mixtape (may 2010)

King of the road
Broken Social Scene "Lover's Spit (Feist vocals"
The National "Daughters of the Soho Riots"
Townes Van Zandt "I'll Be Here In the Morning"
M. Ward "One More Goodbye"
Paul Westerberg "Boring Enormous"
Nick Drake "Road"
Ryan Adams "Cry On Demand"
Wheat "Body Talk No. 2"
Nina Simone "I Shall Be Released"
Final Fantasy "The Dream of Win and Regine"
Beirut "Un Dernier Verre (Pour La Route"
Iron & Wine "Sinning Hands"

I had a funny dream: Guess it is good to disappear completely sometimes, and hope nobody notices. Anyway, I once commented that Wings of Desire (1988) is Wim Wender's best film. Turns out I'm pretty dead wrong - have been watching his seventies Road trilogy, three films which are by far his finest (especially 1974's Alice In The Cities). This mixtape is sorta a tribute to these three films' cross-country wonders.

mixtape (march 2010)

Kidsmoke and cigarette gusts
Grizzly Bear "Marla"
Palace "Winter Lady"
Gillian Welch "Lowlands"
Ryan Adams "Tomorrow"
Feist & Ben Gibbard "Train Song"
Calexico "Crystal Frontier"
Davey Graham "Both Sides Now"
Cat Power "Who Knows Where The Time Goes"
Odetta "Tomorrow Is A Long Time"
Tom Waits "Hold On"
M. Ward "Here Comes the Sun Again"
Joanna Newsom "Good Intentions Paving Company"

Happens to know me pretty well: I thought, this brief hiatus from regular blogging - if you can call it an "hiatus" or this "regular blogging" - can only do me good. This mixtape is half inspired by Jacques Rivette's amorphous early films and half put together while I'm nursing another bout of self-doubt and directionlessness... but all with good humor though of course, so there you go.

mixtape (february 2010)

Storyboard of urban myths, the ascendance of doubt
A Sunny Day In Glasgow “The White Witch”
Real Estate “Green River”
Beach House “Zebra”
Frances Gall “Cet Air La”
Slumber Party “I Never Dreamed”
Grizzly Bear “Boy From School”
The Beach Boys “Surfer Girl (1967 rehearsal)”
Bart & Friends “Hounds of Love”
Belle & Sebastian “Put the Book Back On The Shelf”
Joan of Arc “Ne Mosquito Pass”
Luna “Bewitched”
The Sea and Cake “Jacking the Ball”
The Velvet Underground “I’ll Be Your Mirror”
Charlotte Gainsbourg “Me and Jane Doe”
Girls “Laura”
Cass McCombs “Dream Come True Girl”

All the time in the world for an unintelligible end: I had been boning up on a few bric-a-brac masterworks by prose artists whose writings – specifically, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, Paul Auster’s Moon Palace and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, to name three – seem to have such an inextricable bond to the ashen cities they write about. By that same token, this mixtape of interstate love songs are kind of appropriate.

mixtape (january 2010)

(Wide awake on) wayside overestimations
Wire “Mercy”
Joy Division “The Sound Of Music”
The Fall “Fit And Working Again”
Public Image Ltd “Public Image”
Delta 5 “Mind Your Own Business”
Gang of Four “Damaged Goods”
Devo “Girl U Want”
Scritti Politti “Skank Bloc Bologna”
The Desperate Bicycles “Grief Is Very Private”
The Talking Heads “Memories Can’t Wait”
New Order “Ceremony”
Josef K “Revelation”
Pere Ubu “Final Solution”

Tell her what’s possible/all-day derision, is: Just when I remarked to a friend that I’m not finishing this non-definitive postpunk mix, something comes along to piss me off enough, providing enough bile for completion. Several things that “inspired” this: Simon Reynolds’ impossibly cool Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk 1978-84 of course (what a book); re-watching Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette recently (a tad unfairly maligned, maybe); crappy freelance wages and the sweltering, ever-pretentious frustrations of being, ahem, “generally unemployed” (or “positively unemployed”). The icy grandeur of Wire’s “Mercy” is an attempt of letting you in on all you need to know about postpunk in six minutes; or watch me jumpstart and wail along to David Byrne’s “these memories can’t WAAAAAIT”.

mixtape (december 2009)

Saints born being saints, parallel movies in slow motion
Asobi Seksu “Thursday”
Sigur Ros “Hjartao Hamast (Bamm Bamm Bamm)”
Real Estate “Basement”
Atlas Sound “Quick Canal”
My Bloody Valentine “Off Your Face”
Broadcast “I Found The End”
Animal Collective “Bluish”
Mazzy Star “Fade Into You”
Wilco “She’s A Jar”
Mercury Rev “Opus 40”
The Magnetic Fields “Queen of The Savages”
Neutral Milk Hotel “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea”
Broken Social Scene “5/4 (Shoreline)”

Begin responsibilities: As per the end of every decade, my wish is to be completely lost in the mist of presumably could-have-been dreams. The Atlas Sound song “Quick Canal”, the Deerhunter dude Bradford Cox’s nine-minute kraut-fantasy/dream-pop collaboration with Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, really anchors this list. (Anyway, just got back from Taipei, and it’s kinda exciting how the Deerhunter album Microcastle/Weird Era Cont match the city scenes and the ache of transience they gave me as I haul my ass around its busy streets.) Or maybe this has got more than a bit to do with the Animal Collective song too, how Avey Tare sings “pulling me into another dream, a lucid dream”. It’s unerringly revealing too, from this mixtape’s second half, that I am still so hung up on my favorite music from the decade before.

mixtape (november 2009)

Dreaming backwards, rehydrated
Black Tambourine "By Tomorrow"
PS Eliot "Entendre"
Boy Genius "Old New England"
Love Is All "Movie Romance"
Ampersand "Tokyo Girl"
Veronica Lake "When You Smile"
Orange Juice "Louise Louise"
The Champagne Socialists "Teardrop Tattoo"
Voxtrot "The Start Of Something"
The Vaselines "Molly's Lips"
The Aislers Set "Long Division"
Young Marble Giants "Music For Evening"
Best Coast "When I'm With You"
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart "Doing All The Things That Wouldn't Make Your Parents Proud"
The Shop Assistants "Train From Kansas City"
A Sunny Day In Glasgow "Panic Attacks Are What Make Me 'Me'"
The Magnetic Fields "I'm Sorry I Love You"
The Softies "Count To Ten"
Teenage Fanclub "Everything Flows"

Whole-grain madness: Anxious, slack motherfuckers are making me nervous. Probably after I watched this sorta-forgotten American movie Wanda recently or more so because of the current seasons - I love days that never stop raining - but I have been in the mood for some classic indie pop. Either that or I'll be commuting across town, disgruntled and immersed in Wire's Pink Flag, so help me God. My post-thirty days thus far can perhaps be summed up in my favorite Teenage Fanclub song ("I'll never know which way to flow/ Set a course but I don't know") that close this latest mix.

mixtape (oct 2009)

Storm tastes, savagery of microphone memories
White Hinterland “My Love”
Junior Boys “First Time”
A Sunny Day In Glasgow “Passionate Introverts (Dinosaurs)”
Phoenix “Rome (Neighbors remix)”
Mary Timony “Aging Astronauts II”
Au Revoir Simone “Shadows”
Kings Of Convenience “Mrs. Cold”
Fireflies “Cherry Blossom Girl”
Clothilde “Fallait Pas Ecraser La Queue Du Chat”
Scott Walker “30 Century Man”
The Clientele “Joseph Cornell”
The Clean “Linger Longer”
Atlas Sound “So Sad (To Watch Good Love Go Bad)”
Le Loup “Forgive Me”

Calamities noun: I pay attention to natural disasters on a fairly regular basis for my work and I can say I’ve just about had it, especially last week when these distressing incidents were unfolding across the region in such quick succession that it felt like infinities. So here’s a quick mixtape to take some of the edge off the sinister gloaming perhaps. The White Hinterlands’ cover of Justin Timberlake is phenomenal, so is Bradford Cox (Atlas Sound) trying his hand with a tune made famous by the Everly Brothers.

mixtape (september 2009)

Funny how her mouth tastes like linguine
Aimee Mann “That’s How I Know This Story Would Break My Heart”
Mark Lanegan “Pill Hill Serenade”
Elvis Perkins In Dearland “Slow Doomsday”
Ryan Adams “Harder Now That It’s Over”
The Rolling Stones “Sweet Virginia”
Yo La Tengo “When It’s Dark”
Dusty Springfield “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today”
Elvis Costello & Burt Bacharach “I Still Have That Other Girl In My Head”
Camera Obscura “James”
Bob Dylan “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”
Bright Eyes “First Day Of My Life”
M. Ward “Post-War”
Belle & Sebastian “The Boy With The Arab Strap”
Joni Mitchell “Cactus Tree”
Aretha Franklin “One Step Ahead”

Worthy ventures: Not being the most articulate motherfucker out there, I’m not surprised that I struggle most of the time to explain why making mixtapes is one of my favorite pastimes. Usually I just fumble along: last time I explained (or, over-explained) that it’s just like imaging doing a one-hour radio show or something. That’s not quite it, I think - plus I'm no Jack Frost -but this mixtape comes pretty close to that perhaps, a special hour show of familiar but unknown pleasures on some lost-highway radio station. I’m particularly fond of how the Ryan Adams song runs into the old Stones track. Randy Newman’s “I Think It’s Gonna Rain Today” is such a classic pop song, and I think I like Dusty’s version best; “Cactus Tree” is probably my favorite Joni Mitchell song of all-time, if I had to choose.

mixtape (august 2009)

Murder tapes, her bulletproof smile
M. Ward "I'm A Fool To Want You"
Ilyas Ahmed & Grouper "Exit Twilight"
Silk Flowers "In This Place"
Interpol "Say Hello To The Angels"
Little Girls "What We Did"
Galaxie 500 "Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste"
Leonard Cohen "Avalanche"
Billie Holiday "When You're Smiling"
Tom Waits "Dead And Lovely"
Warpaint "Billie Holiday"
Tom Verlaine & the Million Dollar Bashers "Cold Irons Bound"
Matt Sweeney & Bonnie Prince Billy "Only Someone Running"

Depression gangster issue: Just watched Michael Mann's Public Enemies, which could well be my favorite movie of the year; interesting use of Billie Holiday music too, and so influenced is this latest mixtape. A nod to all sorts of killings and robbing, jailbreak and other misdemeanors of "gangster type" criminals (as my colleague like to label them) then, in all their existential, gun-toting shapes and forms.

mixtape (july 2009)

Lethargy, a cavalry of obsessions
Grizzly Bear “About Face”
Bob Dylan “I Don’t Believe You (She Acts Like We Never Have Met)”
Emmy The Great “MIA”
Alexi Murdoch “All My Days”
Jon Brion “Strings That Tie To You”
Phoenix “Lisztomania”
Peter Bjorn and John “Teen Love”
Best Coast “Up All Night”
Dirty Projectors “Two Doves”
The Fiery Furnaces “The End Is Near”
The Rolling Stones “Factory Girl”
Yo La Tengo “Alyda”
The Broken West “Back In Your Head”
Broken Social Scene “Swimmers”
The Free Design “Kites Are Fun”
The Vaselines “Molly’s Lips”
The Pains of Being Pure At Heart “Doing All The Things That Wouldn’t Make Your Parents Proud”
The New Pornographers “Letter From An Occupant”
Belle & Sebastian “A Century Of Fakers”

When with the fortunate only: Another month, another new job, and the quiet march of employment tedium rolls along discontentedly, it would seem, tired and no time to read, no time to discuss anything, whiling away in the bleeding heart of the city, an 80-yard rush into nowhere, discouragement and a big confusion, directionless, apocalyptic thoughts, indebted to all sorts of nonsense, waiting for some shit to happen. Or well, things just getting good, eventually? Be careful.

mixtape (june 2009)

Candy floss and shady Swedish houses
REM “Parakeet”
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone “Natural Light”
Au Revoir Simone “Take Me As I Am”
Luna “Into The Fold”
Kath Bloom “Come Here”
His Clancyness “Nothing and Nowhere To Go”
Richard Swift “Buildings In America”
Wilco “Alone (Shaking Sugar)”
Iron & Wine “My Lady’s House”
The Wooden Birds “The Other One”
Mojave 3 “Starlight #1”
Okkervil River “A King And Queen”
Deradoorian “This is the Heart Now”
M. Ward “Involuntarily”
Grizzly Bear “Two Weeks”
The National “Apartment Story”

Uninhabitable daydreams: I was going to write down some of my random thoughts on Alain de Botton’s recent The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work (well, a serviceable read) but one of the local dailies beat me to it by a whisker, last Sunday. But I hope I’m the first to recommend to you Albert Sanchez Pinol’s Pandora in the Congo (2008), the best new fiction out of all I read in the first half of this year – I was completely entranced by this Spanish writer’s incorrigible humor and relentless imagination. But back to this whole thing about using music to unburden oneself from the vagaries of work life, that I alluded to vaguely in my last Sigur Ros post. This latest mixtape is a soft one perhaps, the song choices and sequencing dictated by those moments of uninhabited (or uninhabitable) daydreams experienced ever so briefly when stuck for long hours in a dreary job. Two songs here capture this sort of vibe particularly well, I thought, one a bit older and the other brand new. I remember reading somewhere (though I might have gotten some parts of the anecdote wrong) that Dean Wareham wrote “Into The Fold” about a junkie dude he tried unsuccessfully to check into rehab one rainy morning, a friend who later stole some of his records from his home - the song itself is tender, forgiving and lovely. “Two Weeks”, from the Grizzly Bear album recently released, not only sound awesome but Ed Droste’s lyrics are pretty evocative as well, even when singing about something as mundane as saving up the obligatory 14 vacation days: "Save up all the days, a routine malaise/ Just like yesterday I told you I would stay".

mixtape (may 2009)

Something about a man laughing in an abattoir
Marnie Stern "Shea Stadium"
Dirty Projectors "Stillness Is The Move"
Deerhunter "Rainwater Cassette Exchange"
Animal Collective "Lion In A Coma"
Arch M "Cat Grave"
TV On The Radio "Playhouses"
Sonic Youth "Nevermind (What Was It Anyway)"
Cymbals Eat Guitars "Share"
Sunset Rubdown "Idiot Heart"
Deerhoof "Midnight Bicycle Mystery"
Silk Flowers "Flash of Light"
Black Dice "La Cucaracha"
The Field "The More That I Do"

Conversation fear: I happen to put together this latest mixtape the week the writer JG Ballard passed away. I've never been the most dedicated reader of Ballard (1930-2009) as I only got around finishing three of his novels but I would always appreciate him for having the balls to actually write a book as elegantly subversive as Crash in 1970, never mind that I found its nihilist sensibilities better articulated in David Cronenberg's perfectly executed film adaptation in 1996. Ballard's influence on rock musicians (from Joy Division to the Klaxons, apparently) has been well documented of late, since his death. I am not sure how much of this mixtape's music would lay claim to be directly Ballard-influenced, though I was fucking around a bit with some vaguely similar themes of technologically-enabled abattoir blues and free-floating anxieties here. Anyway.

mixtape (april 2009)

Unity concepts of the rational doomsayer
Sam Prekop “Practice Twice”
Nina Simone “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out”
Atlas Sound “Dovers Jam”
Pavement “Grave Architecture”
Camera Obscura “My Maudlin Career”
Calexico “Trigger”
Iron & Wine “Love and Some Verses”
Devendra Banhart “At The Hop”
M. Ward “Shangri-La”
Beach House “Turtle Island”
Grizzly Bear “Cheerleader”
Big Star “O My Soul”
Yo La Tengo “Paul Is Dead”
Dum Dum Girls “Jail La La”
Matthew Sweet “Sick Of Myself”
Andrew Bird “Fitz And The Dizzyspells”

Walking Spanish: I am sure I have shared with some of you, in conversations probably, how much I love the smartass Tom Waits reference in Joshua Ferris’ very readable novel Then We Came To The End, where folks being laid off becomes “walking Spanish down the hall”. On a related note, I am currently, officially, out of work this week, though I must say that the realities and circumstances surrounding the decision to leave I had made some six weeks ago have not truly resonated with me yet. In better times, I might have felt in some way liberated from the drudgery of dispassionate work, and looking forward to some time off for holidaying, long-term decomposing and what not. But these are different times of course. These days, I don’t need to remind anyone (i.e. myself) that there is rich cause for apprehension instead. The economy, as you might have heard, is way down in a hole. Employment opportunities in my line of work have actually been rather limited even before the shit hits the fan, plus I’ve got this worrying tendency to strike out at job interviews as naturally as A-Roid taking bad swings at breaking balls. (Speaking of Rodriguez, below is my prediction for the MLB 2009 season, with the teams in bold making the playoffs but I end my predictions there because, as they say, it’s crapshoots from that point – if I don’t find a proper job soon, the silver lining is that I would have plenty of time for baseball.) I put together this current mixtape in that murky, lack-of-sustained-confidence kind of mood I was in, the whole thing took a while to really “click” (not until I added Nina Simone, because I am really starting to relate to the sentiments of the song in so many ways; the Atlas Sound live recording that follows is so insanely good), and perhaps that is not so surprising.

AL West
LA Angels
Oakland As
Seattle Mariners
Texas Rangers

AL Central
Cleveland Indians
Minnesota Twins
Chicago White Sox
Detroit Tigers
Kansas City Royals

AL East
New York Yankees
Boston Red Sox
Toronto Blue Jays
Tampa Bay Rays
Baltimore Orioles

NL West
LA Dodgers
Arizona Diamondbacks
San Francisco Giants
Colorado Rockies
San Diego Padres

NL Central
St Louis Cardinals
Chicago Cubs
Cincinnati Reds
Milwaukee Brewers
Pittsburgh Pirates
Houston Astros

NL East
New York Mets
Atlanta Braves
Philadelphia Phillies
Florida Marlins
Washington Nationals

mixtape (march 2009)

The thicket that exploded
Black Dice “Street Dude”
Little Girls “Venom”
Richard Hell “Blank Generation”
Deerhunter “Nothing Ever Happened”
Crystal Stilts “Prismatic Room”
Crocodiles “I Wanna Kill”
Handsome Furs “All We Want, Baby, Is Everything”
Public Image Ltd “Annalisa”
David Bowie “I’m Waiting For The Man”
Dum Dum Girls “Brite Futures”
The Mayfair Set “Already Warm”
Vivian Girls “Surfin’ Away”
The Yardbirds “Stroll On”
The Black Lips “Drugs”

Deeper into movies: Just around the same time when many dudes around me are making peace with the fact that Liverpool FC won’t be taking the English title this season (some having made that contention earlier of course), I caught the latest Terence Davies film Time and the City (2009), the British filmmaker’s Proustian documentary about his hometown Liverpool. Davies is the greatest living British filmmaker, in my opinion, and the soot-flecked portrayal of working class consciousness that characterized his two greatest movies (1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives and 1992’s The Long Day Closes) is evident in the barbed, revealing commentary (Davies did the voiceovers himself) accompanying the reels of vintage archival photos and celluloid footages used in Time and the City, along with some of the most hauntingly evocative use of music you’ll find in the cinemas these days (never mind that this is one filmmaker who hates the Beatles). Most potent is the weight of memory’s darkest and most fiercely perseverant contraptions that seems to be wired into every frame of Time and the City, Davies’ artistry clearly having a much more powerful effect than any of the chance-generated ambiguities of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (which I happen to quite enjoy as well). And well if David Fincher had made a more punk-ass version of Benjamin Button, then this latest mixtape might well serve as the soundtrack.

mixtape (february 2009)

Relationshipness (rollerskating at night)
Belle and Sebastian "The Rollercoaster Ride"
Can "Moonshake"
Califone "Your Golden Ass"
Yo La Tengo "Demons"
Throbbing Gristle "United"
Animal Collective "Taste"
Beach House "Used To Be"
The Antlers "Bear"
The Pains of Being Pure at Heart "Young Adult Friction"
The Velvet Underground "Here She Comes Now"
Ancient Crux "In Teen Dreams"
Broadcast "Before We Begin"
Lotus Plaza "Red Oak Way"
Wilco "Cars Can't Escape"

Truths: So the first time I test-drove this mix on a night jog, there were actually these two kids rollerskating along the canal with me, young boy and a girl who inspired the latter part of the mixtape title, for the short length of time Throbbing Gristle runs into Animal Collective runs into Beach House, seamlessly I like to think. The version of "Demons" I used was originally the one from the Genius + Love = Yo La Tengo record, which I replaced with the one appearing on the I Shot Andy Warhol movie soundtrack because I really like the slightly-crazed feminist/gendercide rant by Lili Taylor (in character as the unsucessful Warhol assassinator Valerie Solanas) tagged on the end of this soundtrack version. "Cars Can't Escape", one of my favorite Wilco compositions, is still officially unreleased to the best of my knowledge, Jeff Tweedy's lyrics I misheard on this particular song ("relationless") having something to do with the word "relationshipness" used here.

mixtape (january 09)

Not a neutral discourse
Handsome Furs "I'm Confused"
David Bowie "TVC 15"
Tom Ze "Quero Sambal Meu Bem"
Filastine "Palmares"
Serge Gainsbourg & Jane Birkin "La Chanson De Slogan"
The Knife "Neverland"
Animal Collective "Peacebone"
Asobi Seksu "Breathe Into Glass"
Battles "Tij"
Os Mutantes "Dia 36"
Antony & The Johnsons "Shake That Devil"
Dizzy Gillespie "Upper Manhattan Medical Group"
Stereolab "Cellulose Sunshine"
Super Furry Animals "Y Teimlad"
Mogwai "Kings Meadow"

ps: perhaps the track that is closest to my heart for a long time now is "upper manhattan medical group", as performed here by a dizzy gillespie band, always been my favorite composition by billy strayhorn, duke ellington's longtime creative foil ("blood count" probably my second favorite of strayhorn's, love stan getz's rendition).