Atlantica - 01.10.2006, Blaðsíða 18

16 AT L A N T I CA
Time to dust off your boombox and replace the
batteries in your Walkman. Mixtapes and tape trading
are back, man.
The International Mixtape Project is a community
of more than 500 people on six continents who
exchange monthly mixtapes (okay, CDs) with
random and anoymous recipients. Assignments are
automatically generated on the first day of every
month and mixers have a month to select their music,
burn and send.
The project was founded in 2003 by music bon
vivant Ryan Goldman, who is now 28 and working
for an international non-profit in Washington D.C.
It began with 25 friends and has grown by 200
percent, mostly by word of mouth, blog mentions,
and its MySpace page, myspace.com/mixtapeproject.
(An official website is expected this winter). To join,
members pony up a USD 10 membership fee to cover
administrative costs and are responsible for their own
shipping.
IMP devotees exist in more than 30 countries,
including places as distant as Guam, China, South
Africa, and sound-saturated Iceland. And it’s not just
the underground music community that participates:
there are students, dot.com-ers, doctors, lawyers,
farmers, scientists, and professional athletes.
“Mixtaping is one of those things I’ve enjoyed my
entire life,” says Goldman, who made his first mixtape
at the tender age of 10. “The assumption is that
people have been making mixes all along, which we
forget about with iPods and online radio. Basically this
project is about recontextualizing the music people
already love.”
As the exact origins of the first homemade mixtape
are unknown, it is believed that the first mixtapes
appeared not long after the cassette was introduced
in Europe by Royal Philips Electronics in 1963. Philips’
trademarked “Compact Cassettes” arrived in the
United States a year later.
It is reported in an October 1974 article in Billboard
that “tapes were originally dubbed by jockeys to serve
as standbys for times when they were not in personal
use of disco turntables.” In his 2004 book Sonata for
Jukebox, poet-essayist Geoffrey O’Brien called the
mixtape “the most widely practiced American artform:
the personal mix tape of favorite songs that serves as
self-portrait, gesture of friendship, prescription for an
ideal party, or simply as an environment consisting
solely of what is most ardently loved.” Last year,
Thurston Moore, one of the founders of Sonic Youth,
published Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture which
includes personal stories and essays from more than
80 mix tape followers, including designer Kate Spade
and artist Leah Singer.
As the project’s name is anachronistic, most people
send CDs rather than B-side style cassette tapes. The
automatically generated e-mails include only a name
and an address, and members are asked to include
their e-mail address when they send the mix. Gone
are the days of tape decks, at least for the most
part, Goldman notes, though he still rocks the deck
occasionally, as does Chiansan Ma, an English teacher
based in Beijing, who sent his first mix last April.
Though Ma sends CDs, he also precisely measures
the minutes and includes instructions on how best to
record onto either a 60- or 90-minute cassette tape.
With so little information available about the
recipient, “the best you can hope to do is get lucky
with the song that saves someone’s shit day at work or
helps lost heartache,” Ma writes in an e-mail. “Maybe
it just happens to be exactly what someone likes or
wants to hear at some particular moment that will
elicit appreciation.”
The tracks Ma chooses are typically unthematic,
but do tend to resonate with his emotional state. An
extra challenge: he tries to avoid repeating tracks on
more than one mix. “Backlash against when I was a
teenager,” he explains. “I wanted to make tapes where
half the songs were by Radiohead.” Ma’s most recent
mix included a “very sweet Chinese pop song” from
singer and actress Wang Faye of 2046 and Chungking
Express, followed by “some pretty hard and screamy
stuff.”
The Internet has been both good and bad for
mixtaping, project founder Ryan Goldman says.
Filesharing and pay-per-download sites initially
seemed to deter interest in mixtaping, though this
seems to have changed. IMP itself is, of course, a
product of the Internet, and most of its growth
has been a result of mentions in blogs and online
webzines.
Duncan Nicholas, known to friends and IMP
members as “Meatbreak,” is a peer reviewer for a
psychology journal in Brighton, UK and a music
reviewer for The Brighton Source. He has received
a total of 15 mixes, ten from the States, four from
Canada, and one from Australia. Unlike Ma, he chooses
a theme for each mix – his March mix entitled “The
Atvian Experience” was “all about the hypnotic effects
of repetition and drone,” and included ten tracks
like “Musikvatur-Purrki Purrk” from múm, “Sheets of
Easter” from Oneida, and “Night Falls On Hoboken”
by Yo La Tengo. May’s mix, he writes on his MySpace
page, “is a shotgun blast through electro, dubstep,
power electronics, and stuff that simply makes you
danzedanzedanze.”
Meatbreak, like some other members, scrupulously
crafts the artwork included with each mixdisc
(“mixtapes sounds so much better than mixCDs. Let’s
coin the phrase mixdisc and get it out there,” he says).
The anonymity of the project is perhaps intensified
by the creativity behind the art. Meatbreak usually
creates his covers using elaborate and far-reaching
functions in Photoshop. Founder Ryan Goldman once
received a track listing from a scientist in New York
that was written using a Sharpie on an X-ray slide of
someone’s mouth.
Most surprising to Meatbreak is that no one – zero
out of 15 – has replied to his e-mails acknowledging
that he’s received a mix. Likewise, no one has ever e-
mailed him to say they’ve received his. “I’m determined
to change this,” he says, admitting that his e-mail
address could turn some people off. Ma has had
two short e-mail conversations that grew out of mix
thank you notes. Goldman “rarely” receives responses.
Evidently, mixing is a solitary art.
“You just have to assume that the person has
received the mix and is enjoying it,” Goldman says.
A community of music traders around the world is bringing the spirit of mixtapes back, track by track.
By Sara Blask
Keepin’ It Reel
(Continues on pg. 18 »)
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