When You Hear It (an April mixtape)

My April monthly mixtape is inspired by thoughts of the upcoming eclipse. The word in Texas is that it’s going to be cloudy on Monday, so I picked this 99 cent cassette from my stack, thinking I’d use the title Cirrostratus. But then I realized if I flipped the cover inside out, it cropped the tagline of Cold Busted records: “STEREO at its best when you hear it on COLD BUSTED.” It’s very possible that our eclipse experience will be mostly ambient, with the sky going dark and nature going quiet. So it might even be a matter of When You Hear It rather than when you see it.

Even wilder: When I flipped over the cassette to side 2 I realized that the inverted Cold Busted logo looks like a solar eclipse! (These are the spooky things that happen when you collage… and especially during Mercury Retrograde.)

Here’s the tracklist, very Kraftwerk-heavy because I’ve been re-listening to their whole catalog in the car with the boys on the way to school, and even jamming on some stuff with Owen in the music room:

SIDE ONE

1. Kraftwerk, “Tanzmusik” (edit)
2. Bubble Puppy, “Hot Smoke and Sasafrass”
3. White Denim, “All You Really Have to Do”
4. Beck, “Sissyneck”
5. Alemayehu Eshete, “Telantena zare”
6. Johnny Osbourne, “Ready Or Not

SIDE TWO

1. The Specials, “Doesn’t Make It Alright”
2. Kraftwerk, “Antenna”
3. Sly & The Family Stone, “Family Affair”
4. Water Damage, “Reel E” (snippet)
5. Gerry Rafferty, “Right Down the Line” (edit)
6. Susan Cadogan, “Fever”
7. Jana Horn, “After All This Time”
8. Kraftwerk, “Ananas Symphonie” (edit)

You can listen to all the tracks on Youtube, and most of the tape on Spotify:

Filed under: mixtapes