If there is one thing that I miss about my pre-Internet life it would be the making of mixtapes. Before eMusic, Last.fm, iPods, and fat broadband came into my life I obsessively bounced tracks from CDs and other tapes to make the perfect soundtrack for a moment in time. July back roads, October in Greenwich Village, February in a steel shop, there was a mix for every time and place.  For whatever reason, technology and life in general saw the need and time for mixtapes evaporate and the couple of times that I tried to reboot the process for a mix trading group I was a complete failure, either phoning the mix in or just not delivering.

It seems odd that I listen to music all day long, obsessively hunt for artists and albums that are completely new to my ears but don’t organize them into neat little packages to remember that place and time when they first crackled on the cheap speakers in my car on the way to work or swam out of my headphones late at night. Here’s my first crack at getting back into mixing and while it is a little disjointed and skips from Africa to Brooklyn to Jamaica it is a quick glimpse into what I have been listening to this past month.

C60 for May 2009

1. Miriam Makeba – Malouyame
2. Thomas Mapfumo – Mhondoro
3. Mulatu Astatke / The Heliocentrics – Masenqo
4. Buraka Som Sistema – Kalemba (Wegue – Wegue)
5. Bronx River Parkway – El Resbalon
6. Chin Chin – Hotter Than Hot
7. Richard Swift – Lady Luck
8. King Khan & The Shrines – Welfare Bread
9. Holly Golightly – You Have Yet To Win
10. Mama Lucky – These Are My Tattoos
11. Sly & Robbie / Amp Fiddler – Black House (Paint The White House Black)
12. Culture – I’m Alone In The Wilderness
13. Dungen – Minda damer och fasaner
14. The Goretti Group with Dennis De Souza Trio – Of My Hands

Download

I’m hoping that each month I can knock out a mix of what might be dominating my ears at the moment with the goal of keeping those mixes to the reasonable constraint of a C60 tape. Enjoy!