, i've got newport, leicester, canada, sheffield, leeds, nottingham here, and more. it's difficult. more difficult than it should be, i think.

this first one has come from a lot of amazing records from last year that i've just caught up with, and listening to them late at night..what can i say, that make you want to give something, to a load of people.



closer: a beginner's guide to quiet noise

1 tape - sunrefrain
2 bj nilsen - front
3 growing - fancy colours
4 stars of the lid - requiem for dying mothers, part 2
5 belong - i never lose. never really
6 elegi - spill for galleriet
7 tenniscoats - hirei
8 mono - palmless prayer/mass murder refrain part 2
9 tim hecker - blood rainbow

...and it should be in a zip file here.



notes:

bj nilsen's 'the short night' was just released at the end of last year, and there's something about the album which seems really different...there's certain structures to ambient/quiet noise/whatever music that you seem to subconciously notice after a while, but this guy seems to jump over them completely. something to look out for is the massive bass note around the eleven minute mark, with the river flowing over the top. it sounds like the low note should eclipse all other frequencies, but the river is right there.

growing is really good to cook to? i don't know why.

belong build up...and the whole song is the build up. it's a new kind of emotional trick, i think.

stars are the lid are probably one of the most well known ones here, apart from mono, and tim hecker who seems to be creeping into a lot of homes. i spent the longest time choosing this track from most of the stars albums (apart from their newest, which just might be their best, but i have no way to convert vinyl to mp3), and i finally went with this one because it reminds me of the first year of uni so much. i used to put it on when first opening my eyes, that moment just before you close them again and sub-sleep for another few minutes. the birds at the end, and that euphoric ebow/violin loop at the beginning.

i like the ticking on the elegi track, and the voice reminds me of the woman at the beginning of 'inland empire', making the whole thing a kind of clockwork suspense.

this isn't supposed to be some kind of crash course or something...i'm the beginner in the title of the tape, really. but i've had some of this stuff for a while, and it really fixes some memories, and i had a big glut with christmas money. there's a load of people missing from here, but i suspect they'll creep up on later mixes. they won't all be this slow, by the way.

ok, so, i better send this one before the half-sent email before confuses too many people. if you know anyone else who would want this, feel free to forward it or send me the email address to add it to the thin list i've got already.

i hope you all enjoy it, and let me know how everyone is. you can even let me know how each other are. i keep seeing pictures of people younger than us from school with kids. hopefully noone has kids yet?

--mikex

oh, also, i should say, the radio is still going - livewire1350.com, electric sails for underground ships, listen live. every tuesday, nine till half ten.

i hope you are all amazing x