Format snobbery

My friend Nicole recently lent me her copy of Mix Tape: The Art Of Cassette Culture, a collection of mixtape art, tracklists and musings edited by Thurston Moore. It’s an interesting read, not just for the insights into the record collections of people like Mike Watt and Jim O'Rourke, but because of the fascinating pretensions and ‘golden rules’ people have when they’re putting their tapes together. (Incidentally, one of the things that annoyed the shit out of me was the constant assertion that musical compilations are best enjoyed on two sides of magnetic tape. If you ask me, there’s ‘retro nostalgia’ and then there’s ‘so unwieldy that no one will listen to your tape more than twice’. But that’s irrelevant.)

When it comes to making mix tapes or CDs, I’ve always been a big fan of mood over crazed eclecticism or a stream of hits. One of my favourite tools is interval music; short, simple tunes that fit in between the other tracks to act like musical apple juice, cleansing the palate or creating a context for the following song.

I’ve linked four of my favourites here. The first, J Saunders’ Tinkle, I found on Four Tet’s Late Night Tales compilation. It’s an action-packed half-minute of pure library, a glockenspiel pattern which is interesting for its plainness and has resolved everything and clocked off in just over 30 seconds.

A Robin, by Aaron Martin, is a similar story. It’s an enchanting and sort of old-fashioned melody, and although it’s complicated, it sounds simple – 12 bars of an accordion melody, then looped, then with another accordion added, then cello and sound effects. The more you listen to it, the more it reveals its complexities, but it waits until you’re ready before surprising you and in the meantime it has a timelessness that keeps the flow of just about anything.

A little while back I bought a book of Tom Waits interviews, and one of the things that I found interesting was that he hates to listen to music in isolation or complete silence. He finds anything more interesting when it’s coming from down the hall or upstairs or with the sounds of the street blaring over the top. Need New Body’s Tuthmosis, from their last album, Where’s Black Ben, reminds me of that. Tuthmosis sounds like it’s not coming from your speakers but from a secret passageway in your house you never knew existed, and it has a sort of magic that makes anything that follows seem a bit special.

Then there’s Chick Corea’s The Law Of Falling And Catching Up, which is basically Stockhausen in two and a half minutes. It’s the sound of a jazz trio turning things down to the minimum, flipping the ratio of sounds to silence on its head. It’s almost completely silent, in fact, with only the occasional tap of the keys from Chick or a rattle of the snare from Roy Haynes to remind you they’re still there. It’s the mixtape space-in-between.

Actually, I haven’t finished Mix Tape yet so I’m jumping the gun a little, but it seems like a lot of the tapes that made the cut were genre-specific, and if not, long sides of strange and quirky selections. Am I just being a hopeless wanker with my "moods" and "interval music"?