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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Lost in the Mix?, 30 April 2007
If you have ever hovered over the pause button on a rainy saturday afternoon you need this book. A bittersweet and intelligent memoir/art book about the art of mixing tapes for friends and lovers. tHE SHEER JOY IN SCOURING THE BOOK FOR YOUR FAVOURITE TRACKS/ARTISTS. I found my guys Nick Cave, Tindersticks, leonard Cohen and Belle & Sebastian but missed Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.
What is missing? The ettiquette of mixing. Never double tracks, always start with a drum intro etc...
I read it in a sitting and then went off to make a mix tape.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
a limited mix, 30 Dec 2008
Like the editor of this book, I grew of age in the thick of the mix-tape era, and to a certain extent, mourn its passing. And like many of the contributors to this celebration of "cassette culture," I spent hundreds of hours obsessing over track selection, sequencing, fade-ins, the overt and subtextual messages embedded in each mix, liner notes, cover art, etc. So, I tend to gravitate toward books that invoke that lost world (sorry folks, the mix CD is similar, and I do make 'em, but it's not the same) -- books like Nick Hornby's High Fidelity and Songbook, or Rob Sheffield's memoir of grief, Love is a Mix Tape.
This book is a kind of interesting and frustrating document of the mix tape, limited in many ways by the relatively insular world from which its contributors are drawn. Moore is a legendary underground musician (with Sonic Youth) and for this book, he seems to have fired off emails to all his hipsterati friends in the art and music world, asking for contributions. The resulting hodgepodge of stuff is nicely packaged in a book mimicking the dimensions of a cassette tape, but it's all pretty insular. Page after page of random track listings, homemade covers, etc. from people you're unlikely to have heard of, featuring music you're unlikely to have heard. A few bits and pieces capture the possibility of the mixtape, such as Allison Anders explanation of one made for her, since returned in anger, and forever mourned.
What gets lost in all this is that for every obscurity-laden, collage-covered, mix-tape-as-art piece, the bedrooms of the Western world spawned 1,000 more mainstream "hits of 1983" type mix tapes. There's zero evidence of the prevalence of the pop mix tape here, with probably the most mainstream example being Kate Spade's (yes, that Kate Spade) wonderfully banal mix of the usual Dylan/Beatles/Van Morrison/Elton John tracks. It's important to remember that DIY culture can encompass a wide range of participants, and not just the cool kids, and that's something that gets lost in this particular "celebration."
Still, if you were ever into making mix tapes, this is a book that will bring back the memories and make you want to dig into that box of tapes in the basement and find a tape deck.
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