Well, this came out of nowhere. It’s a mix cobbled together by John Xela for Boomkat, and apparently it’s an exclusive because I’ve heard absolutely nothing about it elsewhere. I went ahead and got it on a lark, and it’s pretty darn good.
For music geeks, the mix-tape (which I shall call it, regardless of medium) takes on a certain aura of history and reverence. Chances are, most of us have had a life-defining moment based on something somebody’s cooler older brother or sister put on a tape for us…something that we’d never have been exposed to otherwise. For me, it was the first time I heard “Debaser” on a tape that a high-school friend’s sister’s boyfriend had given her. I was a freshman in a redneck Georgia school, where all the local radio stations played a constant litany of country and “Classic Rock,” so the dichotomy between Francis’ hideous wailing and the sheer catchiness of the chorus was something altogether alien and liberating. By college, I’d amassed an encyclopediac collection of music, and in the early ’90s, tape-trading became a loosely-organized subculture among my peers.
There’s a science to the very making and sequencing to the mix-tape. The procedure’s a little different for everyone, and it’s almost always based on emotional choices more than anything else. It’s not so much about the individual songs on the tape as it is about the experience as a whole. The tape itself conveys something about the person making it, and what they were thinking and feeling at the time. It exists on its own merits, as a love-letter, a subtle “piss-off”, or perhaps just a “you’ve got to hear this!”
High Fidelity placed this in the cultural forebrain just as the cassette medium died out. There are arguments as to exactly when it happened, or if there really was an individual moment when the useful-but-fragile-and-despised TDK S90 lost its allure, but some folks point to the period in the mid-90s when labels simply stopped issuing new records on the medium. (There’s a great article here about the demise of cassettes)
When I was in high-school and college, blank tape was a love/hate thing. They were easily broken, sensitive to heat, and face it, we all had that moment when the car stereo went waaaarrrrb-b-b-ly and we had to surgically excise miles of magnetic intestine from the tape-deck with all the corresponding shouted expletives. You still see that stuff on the side of the road sometimes. Hiss was the great and inescapable boogieman, and I can remember spending hours in high school cursing it as it built, layer on layer, on my immaculately engineered 4-track recordings.
So, along comes digital technology, and the world’s a better place, right? No more hiss, no more cross-bleed, no more untangling. CDs can be burned in faster-than-real-time, and even the cheapest DAP software makes sequencing and editing a breeze. But in the process, something was lost. There’s a certain charm in that ugly translucent-orange tape you find under the seat of your car, and there’s the one thing it shared with vinyl, something that’s lost with the compact disc–the concept of “sides.”
There was a joke on one of Tom Petty’s records, where on the fifth song, he says something to the effect of, “if this was a record, you’d be turning it over now.” Vinyl and cassette had that break in the middle, sort of an enforced intermission, that by its very nature lent a certain character to the very approach of recording and sequencing music. It was simple, really: 22-30 minutes on each side. Each side was generally treated as a self-existing set of ideas, so there was a certain degree of care that had to be taken in how it started, flowed and ended. That’s a structure that anyone over the age of 25 or so these days grew up on. That’s the way we’re used to consuming and experiencing this stuff.
And it makes sense, really. I’m a geek among geeks when it comes to music, but I can’t remember the last time I actually sat and only listened to something for 60 minutes straight. Twenty or thirty, sure, but more than that, and you just start to wander. Modern producers seem to have forgotten that, and the sloppy and thoughtless sequencing of most modern music shows this disregard. It’s particularly annoying in the electronic field, where everybody feels compelled to fill every last one of those 80 minutes with something, even if it’s (often) at the cost of quality. Gramophone, the hopelessly pretentious classical-music magazine, regularly pans CDs that clock in at less than 70 minutes as not being worth the money, and we’re back to the perception that quantity equals quality. I don’t care if all 700meg are used, I just want what is used to be good.
Good God, do I sound old yet?
Of course, the format-shift to a single 80-minute side means that the thinking of mixtapes has to change as well. Some folks still make 45-minute mixes, split right in the middle, while others go for some degree of ebb-and-flow on a longer timescale. Some folks deliberately inject pops and hiss into the mix to simulate the sounds of old tape and vinyl. The old ways die hard.
Which brings us back to John Xela. He’s done some great work, and last year’s Yasume collaboration was absolutely stunning. When a composer comes forward with one of these, it’s an interesting chance to look at his influences and personal preferences. Sure, lots of folks do DJ sets, but that’s more extroverted. Since their meant for public consumption (rather than appreciation), they don’t reflect on the artist’s personal tastes as much as on technique. A mix like this is much more personal.
So, what do we know about his work? Two full-lengths, the Yasume record, and plenty of remixes, most of which are quality stuff. He’s got a distinct style, and his work conveys a breezy wistfulness with just a hint of something more despondent underneath. He’s got a light touch and usually sticks with simple, effective arrangements.
That said, parts of Listen with Xela come as a surprise, while other choices seem right on. The whole thing runs like an uneasy miasma of old sepia-toned film footage and quiet glitch, with oddly-placed bits of cabaret-style music poking up here and there. Most of the source material is quiet and sparse, and the whole thing is very subdued in tone. Philip Jeck and Max Richter’s excellent cinematic material blends almost perfectly with the Angelo Badlamenti’s Twin Peaks music, but where the heck stuff like Carpenter’s Dark Star and Night of the Living Dead came from is anyone’s guess. Still, the idea is to fit this stuff together into a coherent whole, and he’s done so admirably here. The whole thing’s seamless, and even when Julee Cruise and Doris Day(!) poke up through the mix, they function as a fitting punctuation to everything else that’s going on.
It’s quite satisfying, with some really interesting choices, but it’s also 72 minutes long, which is the only thing going against it. There’s not enough variety. Still, it strikes me as something done as a lark, and at £5.99, it’s worth every penny. You’re sure to find something you haven’t heard, and that’s the whole point.
(Incidentally, a few of mine that I keep on hand are here if you’re interested.)