Sunday afternoon. I browse through my collection of audio tapes. Yesterday I finished Rob Sheffield’s ‘Love is a mix tape’, today I wonder how much love my old tapes express. It’s not a fair comparison, Sheffield tells a love story supported by mix tapes, my old tapes just demonstrate a utilitarian drive to collect as…
A character analysis in mix tapes
A mix tape, even in its modern playlist equivalent, is a multidimensional carrier of information. It contains information about its creator, the person it is created for, and at least the relationship between those two. Safe to assume that most mix tapes are created by men, to further a romantic cause and on surface level…
Guantanomo Blues
A couple of years ago, at the height of ISIS sponsored terrorism, I toyed with the idea of creating a playlist that would maximally insult the religious fundamentalists. It never got off the ground; in the end I didn’t find the idea of insulting people that appealing. And so I abandoned the project, but not…
Present the past as future
At a Massive Attack concert, almost a year ago, I saw a girl in a Coil T-shirt. Given the distance between us, that observation alone was already impressive, but as she walked away my attention shifted to the widening gap between us, and the spatial quality of time I somehow associate with Coil. From a…
Is it Jazz, is it Afrobeat, is it world music?
The record store owner frowned at me when I asked him where he kept Fela Kuti, under ‘Jazz’ or ‘World Music’. I already assumed he wouldn’t have ‘Afrobeat’ as a separate category or awared Fela Kuti his own, private entry. For a moment I saw him searching for the right words and then he said…
Some of 2019’s best
When listing the best albums of 2019 it is difficult to ignore the voice of the critics. Most people will agree to a large extent with the critics, some, like me, with a strong dislike of authority, will take the opposite position, and claim critics only follow each other and are more focused on being…
We are the music makers (1873-1964-1992)
End of year, time to take stock. Time to say goodbye to ideas that have done nothing more but collecting dust. Time to address the most annoying part of getting older; becoming a grumpy old man no one wants to listen to, someone who is increasingly living in the past and only deals in comparisons…
I am a DJ, I am what I play (90s Christmas Tale in Summer)
In a dark summer night I found myself counting stones. One stone, two stones, three stones. One by one we dug out the cobbles and threw them into the canal. ‘Why are we doing this?’, I asked Adrian. ‘Because this party is boring’, he answered. ‘and because we are doing nothing in the name of…
Earplugs and gags
Suppose every book comes with the warning not to read when light intensity is less than 300 lux, that doing so could damage your eyes. Or museums offering special glasses to protect us against aggressive colours by blocking or filtering those. After all, it can’t be healthy to be subjected to high doses of bright…
Music for elevators
It stopped me in my tracks. At first I didn’t know why, but then I realised, the music in the elevator I just came out was an instrumental version of ‘Don’t look back in Anger‘, complete with a sweet, nondescript string section. It stopped me in my tracks for two unrelated reasons. First, the sudden…
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