In the wake of my recent mix posts ( here and here), 12_12_12 asked some questions about the process, which I'm answering in a separate post because my answers were getting a bit long for a comment.

This post is sort of a follow-up to a long ramble about mixes that I posted... good heavens, four and a half years ago.

( How instinctive (or not) is your process for actually choosing the songs? )

Over the past couple of weeks I put together a mix for pipsqueaky - or rather a couple of mixes, since the project turned into a two-CD set. And she's given me permission to share them!

( info, tracklists, and downloads under the cut )

My contribution to More Joy Day is a mix of songs that make me dance. Not dance music per se - that would be a separate mix - but a bunch of songs, mostly indie-rock and pop with a smattering of hip-hop, that never fail to get me moving. These are songs that make me seat-dance when I'm in the car, move faster when I'm walking, bounce while I'm ( Read more... )

When I was in middle school, I assumed I hated rap, largely because I associated Run-DMC with Aerosmith. (Ah, the unforeseen consequences of bids for pop crossover stardom.) Ditto high school; what little I heard of gangsta rap I really didn't like. As a matter of fact, I still don't much care for gangsta rap (and a lot of the hip-hop artists I ( Read more... )

Driving back from taking truepenny to the train station, I was listening to NPR but still humming to myself because it's just not my car without *some* music, and I hit on the two core songs for coffee_and_ink's October music mix, which, because of the songs in question, I have now been thinking of as the Sad And Restless mix (but which may, due to subsequent ( Read more... )

Yesterday's vidding, frustrating as it was, seems to have unlocked something in my head. Early this morning I got out of bed because I suddenly knew how I could get the sound file for the prospective Firefly vid down from 5:08 to 4:30 (by splicing bits out of the short instrumental bits between verses in a particular pattern). And now I've been ( Read more... )

I still owe laurashapiro a post on narrative, but I've been working on mix CDs tonight instead because I haven't done any for a while and I miss them. I've been trying to figure out how I do it - how I'd explain the process to someone else. I've never really picked it apart before; I've always thought of it as a single prolonged act that inevitably gets paused ( Read more... )

renenet: And then it was The Flaming Lips and I was like "how the hell did we get here?"
here's luck: Well - how does one ever get to The Flaming Lips, really?
- on the occasion of renenet listening to her copy of mely's September Music mix, which I will forever think of as the left turn at the candyskins mix.

Proposal finished and sent. Verdicts ( Read more... )

So I'm making this mix, and it starts off as pretty much a typical mix for somebody who's into that whole folk-pop thing, and then it sort of takes a left turn at the candyskins and wanders off into the weird. It's not so much that any individual song is weird as that if you'd asked me three hours ago whether I was planning to put songs by these ( Read more... )

These aren't driving mixes, per se, but they're tapes that I made specifically for playing in the car. This is an important genre distinction. No, really. Driving mixes are carefully-thought-through tapes, with specially-made covers, that become permanent fixtures in the car's tape case. These are disposable mixes, the kind I listen to for a couple ( Read more... )