muxxxxxes
My brother, who's making a career for himself as a Sound Fellow, is collaborating with me on a mixtape exchange to be held in the third week of this month. Having attended a few similar such events with fellow okids*, I know that this is easily the best way to come across music - tarted up by your favourite people in delightfully overdone handmade packaging, pored over by the whole gang at an intimate little shindig, spilled on by beer, and then feverishly crammed into the cd player at home soon afterwards - and I'm jazzed. But stumped!
Coming up with a suitable theme takes time, and I'm running low on it. In the past, I've come up with some over the top concepts and some really well-mixed compilations**. Though the 'do will have me surrounded by pals, most double as enormous music snobs and it jangles my nerves silly to have my cultural currency put to the test. Can I run a few themes by you, Internet?
stovetop orchestras: my favourite thing to cook to is contemporary indie stuff that has unconventional orchestral bits woven in, like Beirut or Final Fantasy or Dear Reader.
underpantsdance: nobody's home and you're in your underpants and it's 2am. Of Montreal/Annie Lennox/Talking Heads/Dent May/Matt & Kim come on. You know what that means.
music to watch strangers by: or, songs to romanticize strangers to. i'm.. not quite sure what those could turn out to be.
if only i were fourteen: An arsenal of twee that I can fill my 24 year old Hanson-less void with. Probably Yelle and the Ting Tings, that American Boy song all the kids dig these days.
songs to waggle to: Ponytail, mostly? And Romo Roto! mayyyybe You Say Party We Say Die. Frantic exhilerating cacophonic messy adorable music! Caps lock music. Interrobang music. Vibrating eyeballs music. Double Ristretto music.
*OCAD students, but you know that.
** The former being a compilation of all of the socio-political or music-historical references made in Don McLean's American Pie, in chronological order, the latter being a sweet little mux wrapped in hand-sewn pink tweed cases, with every cd in the edition having a different name like "Songs that would make you pancakes in bed if they could" or "Songs that pour like butterscotch" or "Songs cycle with you downhill in May".