Mar 1, 2015 |
Years ago, I was the host of a weekly Sunday jazz show on radio. For six years in New Zealand, then for another couple in the UK, I picked jazz tunes (or thereabouts) and played them to people over the wireless. Always loved doing that. Later on, I had a regular DJ slot at my local pub – again on Sundays – playing the same kind of music. I recorded those mixes and shared them on Mixcloud. And when Spotify came along, I started making and sharing compilations that way too.
Of course, making personal mixtapes for people is one of life’s great pleasures. Receiving them even more so. Choosing music, putting it in a sequence and sharing it with someone is far and away one of my favourite things to do.
But for one reason or another, for the past couple of years, I’ve had real trouble making playlists. It’s like I fell off the mixtape horse and was too shaken to get back on. I haven’t trusted my choices. I’ve made partial playlists and then deleted them. I just kept choosing the wrong songs – or songs that weren’t really what I meant – and as a result, I sort of lost the urge to compile – even for my own listening. So I took a long sabbatical from making playlists.
On the upside, what this means is that I’ve spent the last couple of years listening to a lot of whole albums, and more recently, to other people’s public playlists on Spotify. I figure it’s like that thing where writers need to stop every now and then and just read an awful lot.
Just lately though, I’ve started wanting to put songs in an order and send them out into the world again. Not sure why the urge returned or where it had been – but it’s back. There are lots of different types of mixtapes I could make (and lots of different things to express that way) – but I’m going to play it a bit safe and just start out doing things I know I can do.
So… Sunday Jazz it is. Two hour Spotify playlists for your laid-back Sunday listening enjoyment, if that’s your sort of thing. Back again – starting here next weekend.
Apr 9, 2014 |
This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who knows me – but I’m a bit obsessed with playlists and mixtapes. I like to make compilations of songs. There’s nothing particularly special about that, I guess. But it is something I think a good deal about. It’s kind of my thing.
Making mixtapes for other people has always been one of my favourite things to spend time on. I don’t do it nearly often enough these days, but I’ve never really stopped doing it. Since the age of about 13, my life has been spent in search of “the right next song”. And it’s something I’m still working on.
I always give it a lot of thought, and I’ll listen to and fine-tune a compilation a dozen times or more before I make a gift of it. It invariably means a whole bunch of different stuff to me than it means to the recipient, and that’s probably as it should be – but as a piece of communication, it comes in just above the long, handwritten letter on the genuine-ometer.
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Oct 24, 2012 |
I have a lot of music. Mostly I listen to albums. Whole albums. Not on shuffle. I quite like hearing albums the way they’ve been put together and thinking about them as a single unit, rather than as a bunch of songs that happen to be bundled together.
But as a result of that, there’s a lot of the music in my collection that’s overlooked. Some of my favourite music is on albums I don’t like all that much. Some albums get ignored in favour of others.
Sometimes, though, it’s just fun to make playlists and mix tapes. In fact, it’s one of my favourite things to do.
So I’ve been going through my digital music library recently looking at ways in which I can put together collections of songs that are interesting to listen to – especially for those songs I tend not to listen to a great deal. I’ve been doing this by coming up with themed mixes.
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Sep 5, 2010 |
Soul Food Sunday – Vol. 2 by Dubber on Mixcloud
I’ve just finished a new mix to promote the regular Sunday afternoon DJ sets I’m going to be performing as part of Soul Food Sundays at the Hare and Hounds.
Not much else to say about it – except that Jake made the cover.
Click here to listen – and enjoy.
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Apr 6, 2010 |
One of the ideas I had during my ’30 days of ideas’ last month was something I called I Made You A Tape – an online service that allowed you to make mixtapes for a single person, with personalised liner notes.
Ray Kuyvenhoven, a website developer in British Columbia, took that basic idea and made something genuinely amazing.
It’s called Mixtape For You – and it’s awesome. I’ve made one so far (an introduction to Shriekback for a friend of mine), and I’m so impressed with how it works – and how it embodies the intention of what I was trying to do.
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