I haven’t done one of these in a while, and since pal Sai decided to nudge me ever so gently the other day, here we go again. 14 songs, 1 hour, a snapshot of music I have been tripping on the last few months (weeks?) For a change, there are no mp3s, just a Youtube playlist, and I hope they are accessible from around the world.
Category Archives: Mixtapes
A new playlist
I made this playlist in January for someone. Now publishing with permission.
Download here.
15 songs, tag-stripped, no theme in particular. (Or maybe there is, and I am not telling)
Mixtape: Morning Snow
waiting for a bus on a cold winter morning, with crunchy snow and sounds of birds stirring in the bare branches above, and it starts snowing gently and quietly, wispy white snowflakes, and one lands right on your extended tongue…
Now here’s something I haven’t done before. I mentioned that I was going to make a mix-tape. Shruti, (who drops in every now and then on the blog, hi Shruti) left the intriguing comment above when I asked her for an idea – a mood or a theme. It did sound like a lovely frame of mind to weave a bunch of songs around. Except –
My familiarity with snow is next to non-existent. Real life snow, that is. I encountered snow for a total of 3 hours in my life, and most of it was – well, that’s a story for another day. What I wanted to say is – my experience of these white fluffy thingies falling out of the sky has been based on December issues of Archie comics, Shammi Kapoor films, Yash Chopra heroines and Christmas movies set in New York. Snow in real life, most friends tell me, is not as mysterious, romantic or human-friendly as all of the above make out to be. Or maybe it is, and my friends are too jaded with life to know better (snicker). Actually no, I totally get it. I am from Assam, a state in India known for a phenomenal amount of annual rainfall – as a result, I cannot stand rain. At all.
So this mix-tape is more of a romanticized view of how an outsider perceives a snowy morning. If this sounds like a half-assed excuse for a poor selection of songs, I apologize. The 13 tracks are about a random winter morning, not a particularly cheery one, but not melancholy either. Just that I feel the cold in my bones, I need to touch my ears every now and then to warm them up, and I hold my iPod very tight in my pocket because clenching my fist over the battery makes it feel a tad warmer. And the snow, when it begins to fall, takes my breath away. There is a very clear story playing out in my mind when I listen to the tracks in order. The lyrics, as with most of my musical choices, are not important.
All cliche, pretentiousness and lack of taste are completely unintentional.
You can download the zip (ID3 stripped) from here.
Also, I intend to do this more frequently. I have a theme for the next one already, thanks to a recent conversation, and that will turn out to be much more upbeat than this.
A Mix For Midnight
Years ago, when I could still say the word with a straight face, I made a mixtape. It was good, or so people said. It was a collection of music that made me smile and want to be creative and go through my work-day punching programming problems in the face, be able to attend meetings without caffeine injections and handle annoying colleagues all without losing that smile. Sometime later, I made another one, dedicated to The God of Indian Contemporary Music. My last attempt was for a short-lived site called Muxtape (for everyone reading this and wondering WTF a ‘mixtape’ is, this link should give you an idea of what one looks like, at least). The theme for that happened to be female electronica vocalists – and once the site went down, taking my playlist with it, I gave up on the idea of trusting third-party sites to host any music content. Until recently, when I thought it was time to, y’know, revive the franchise.
Captain Obvious and his sidekick Private Meh-mori speaking: Tapes are no longer around – the last time I tried looking for one was in 2008, when I got the weird idea of making a “permanent” mixtape – buying a walkman, filling up a 90-minute blank cassette with songs, sticking it into the walkman. Really sticking it in forever. That cassette would be all that the walkman would play, and then it could be thrown away. I have no idea why I thought that was a cool idea. But it was there in my brain, for a bit, and when I saw that there were no walk-men to be found in the cluster of grey-market shops in Abids and Koti – and these guys, they would stock everything – I gave up on the quest. Sayonara, TDK and Denon and Meltrack, even you, T-Series, you were cheap and terribly bad but you were there for a penniless student when he needed The Corrs and Michael Kamen and could not afford to buy both. You’re almost-science-fiction now, tiny little tremors in my neural impulses, though you still exist in Nick Hornby books and wiki pages about Metallica, and overly sentimental blog posts.
“Please say mix-tape, man, it’s ok” my friend said, when I told him what I was up to. I tried very hard to come up with an alternative title. Mix album. Compilation. A Mix. (“You could be the local bhel puri guy”, he retorted. *Snicker*) Well, call it what-the-fuck-ever. I know it’s sucky to go all meta about a bunch of songs arranged together – but please bear with me. The collection’s 16 songs, 115 MB zipped, about 60 minutes long, which is about all the time I can borrow from you fine folks. The titles exist, the artiste-names don’t – just to keep some element of surprise intact. Try to listen to all of them without skipping any, even if you might know quite a few – I am fairly sure you do. Hmm, what else? Oh yeah, try to listen to them at night, with your choice of beverage, alcoholic or non-alcoholic, hot or cold, doesn’t really matter. I think the songs work best at low to slightly below-medium volume, but whatever floats your boat.
Ok, I am done. Download here.
I put the mux in muxtape, yo. Wait, what’s mux?
The Heavenly Voices Mix, now playing on my Muxtape.
(Update Sep 2020: Muxtape no longer works, of course. One of the crash-and-burn casualties of the pre-streaming era. So I created a new playlist on YouTube. Win win, right?)
Before you ask, you can download from Muxtape, you know. You just need to find out how.
(Update Sep 2020: You didn’t ask.)
The mix features all-female vocals,voices like the magnificently breathy Kirsty Hawkshaw, Beth Hirsch on one of her non-Air collaborations, Portishead’s Beth Gibbons on a solo project. While the focus is on ambient/electronic music ( Psapp would be the most experimental of the lot), exceptions are Eva Cassidy’s folk-tinged cover of Songbird, and Blonde Redhead’s Kazu Makino on Elephant Woman. And because every female-vocal compilation deserves her presence, we have Susheela Raman on, too. And Venus Hum, yeah.
Today was the day Peter Parker’s aunt was born. My company apparently is not too big on Spider-man, they are more of DC fans, ( the FREAKS! ), so we didn’t get a holiday today.
Deli 9, right near my office, is becoming my lunch-zone these days, except when their a/c isn’t working. Their menu’s limited, but the waiters are courteous, know just when to refill my glass of water and get the food at just the right time. They don’t get the bill unless I ask for it, and the waiters don’t look askance when I don’t leave a tip, which is most of the time. I spend about forty-five minutes there everyday with a book or two, sometimes with the DS. Those forty-five minutes are like an oasis of sanity in the mad work-day rush, and post-lunch, I find myself much more courteous and people-friendly. Except today. At three o’clock or thereabouts, I got a monkey on my shoulder, a monkey called Don’twanna.
Don’twanna is a bad, bad shit chimp, who whispers dirty thoughts in my mind, thoughts of running away to a tropical island ( or the preferred second choice – home) and dipping my feet in cold water and sipping Lipton tea, with Cocorosie playing and the complete Starman in front of me waiting to be read. Don’twanna makes me sink deeper into my seat when someone calls my name, he forces me to sigh heavily when someone comes over to my cubicle; and crinkles my face, subtle enough to hint at my world coming to an ignominious end if I choose to respond to anyone calling my name. I hate Don’twanna when he’s not around, but when he comes sits on my shoulder, I just …um…don’t wanna. Today, I just wanted to quit everything, go home and read The Drawing of the Three in peace. Yes, world, I am reading the Dark Tower again. I have figured out how to get into the series again without stopping after volume 1. I just skipped it this time and went straight to volume 2. Muwhahahah. Fingers crossed.