mixtape 015

15 years ago
Please enjoy jwz mixtape 015.

By the way, there were a whopping five comments on the last one, which I can only interpret as "nobody's listening"...

Tags: ,
Current Music: as noted

54 Responses:

  1. perligata says:
    15 years ago at 4:52 am

    That should be trivial to check, no? (I'm not listening, but that's because my musical taste is pretty drastically different from yours.)
    • jwz says:
      15 years ago at 12:42 pm

      The aggregate stats really aren't that interesting; for one thing, it's hard to see the difference between one person who listened to the whole thing, and two dozen people who listened to the first track and gave up. And also it doesn't tell me anything about what people think about them.

      Also, the stats page completely fails to make musical recommendations to me, which is the kind of thing that sometimes happens in actual conversation about music.
      • perligata says:
        15 years ago at 1:19 pm

        Gotcha. Hopefully the mixtapes aren't self-selecting for people who already listen to mostly/all the same music as you, but I could see that happening...
    • fu3dotorg says:
      15 years ago at 1:43 pm

      Jamie, 'cabaret music' (or whatever,) isn't my thing, but "Pretty Balanced - Simon's Sleeping" was alright, to say the least..

      Compare it to the other tracks on the playlist and it might be your 'you suck'(as in me/I)-track/"trap," (hehe; for liking it and none other,) but if so then that's my problem exclusively, which is great, aswell as irrelevant.

      (..Conclusively; - except for 'Pretty Balanced' the whole playlist was well-balanced.)

      [Thanks once again.]
  2. mcfnord says:
    15 years ago at 5:00 am

    i listened recently for the first time and it was cool.
  3. fightingwords says:
    15 years ago at 5:10 am

    Listening now.
  4. tedlick says:
    15 years ago at 5:33 am

    ...but it didn't occur to me to post my opinion about them. If that's what's needed to keep the mixtapes flowing, so be it.

    On mixtape 15-- interested to hear the Barry Andrews track. I picked up the recent two Shriekback albums and enjoyed them somewhat; curious as to what his solo stuff sounds like.

    For me, these mixtapes make me feel like the shut-in whose garden gnome gets abducted-- it's as if you stole my CD collection, and are now mailing me back pictures of it enjoying the wide world; on average 30% of what I hear I already have, but the remaining 70% is nicely new.
  5. vare2 says:
    15 years ago at 5:36 am

    been listening and relistening to all your previous mixtapes.
  6. skreidle says:
    15 years ago at 5:48 am

    I'll admit that I haven't, because a) I recognize about 5% of the artists involved, but that's not nearly so inconvenient as b) it's streaming audio and not downloadable--I never sit at my computer long enough to listen to an entire streamed album.
    • vmole says:
      15 years ago at 10:00 am

      What if there was tool that could download an audio stream and save it to disk, neatly splitting it into individual tracks, just like a CD ripper. But there isn't. You won't find one, even searching for certain keywords.
  7. waider says:
    15 years ago at 5:48 am

    I've been enjoying these, mainly for the exposure to music I generally wouldn't otherwise have encountered. There's been at least one track per mix that makes me want to find out more about the artist in question. Sometimes this means going back and listening again, because a particular track has stuck in my head but I didn't note the artist/title at the time. "Rocked by Rape" from the third mixtape has been repeatedly popping into my head, as has "Let's Dance To Joy Division" from #12 or #13.

    I was surprised by the last tape: I'd mentally pidgeonholed old-school Industrial as being something like "Trent Reznor with less showboating", or possibly "noise with occasional other noise" and was surprised to discover the more rhythmic stuff, some of which came off sounding like Graeme Revell's score for The Crow (of course, in checking that I've got Revell's name spelled correctly, I find that he played keyboards and percussion for an industrial band. Doh.)

    I would say more on the podcasting, except that it relates to patently impossible activities such as saving the streamed music, etc. Suffice to say that my opinion of iTunes' podcast handling hasn't lifted above "This was an afterthought, right?"
    • jwz says:
      15 years ago at 12:29 pm

      Yeah, I love the Crow score, Revell's great. He also did the score for Pitch Black, and there's this amazing scene at the beginning where the ship is coming apart in the atmosphere as they're trying to land -- the windshield is gone, debris is smashing around in the cabin, and it's making all these great "tearing apart" noises... and then underneath it you realize that part of what you're hearing isn't only the ship coming apart, it's a drum track. There's this incredibly subtle transition from "audio effect" to "song".
      • tooluser says:
        15 years ago at 12:40 pm

        Count this as a vote to put that in the next mixtape if you're taking 'em. That sounds fantastic. In the mean time, I may try to find it myself.
        • waider says:
          15 years ago at 1:19 am

          Seconding that vote; I'd go buy the track/album off iTunes except that I'm engaged in one of those quixotic "no money to the RIAA" things.
    • waider says:
      15 years ago at 2:59 pm

      Following up on my own comment, since I've now listened to a good half to two-thirds of the current tape: I am giving up on trying to figure out if any music I know of would fall into the category of "You Would Like This". Some of this stuff is really, really good (the first track had me smiling and on the verge of laughing on the way to the office this morning) and some of it I don't much care for. I can suggest you check out Jack L / Jack Lukeman / Jack Lukeman and the Black Romantics (all the same, or at least the same lead singer; not sure if he drags the band around with him all the time) for something that would fit approximately into this sort of music genre, albeit not quite so dark, and there's a track on Faithless' Reverence called "Angeline" that would also not go astray here. But really, as I said, I have no idea if you'd actually like this stuff, just that I'm throwing it out there.
  8. davachu says:
    15 years ago at 6:05 am

    It's been a royal pain in the ass getting logging in to livejournal to post this, so maybe that's one contributing factor?

    Anyhow. Most of these tapes have been new to me, since I usually inhabit the metal or trance worlds, and they've been great. It's good to hear new music.

    Tape 10 was awesome. The covers selection was great. Fuzzbox was an inspired choice.

    So there.
  9. baconmonkey says:
    15 years ago at 6:16 am

    dude, that is the lamest and lowest form of Fishing For Complements.
  10. rob_from_ca says:
    15 years ago at 7:48 am

    Been listening, but haven't commented. I do with that the stream would at least support pausing in iTunes without starting over. I tend to end up listening to the beginning 2-3 times, since I almost always have to pause at least one...

    But I'm sure that's not your fault, and other then that they are great, I think I've listened to them all. I find lots of new stuff to buy this way. Thanks for doing this.

    Also, not sure if this is against the rules or not, but if it's possible, it would be nice to leave the track-listings up for longer, always good to browse the list when looking for something interesting to pick up.
  11. calmingshoggoth says:
    15 years ago at 8:09 am

    I listened to mixtape 009 and loved it, but the inability to pause* is what is holding me back from listening to more. I don't have more than one to three songs worth of contiguous attention most of the time. This means I keep listening to the first few songs of each tape trying to get to the later songs.

    * yes, I know there are ways around the limitation, but listening to new music is not important enough for me to spend the ten minutes or so it would take to setup a system.
  12. spoonyfork says:
    15 years ago at 8:32 am

    This fanboy has enjoyed the mixtapes but is hesitant to comment. Now that I'm already out here... the "punk" mixtape might be an interesting diversion.
  13. pdkl95 says:
    15 years ago at 8:57 am

    Oooo... Jill Tracy and Miranda Sex Garden? This one has big potential. "A Fairytale About Slavery" has always been my favorite song in 5/4 time...

    The previous tape was great, too. You successfully introduced me to industrial I was not familiar with, which is a pretty big achievement,
  14. quuuuux says:
    15 years ago at 9:47 am

    Just recently stumbled upon your mixtape series... definitely a great source for discovering new music. Are the tracklists of the previous tapes available online by any chance?
  15. jmtd says:
    15 years ago at 9:58 am

    I try to listen at work, when I have a long stretch of coding or something to do. I've found that pausing the stream in the software I use (probably totem or something, not particularly sophisticated for the task) does not really work and I get sent back to square one.
  16. incster says:
    15 years ago at 11:17 am

    I prefer your older, funnier mixtapes.
  17. jwz says:
    15 years ago at 12:38 pm

    I'm of course interested in finding a way to have longer-term availability of these. One way would be if instead of (or in addition to) my streams, I was linking to tracks on some other site that already had permission from the labels to share music... Recently there's been some noise about how last.fm is streaming full songs now, even to people who aren't logged in. They have this flash gizmo on their site where if you create a playlist that is more than a dozen songs long, they'll let you stream those songs to others.

    That would be a pretty good way to go about this, except that they don't have most of the songs on my mixtapes. The other day I went through mixtape 001 and tried to create a last.fm playlist of it, and they only had, I think, 3 of the first 12 tracks. Also, it was really time consuming to get even that far, because their search tool is not geared toward this kind of task. Even if they had the tracks, which they don't, I think it would take me hours of manual tedium to set up each mixtape there.

    So, that's all a drag.
    • pmb says:
      15 years ago at 2:03 pm

      iTunes music store has something called an "iMix" which may do this, kind of. It requires people to buy the tracks to listen to them, but pitching $ to the artists is always nice. And if you are making these mixes in iTunes initially, then it's probably quite easy.
      • jwz says:
        15 years ago at 2:08 pm

        I know they're giving up on the DRM, but I still have a knee-jerk dislike of ITMS. I've been spending a whole lot of money at the Amazon MP3 store lately, though: it's so easy, and their recommendation system has (surprisingly) actually been working pretty well for me.
    • fu3dotorg says:
      15 years ago at 2:04 pm

      Maybe Deezer.com has some tracks of relevance to you, (there are quite a few,) but unsure of their policies so it might be a useless call..

      But hey; it's a bonus these days that you're actually able to entertain in some way (as you do; within the constraints that be,) while still being law-abiding; - yay! (..)
    • waider says:
      15 years ago at 1:25 am

      Here's a crazy idea: at least put the .m3u files (or your equivalent thereof) up somewhere - in addition to the mixes, mind you. That way, people who don't have any of the tracks can listen to the mixtapes, people who have all the tracks can just grab a handy file and resolve the mix locally against their collection, and those of us somewhere in between can look for new music to add to the collection.

      Thinking about it further, you'd have to distribute a .m3u-like format rather than actual .m3u files, to avoid people complaining that the files don't work in their player...
  18. tooluser says:
    15 years ago at 2:39 pm

    I recommend JWZ's mix tapes for all bar/bat mitvahs, weddings, funerals, and tupperware parties.
    #15 is really great; I intend to make some friends listen to it tonight.
  19. bjornv says:
    15 years ago at 3:16 pm

    I like the tapes, they broaden my listening. One thing which would make it easier to tune in would be a generic URL to the latest tape; this I could use from my Squeezebox more easily.
    • option12 says:
      15 years ago at 8:42 am

      I second this request.

      This would make it much easier to not automate the tool I don't use that doesn't auto download these tracks that don't exist.

      Please?!
  20. shalpin says:
    15 years ago at 3:44 pm

    ... I must be bucking the trend because I'm listening more than I used to.

    If it helps:
    * I'm too lazy to comment (and probably wouldn't say anything interesting if I did)
    * I don't usually get more than the first few before life calls and I can't pause/skip effectively (not sure if that's me, or just the limitations of streaming, but once again, I'm too lazy to try and find out).

    Thankyou - I've enjoyed listening.
  21. urajah says:
    15 years ago at 6:02 pm

    I travel every week for work and try to have your latest mixtape stored on my blackberry^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H stream it while I'm waiting in the airport or for a shuttle bus. So far they've all been great and I've found a number of songs that made me start rocking out while waiting for the bus or that I still have buried on my music server due to lack of sorting.

    Thanks for the excellent mixtapes - I really appreciate the break in the monotony of travel and never knowing what song is coming up, especially since I've never heard most of them before. I'm really enjoying the Shriekback and Minuet songs and ended up looking up the Bastard Fairies video for their song.

    The downside is that until just now I didn't have a livejournal account to make comments with and I was away from keyboard whenever I was listening. I'll try harder to keep comments in mind and similar recommendations in mind.

    On that note, have you heard Oceania? Produced by a British Punk Rocker and generally composed of Maori chant. It's a love it or hate it thing and I like it in the background while working.
  22. bonniegrrl says:
    15 years ago at 8:49 pm

    "Wild Boys Unplugged"? Nice one!
  23. chazkim says:
    15 years ago at 11:41 pm

    I'm 38, with kids, job, mortgage etc and I've moved to New Zealand. I find it REALLY hard to source the good new stuff these days. Back in the day, I was tapped into a network of cool dudes and we would point each other to worthwhile music in amongst the dross. These days I have to rely on people like yourself.

    These mix tapes are a public service. Don't stop. And thanks.
  24. jkow says:
    15 years ago at 1:09 am

    Yes, I agree to all of the above (excluding those who are unable to pause) and must say those mixtapes are an awesome source of inspiration and joy. Even my g/f says so. ;) I already planned to use your mixtape on my next birthday party. So thanks again for that and please keep it up.
  25. silkov says:
    15 years ago at 1:46 pm

    it is very sadly
  26. omni_ferret says:
    15 years ago at 7:37 pm

    Oh, great, a hanging browser managed to post an incomplete reply...

    So I bought the Shiny Toy Guns album after loving Le Disko on one of your earlier mixtapes, & I realized they remind me of The Lovemakers, at least vocally. I'm sure you've heard them, right? They perform a lot locally.

    (I haven't dug out the Lovemakers album since making this connection, so it might just be a brainfart.)
  27. rcr203 says:
    15 years ago at 7:40 am

    I like seeing Scatterbrain up there.
  28. cow says:
    15 years ago at 3:16 pm

    I often don't comment because I rarely know what to say. Also, I'm a few weeks behind and catching up. :)

    I liked this one. I tend to enjoy your more ambient mixes (011 is possibly my favorite to date--that led me to a couple of artists I hadn't heard of before).

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