June Mixtape

Here’s another monthly mixtape I made from a sealed, pre-recorded cassette I got for 99 cents. (Loudon Wainwright III’s Grown Man.) I tape over the cassette’s protection tabs and then I tape over the music and then I tape over the artwork.

For this one, I was going for summer pool vibes. I started with the Junior Murvin track that I think I’ve played every day of this month.

All these songs are streaming online, so you can listen on Spotify or Youtube:

SIDE A

– junior murvin, “roots train”
– the marvelettes, “the hunter gets captured by the game”
– james brown, “super bad”
– donovan, “epistle to dippy”
– the everly brothers, “gone, gone, gone”
– junior murvin, “give me your love”
– prince, “the ballad of dorothy parker”
– deerhoof, “running thoughts”

SIDE B

– the knife, “heartbeats”
– wailers, “duppy conqueror”
– new order, “thieves like us”
– bacao rhythm & steel band, “PIMP”
– lefty frizzell, “always late”
– mulatu astatke, “tezetaye antchi lidj”

Listen to more monthly mixes.

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