making mixtapes
I've had mixtapes on the mind ever since I listened to the incredible episode of Louder than a Riot about DJ Drama and the death of the mixtape. The episode featured a lot of excerpts of Drama's early mixtapes and I was instantly struck by the unpretentiousness and authenticity of them.
I loved that they were hosted. Loved the adlibs. The interludes. There was a kind of theatre to them - a scrappiness that I recognized from my early days of creating where you'd throw in anything that really made the thing work. It didn't matter if it made sense, or had precedent. It was a way of communicating. And communication really has no rules.
Ever since then I've been thinking about mixtapes and what they could mean for me. Mixtapes don't really exist in my life, but other kinds of storytelling, other kinds of curated suggestion, are more prevalent than ever.
I've also been thinking of broader, more encompassing formats of communication. Especially as you meet and connect with people, is there a /thing/ that you can create that can communicate your identity more effectively?
Suggestions and recommendations have always - for me - been the most direct path to understanding. I share things I like with people I like so they can exist instead my head for a bit. You can tell who I am by watching a movie I like. The movie tells you more than I could about how I exist in the world. What I believe and what I feel.
I've started to wonder about a format - a kind of mixtape - that exists over a massive timescale. What if there was an audiofile, for example, that was hours long, curated around a single mood, feeling, place, or emotion?
There was a video version of this in Toronto - people curating visual mixtapes - but I think audio might be a format that feels more correct to me. What if, over the course of several hours, you listened to songs, podcasts, and audiobooks that immersed you in a certain kind of world.
Spotify is sort of starting to do this - combining playlists of music, podcasts, and other audio. But I think there's space for a more raw version. A re-emergence of a kind of mixtape. It won't be for everyone but it'll be for someone. It'd definitely be for me.
I love to live in moods and emotions. Imagine a week's worth of audio about nostalgia. Songs. And excepts of books, and movies, and soundscapes. I don't know how or when I'll start exploring this. Only that I will.