I have been sick this past week. I think it might be bronchitis. I’m not diagnosed yet but I went by the color of what I’m coughing up (stop me if this is too much info, lol). It could also be pneumonia too. Woo hoo. I will be seeing a doctor hopefully today. It’s been a week of insomnia, fevers, headaches, and excruciating throat pain due to coughing up my lungs every few minutes. A little bug my son brought home with him from school; he bounced back after a couple days, fortunately, meanwhile a week later and I’m still like the walking dead. Anyway, being in bed a lot, I’ve been focusing on my mixtape hobby.
Someone in one of my cassette groups on Facebook was showing off a mixtape he did of obscure 80s music. I was thinking “wow, a kindred spirit, I already have three mixtapes like that”. He went the extra mile by generating a custom j-card, which for those not in the know is the name for those labels on the inside of a cassette case. I decided to be a copycat and make my fourth 80s Underground mixtape using his method. Of course, I’m going to have to wait a while to share it in any cassette groups so I don’t look like a complete copycat of that other person, even though I am. After a bit of searching and checking a few different websites out, I settled on this one.
Here is the template of the website. You have to be careful switching tabs in your browser because it will lose all your hard work. Best thing to do is type the track listing out in a word document and then copy and paste it in. I looked through lots of pictures of 80s goths for the cover. The one I settled on is a portrait of Rozz Williams, singer of the band Christian Death. I made sure to include at least one song from the band to justify using it. As for the songs, they’re mostly selections from my YouTube playlist The 1980s in Music. I made sure not to pick anything that was already on the other three tapes. To fit the whole track listing on the cover I had to use a small font. The template seems like it was designed for short album cassettes that only have like ten songs, but you can make it work if you shrink the font down and forgo a few unnecessary additions like what type the cassette is. I can’t imagine using a tape any longer than 90 minutes though, unless you have a lot of long songs on there to bring the track listing down. Another thing to think about if you’re going to do this is that your playlist is going to be pretty much set in stone, you can’t decide to record over a song with another song or else you’ll screw up the J-card. With a normal J-card I don’t mind putting little sticker labels over my writing or white-out when I make an edit, but that wouldn’t work with this. You could just print out a whole new J-card, but that would be a pain.
Hopefully you can already read the track listing on the cover, but since I still have it typed out I might as well copy and paste it here:
Side A
Fehlfarben - Paul Ist Tot
Dance Macabre - No Answers
The Pulse - Plastic Man
Donación Agnelli - Lo Antiguo
Pornografia - Electrownie Atomwe
The Klinik - Murder
Vomito Negro - Fire Burns
Blood and Roses - Enough is Never Enough
Blood Fetish - Cause Mistress
Fear Condition - Black and White
Smirnov - Savé
Side B
SigloXX - Sister Suicide
Christian Death - Deathwish
Altar Ego - Altar Ego
Threshold - I Want You
Vivabeat - Working for William
Voodoo Church - Egypt
Lost Loved Ones - The Dark
Magnum - Sacred Hour
A Scanner Darkly - Cigarette in the Rain
XDavis - Window to the World
Kill the Messenger - This is America
Sculpteurs D’Ombres - L’Ange Noir
A nice mix of post-punk, new wave, early industrial, and a little bit of metal. Here is how the spine came out:
It even let me add Armenian letters. Unicode hieroglyphs work too, I tested it out but I didn’t print the results. That opens up lots of possibilities. You can change the text and background colors too. One of these times I’ll use a black background with red letters. But white worked better with this particular photo.
Here’s the whole happy family, 80s Underground Volumes 1-4:
I will have to marathon these tapes again. Plenty of time for that when I have bronchitis and can’t do much of anything else. I’ll be making some even prettier J-cards once I really get the hang of it. But I don’t think I want to do it for every single mixtape, just special themed ones like this.
I have long neglected my monthly Top Songs of the Month blogs, I know. But for a long time I didn’t even have the creative drive to work on my webcomic, which tends to be my first creative priority. I think that happens to writers sometimes, the well just runs dry. Anyway, why don’t I just fill everyone in on what I’ve been listening to these past 12 months? This is my most recently completed Year Tape, to which as I explained in the previous blog post, I add two songs a month to throughout the year, and any extra space at the end of the tape gets the best of the #3 spots. Doing this on a two hour tape allots me ten minutes a month maximum, but your average song is about four minutes long give or take so there’s usually some extra space.
So many songs I had to use the back of the J-card.
For the convenience of whoever is reading this, I’ll break it down by the Gregorian calendar, even though I did the whole tape by the ancient Armenian calendar. I’ll try to say a little something about each track, and link to it on YouTube (I don’t want to try to embed that many videos). If you follow the links and find yourself liking any if the music please consider supporting the artist and purchasing their music. Might be hard with some of the older tracks.
Side A
August
Sin Razón Zoocial - Crucifixion - Some insane Mexican post-punk from 1990. The singer goes crazy later on in the song and shrieks like Judge Doom from Who Framed Roger Rabbit when he’s melting due to the Dip. Specific reference, I know.
Allie Frost - Abandoned Ghost - An eerie song about death. The whisper at the beginning talking about how ghosts are souls that didn’t walk into the light after death is particularly jarring.
September
Trait d’Union - Marche Nocturne - I love how this song just builds and builds. I almost didn’t like it at first but I’m glad I stuck around. It’s like a brewing storm.
Mannequin Twin - Threshold - This song carries a lot of passion as well as darkness and melancholy, which came along at the right time for me last September.
October
Cashiari - Oscura Noche - This song came around just in time for Halloween for me, such a haunting and spooky track. Cashiari is a band out of Peru, and they make lovely music like this along with some artistic and macabre animated music videos.
Blurpz - Escape - “Cuts me like a kniiife.” A very moody post-punk track from 1983. At this point in the year I was dealing with a lot of emotions and moodiness, that this song was perfect for. It’s a beautiful and underrated song.
November
Rob Zombie - Phantom Stranger (slowed + reverb) - This one was kind of a passing fad I guess. I liked Rob Zombie back in my early teens, but only his first two albums really, before he, much like the pro-wrestler The Undertaker with a similar undead gimmick, became a patriotic redneck zombie biker, and started to suck. I just thought the intro to this song sounded so badass being given the “slowed + reverb” treatment.
Slow Danse with the Dead - Are You Tortured? - This song should have been #1 in November, history has vindicated it. Slow Danse with the Dead is still one of my favorite still-active bands, and made a few appearances on this tape. In this song SDWTD captures their signature “misery goth” style. Sometimes the answer to their question is yes.
December
FEVR - I’ve Had Enough - A breakup song that I fortunately don’t relate to on a personal level, but it has this cold and dreary melancholy sound to it that was perfect for December. Some great seasonal depression vibes.
Conjunto Vacío - San Benito - Some dark Mexican post-punk from 2022, carries kind of a similar energy as the previous song. Very wintery. It’s in Spanish, which I don’t speak, but I just listen to the sound of the song.
January
Tout Debord - Les Gens Sont Les Gens - Okay, I mostly liked this song because of the cute little “beep, beepbeepbeep boop, beepbeepbeep boop” sounds throughout. It just amused me, and got stuck in my head for days.
Flue - Sometimes - A 1983 post-punk track with vaguely Middle Eastern influences. I couldn’t pass that up. The band Flue was from Holland though. Actual goth bands from the Middle East are sadly pretty rare. If only this song had started a new sub-genre.
February
Obsidian - Night Director - I saw this band live in Tampa a couple years ago opening for Twin Tribes, and they seem to be doing just fine, I liked this track even better than the songs on their previous album. They have been improving.
Metawave - Ausencia - Oh goody, another Middle Eastern-sounding goth song. It sounds more authentically Middle Eastern than Flue, although the band is “Franco-Portugese”. It’s a song about how fleeting life is apparently. But very dancey regardless. Great for goth bellydancing. And that ends Side A. Made it over half the year on one side; that means a whole extra ten minutes to spare, and bonus tracks!
Side B
March
Tango Mangalore - Re-Vamp - This little-known band fronted by a Greek fisherman who sings about how much he craves the sea and hates living on land released a new album early this year and it was great. This is the title track off the album. It’s about, of course, craving the sea and hating living on land.
Scary Black - The Fallacy of Worth - A therapeutic goth song with a positive message. “Don’t believe them if they say you’re not worthy.” I have wrestled with the fallacy of worth myself in the past. Don’t let your self-worth be determined by the opinions of others, or by capitalism or religion or what have you. Word on the street is Scary Black is going to have a new album soon, which I look forward to. This was released as a single by itself, it could end up on the new album.
April
Kalte Nacht - The Last Breath - I had been waiting for this band to come back since 2020. Their new album was a blast, as expected, and this was the lead single from it which got a music video. A very dancey track that makes for a great intro track.
Tango Mangalore - Thelema - Another song from their Re-Vamp album. Apparently an anti-Aleister Crowley song, but I didn’t really pay much attention to the lyrics, it’s just catchy.
May
Mekong - Danse Danse - This is just one of the prettiest post-punk songs I’ve ever heard. All the little guitar riffs here and there accenting the song. It even uses the cool spelling for “dance”. Mekong’s other songs on the album don’t quite sound like this, tracks like “Picture of Wrong” on the same album are a bit comical. But I love this song. I would show this to someone who didn’t know what post-punk was, alongside early The Cure.
Slow Danse with the Dead - The Hermit - I was shocked that Slow Danse with the Dead decided to write a song about my life. Pretty much every word in the lyrics could be about me. I mean I’m a hermit that somehow managed to get a wife and son, but still a hermit at heart. My bedroom is the safest place to be.
June
Dead on a Sunday - Dammit (After Dark) - This is a goth cover of the song “Dammit” by Blink 182, apparently to the somewhat similar tune of “After Dark” by Mr. Kitty. I am less familiar with the latter song, and Blink 182 was never one of my favorite bands, but I did hear them on the radio a lot back in the late 90s. I knew well the song “Dammit”, or as I probably would have called it, “I Guess This is Growing Up”. It’s a catchy, upbeat, happy pop-punk song that captures the spirit and energy of youth, while perhaps having some melancholy lyrics which you wouldn’t notice unless you were really listening, but it was never really my type of song. It never even made it onto my old mixtapes at the time. But this version. Wow. Suddenly the “I guess this is growing up” chorus feels like it’s being said from the point of view of a jaded 30-something adult who has had all the dreams of their youth beaten out of them, has to work a soul-crushing 40 hour a week job to barely scrape by, has no free time and lost most of their friends. I can’t help but feel both versions of the song capture the spirit of the Millennial generation at two different stages in their lives, even if the original song isn’t my cup of tea.
Slow Danse with the Dead - Today is a Good Day to Die - I was thinking perhaps “The Hermit” would be the best song of the year by Slow Danse with the Dead, but I was mistaken. This song here has such badass energy. It’s almost a metal song, insofar as it’s the first time we hear a metal-growl from the lead singer Johnny Montoya during the chorus. And I wonder if the corridor in this song is the same corridor mentioned in their song “Strangers in the Dark”. Is there a lore I should be following? Anyway, now that SDWTD is an official band rather than a solo-project we are getting a different sound out of them, a little heavier sometimes but more polished.
July
Vomito Negro - Bone Cutter - I went on a binge of the extensive discography of Vomito Negro (“Black Vomit” in Spanish, before you ask) this summer and found a lot of great tracks I had been sleeping on previously. Vomito Negro has been around since the late 1980s, one of the pioneering industrial bands. This song in particular is off their 2017 album, Black Plague. It’s very catchy.
Cashiari - Sombrio Reflejo - A song I had overlooked previously from the Peruvian goth band. It has their typical spooky sound and haunting, whispering vocals. Then about a minute and a half in the tone shifts a bit, becoming slightly heavier but not by a whole lot. It’s a darkly psychedelic song like most of their work.
Bonus Tracks
Vivabeat - Working for William - The #3 song for June. No idea who William is but this song is super catchy and was stuck in my head for like two weeks. It’s a New Wave track from 1980 that I discovered while building my 1980s playlist. I always have a hard time finding good music from the year 1980 because disco wasn’t dead yet and there wasn’t much goth music, so I get excited when I hear a song I like from that year.
Vomito Negro - Chicago Cave - From their 1989 album Shock. I am unaware of any caves in Chicago, and have no idea what the song is about, but it’s so catchy, and I love joining in with the singer and singing “the Cave, the Cay-yave” in a Cookie Monster voice during the chorus.
Nemuer - The Gates of Duat - This song got robbed of the #1 and #2 spot because it was September and there was heavy competition. Nemuer is a pagan folk band that up until now mostly did Norse pagan stuff but decided to do an album based on the Egyptian Book of the Dead in reconstructed ancient Egyptian language. The results are incredibly badass, I definitely recommend giving it a listen. It had its fair share of detractors but they’re just jelly (I specifically remember one comment saying “this is what happens when goths watch too much National Geographic”, which was cruel but also admittedly funny). The music video for this song is awesome too.
Have a Nice Life - Bloodhail - And this song got robbed in October because of Cashiari and Blurpz. Have a Nice Life is pretty famous in some internet circles but I only recently listened to their 2008 album Death Consciousness, which is a modern classic but very depressing. It’s kind of post-punk mixed with shoegaze and maybe even some emo, but tolerable emo at least. This was my favorite song of theirs. It’s very emotionally deep.
Glis ft. Ayria - Dream Chaser - Ayria came back! Or rather, Jennifer Parkin did guest vocals on this song by Glis. It was good to hear from her again, probably my favorite song I’ve heard from her in a long time, hopefully another new album is forthcoming.
Anyway, what a year it has been! And at least my list won’t get crowded out with everyone else’s year-end music lists in December. Maybe I’ll write some more about music, even do monthly blogs again. Let’s just see if I can get ahead on that webcomic. I guess the trick to these music blogs is to work on them little by little so it isn’t such a daunting task. Anyway, hopefully someone discovered some new music thanks to my little mixtape here.
And you know what, because I’m feeling generous, here are the first two songs on this year’s tape!
August 2024/Նավասարդ 4517
dreDDup - Garden of Dead Friends - dreDDup is a Serbian industrial band I have been getting into lately, been around since 1997 and still making music. This song came out in 2011, but all their music is new to me at this point. It’s a very spooky tune, I love the melodies in it, very unique. The climax at the end of the song is awesome too.
Damien Hearse - Negative Mental Attitude - Damien Hearse is a darkwave/industrial band from Florida, and I can feel like I can tell, because he sings about very relevant current political topics (“Pro Life Death Camp” is one such song, about the repeal of Roe vs Wade). This song is about how you could technically give into your darkest desires (stabbing your landlord in the neck, strangling a senator and dousing them with gasoline to light them on fire), like it’s always an option, there are just severe consequences. It’s a strangely motivational song. Don’t worry I’m not going to do it
I have never watched the 2000 movie High Fidelity all the way through, but there’s a famous scene where the main character discusses his “mixtape rules”, or the subtle art of making a compilation tape. He comes off as kind of snobby, like who calls a mixtape a “compilation tape”, really? But you know, he gets it. He knows that making a mixtape is a very subtle art. Nearly a lost art. Kind of a useless skill in today’s society unless you can make a living being some sort of DJ. And usually your only audience is yourself. It’s a very solitary, almost lonely hobby. With few exceptions, it’s mostly only neurodivergent weirdos like me that are still using cassettes in the 2020s. But that’s okay because it means cassettes are cheap and plentiful, unlike say, vinyl. He also points out that you’re using someone else’s art to make your own art (in a way that I would argue requires more creativity than AI “art”, just to clarify) and that's a very delicate thing, as he puts it. There might be planning stages. Afterwards you might need to make edits. You might want the case to have pretty art on it. The whole process of recording a mixtape might take much longer than the 90-120 minutes that make up the length of the cassette. He doesn't go into his rules too deeply, perhaps because the movie would be too boring for normal people who just slap their playlists together willy-nilly. The movie is based on a book though, that might go into more detail. I should pick it up sometime.
As an aside, making a mixtape takes a lot more thought and creativity than a playlist because you have time limits. It’s like writing a sonnet, you have to be creative within the constraints of the medium, and that pushes you to make choices you might not otherwise make. You have to make sure the best songs make it on the tape, so you eliminate the less-good tracks. And you have to keep in mind that skipping any of the tracks on a cassette takes the effort of fast-forwarding, not to mention the possibility of wear and tear on your equipment and the tape itself, so it's best to make it listenable all the way through, whereas with a playlist, like the mix CDs that preceded them, you can skip around with ease. Now that said, I've made lots of great, very long playlists on YouTube using much the same logic I use to make mixtapes, so I'm not knocking playlists as a medium. But mixtapes are far more concentrated. Even the two-hour ones.
The mixtape rules from High Fidelity seem to be as follows, and I'm paraphrasing:
1. You start out with a "banger", a hook, something that slaps, that grab's the listener's attention, a high-energy, fast paced track.
2. You follow up with a song that's almost as much of a banger but not quite. Maybe it's just a little slower, a little less heavy, or what have you.
3. The third track has to slow things down. It has to be something more relaxing. You don't want to "blow your wad", as he says. (Gross)
He then goes into how personal it is to make a mixtape for someone else, you really have to know the person through-and-through. I have done that in the past but not often. If I make a mix for someone it’s hard not to just shove my musical tastes down their throat, honestly. He's right about that being challenging. In the movie he’s making a mixtape for a girl he likes, so his approach makes sense, you wouldn’t want to get too experimental with your mix in that case.
My personal rules are a bit different. This is one way you can start a tape, and I've used this method often, long before ever watching this scene. But you might also want to start slow and work your way up, in a slow burn. If you're already listening to a cassette you're in it for the long haul anyway. Or you can throw some voice samples in there first (easy to do these days if you have a cassette deck with an aux port and can record straight off YouTube), or start with a stirring instrumental opener, whatever strikes your fancy. In fact, my most recent tape "Tropical Twilight" starts with this very scene from High Fidelity, which I recorded onto the cassette, and then I use his method.
These are my mixtape rules. Or rather, more like guidelines. They can always be broken if the situation calls for it.
I. The Brainstorming Phase and Types of Mixtapes
So, you've been hearing some great music lately and want to put it on a tape. Or, you noticed some of those new songs have similar themes or sounds to them as older songs you know, and you want to hear how they would sound synchronized back-to-back. Maybe you have a tape series that you add to at the same time every year, or every ten tapes perhaps. Then it becomes something you look forward to, something special.
My mixtapes fall into a variety of categories:
1. The Radio Mixtape:
Ah, the old tradition. How they did it way back in the 1900s. Sitting there for hours waiting for the radio to play a song you like, hoping the DJ doesn't talk over it too much. Nearly impossible to do a Themed Tape this way, except for maybe the genre type (more on that below), you don’t have much control beyond just deciding when to hit record. My first tapes were this type. I must confess I don't really have the patience to do these anymore. I mostly stopped doing these around the time emo got popular and all my favorite rock stations went to crap, leaving me to become a metalhead. Even if I were to find a decent rock radio station around here, it would only be stuff I've heard a million times, and unlike some people my age I always crave new music.
Now there IS a newer method of doing these that I should mention. There's an app called Radio Garden, which I wrote about before, that lets you access radio stations around the world, some of them internet-based. There are actual goth stations on there, amazingly. If you have a boombox with an aux port, you can record straight to cassette from this app too. I did four mixtapes over the course of a couple years using this method, but again I ran into many of the same problems. Even a lot of the goth radio stations play stuff I've heard a million times, it’s just Sisters of Mercy instead of Nirvana. I would get lucky every now and then, like once I recorded a radio show of nothing but remixes of Velvet Acid Christ songs from a station in Scotland. But it takes more time and patience than I have these days, and for not much payoff in the end. Every time I do another of these I remember why I don’t do them anymore. I like the idea of recording a Radio Mixtape better than actually recording the mixtape. I get all my new music off YouTube anyway.
Above: The radio mixtape I recorded during my 2015 trip to Armenia. Maybe the most important mixtape of this type that I have ever done. Which amazingly YouTube let me upload without any copyright hassle.
2. The Year Tape:
At the beginning of the year, I select a two-hour tape, and each month I add two songs to it. My top two songs of that month. This gives me ten minutes a month to work with. Often there is extra room at the end of the tape because two songs don’t usually add up to ten minutes, which I'll then fill with some #3 songs that didn't make the cut previously. I've been doing my Year Tapes in this orderly manner since 2004, before that I wasn't adhering to any sort of rules, they were just tapes I could do whatever I wanted to all year. Anyway, listening to Year Tapes back-to-back can be a nice, abridged retelling of your life.
Above: My Year Tapes from 1999 to about 2022. I switched from the Gregorian calendar to the Ancient Armenian calendar back in 2010/4502. The first four I recorded sometime in 2005 because the originals didn't adhere to my new Year Tape rules (2003 sorta does so I didn't remake that one)
3. The Theme Mixtape:
So, you want a tape where all the songs are all about vampires, or the Moon, or the ancient Egyptian afterlife? Or all the same genre, subject, theme, language, mood or time period? Maybe they're all covers, or maybe they all came out in 1984? Then you make a Theme Tape. You're putting songs together that all have something in common, in order to make a statement or tell a story. I've shared many of these on my blog before. These tapes can be loads of gimmicky fun, but they can even be therapeutic, especially if they're mood-based. You might start out with sad songs or angry songs and very gradually work your way into happier songs, leaving yourself in a better mood afterwards. You can also do the opposite, but you probably don't want to (though there's something to be said for ending Side B with beautiful melancholy after an upbeat tape, if you do it just right). Walk yourself through the Five Stages of Grief if need be. It's like alchemy, transmutation magic.
Above: Nosferatunes, the aforementioned vampire tape. I included voice clips from the 1932 Dracula and the Castlevania anime throughout. There’s a corresponding playlist too if you want to hear it. And those missing videos on the playlist are still preserved on my tape, yay physical media.
4. The Audiobiography:
The soundtrack to your life. My life has a soundtrack, it just happens to span over 300 cassettes (I've been doing this for 25 years). These could be "current hits" or songs you were into over the last month or two, or it could be the music that got you through a significant life event, good or bad. You can do them for events that happened years ago too but it's better if it's fresh. That said, I've made some tapes about my childhood that really captured my nostalgia. Put some songs you haven't heard in years on there, it's like a time machine.
Above: Audiobiography: The 20s - Part II. I wrote about this series of tapes before. This is a specific type where each 90 minute tape covers five years of my life, that’s 18 minutes for each year. I’m doing the next one when I’m 40.
5. The Random Mix:
I usually do these as CD mixes for the car, but I've done a couple tapes like this too. Just throw whatever random songs you have into a blender and see what comes of it. Record from an MP3 player or very long playlist and hit shuffle. You might even get some accidental synchronicity. Thing is, the end result probably won't be something you'll want to go back and listen to very often. Radio Mixtapes can fall under this category too sometimes. I've started to do another sub-type too in recent years, where if a song has to be eliminated from a mixtape for time I put it instead on a Random Mix. I might finish the tape over the course of two to four months, only adding a few songs each sitting. These end up being a lot more listenable.
Above: Heart-Shaped Casket, my most recent of the latter type. I found out when you slow Alvin and the Chipmunks down they sound like either post-punk or sludge metal depending on the song, but I still felt like keeping it off my mainline mixtapes.
6. Not Really a Mixtape:
This covers the other stuff you might record on a cassette; bootlegged live shows, full albums, dictation, etc.
Once you’ve chosen what type of mix you want to make, you can start planning the track listing. For the modern cassette enthusiast, it might be a good idea to make a playlist on your streaming website of choice, listen to it few times, perfect it and decide what songs go best together, and time all the songs to make sure they’ll all fit on the tape and nothing gets cut off mid-song. But there’s also something to be said for the little surprises you get by just going in blind. Sometimes I’ll start with a batch of 30 or so new songs, knowing they’re not all going to fit, and just go with what song sounds good after the previous one until I’m done. And with this method, I even be inspired to hunt down a song I hadn’t thought of during the planning stages that would go perfect after another song. Patterns will emerge sometimes that I hadn’t anticipated. Sometimes it will start to tell a story.
II. Choosing a Cassette to Record On
Once you've decided on what you want your tape to be, you'll need to select a cassette. This can be more complicated than you think. You'll need to decide on the length you want (the standard lengths are 60, 90, and 120, with some more rare lengths out there). You'll hear people caution against using the 120-minute tapes. Just be careful with them and don't needlessly rewind or fast-forward them, and make sure the heads in your tape deck are clean, and you'll probably be fine, I've rarely had issues with them. You do kind of sacrifice quality for quantity though. 90 minutes is a good length for an average mixtape, you don’t want to pick a tape that’s too long and end up using filler songs to finish it. 60 minutes is too short in my opinion, you might as well make a mix CD which is 80 minutes, but I do use those tapes for things in the "Not Really a Mixtape" category.
If your supply is low, then you might not have much choice. But I've amassed enough recorded blank cassettes from thrift stores and other places to keep me busy for years, even at two mixtapes a month like I usually do, and I have tons of variety. These days because no one really makes them anymore it's cheaper to record over used cassettes from a thrift store, as sealed blanks can be expensive online. You can digitize them first if they have anything interesting on them (like I found a wrestling show from the 1970s once), but usually it's grandpa’s old country gospel music or something lame like that. If you're lucky enough to have some sealed blanks though, you'll want to save them for special occasions, not just any old mix.
You might also make choices based on appearance. For instance, the Memorex dBS always gives me nostalgia because they were the first tapes I ever recorded on, so mostly I use those tapes for nostalgic mixes (see below). But sometimes a certain brand of cassette just has the energy you're looking to evoke with your mix. Cassettes come in Type I, the standard, Type II, which has better sound quality (but can be harder to record over unless you erase it completely with a magnet), and the mythical Type IV metal tapes with the best sound quality; if you find one of these, treasure it. They're rare and expensive. I have only found two in all my years of collecting. (Not sure what happened to Type III). As for brands, stick to the well-known ones. Avoid Tonemaster, or anything else that looks cheaply-made. And be careful recording on the really old tapes. The best quality tapes are from the 80s to early 90s, during the cassette’s heyday. I'm too nervous to record on anything older than the 1980s myself. Which brings me to another point: make sure your tape is intact and mold-free before you jeopardize your equipment. Make sure the little spongey pad on top is there. If the magnetic tape has white stuff on it or looks crusty, it's moldy and best throw it away unless it was important, because if it gets in your cassette deck the mold will spread to every tape you play in it thereafter. It's not impossible to clean but not usually worth it either. This happens more with VHS tapes, but I've seen it happen to audio cassettes. None of mine of course, because I wouldn’t store my tapes in a damp basement for 40 years only to give it to a thrift store, like some people.
Above: One of my most recent mixtapes, Allstars Գ, on a Memorex dBS. Yes, I'm on Armenian numerals now, this is the third tape in a new series. I started with positive numbers, then negative numbers, and now Armenian numerals. I'm a nerd. I do an Allstars tape every ten tapes. The music on it is mostly new or at least new to me, but between the songs I wedged old radio station bumpers from the 90s that I got off my old tapes so it sounds like I recorded it off the radio. Fun times were had.
III. Picking a Title
Now you might have already gone into this with a title in mind, or you might be flying blind and only decide on a title once you're done, so this step is flexible. I find it best to go into it with a title already in mind, because that will give you a direction you want to take the mix in, like the thesis statement in an essay. I always try to come up with something catchy and creative, something that rhymes or uses alliteration or wordplay. Some common inspirations include the weather, the time of year, something going on in my life. Foreign titles are good too; everything sounds cooler in German. You can also name it after a song on the tape, which is less creative but effective nonetheless if you think it's a good title for the whole tape. I came up with "Allstars" when I was 12 and have kept it out of tradition, even though it's not a terrific title and makes me think of that song by Smash Mouth. Some good titles I've come up with for my mixtapes over the years include "Tropical Twilight", "A Gothic Romance", "Black is Not Dark Enough", "The Hermit", "Eclipse" (recorded during the eclipse in April 2024), "Cold Caress", "November Embers", "Humid Gloom", "The Forest of Ghosts", “Dreamweaver”, “Instrumental Illness”, "Nosferatunes", "The Abyss", “The Gates of Duat”, “The Style is Death”, "WelTraum" (Weltraum is German for universe, but it also contains the word "traum" meaning dream, I always just thought that was cool).
Naming it something like "(Insert your name here)'s Mix" or "Awesome Mix" like in Guardians of the Galaxy is amateurish, if I may be so blunt. Not that I don't have my share of old mixtapes with bad titles myself (yeah I know, Michael's Music/Suren's Songs), but they're from my teen years, when I was an amateur.
A sampling of titles from my cassette drawers. Which one would you pick first?
IV. Building the Track Listing
Now we’ve finally caught up with the guy from High Fidelity. You can use his “hook, follow-up and chill out” method for the first three tracks, if you want, but the possibilities are endless. You may have already gone through most of this process if you built a playlist first. Here are my personal dos and don’ts:
1. Repeating a Band
Ideally you want to wait at least three tracks minimum before repeating a band, and that’s pushing it. Overcrowding a mixtape with one band is bad form. That is, unless two songs from the same band are just perfect together or fade into one another in a way that makes them hard to separate, that’s why these are guidelines and not rules. Another exception can be made if you use a really long song in between two songs by the same band. It also can be done, obviously, if you’re making some sort of “Best of” mix (which I guess would be a type of Themed Mixtape). But typically, if a band you like releases a new album and you just have to have a bunch of their songs on your mixtape, space it out at least, and save some for the next mixtape.
2. Maintaining Tone
Imagine, listening to calm, relaxing meditation music, and all the sudden a black metal scream pierces the air and gives you a heart attack. If you want to change the tone of the tape, you need to transition. This is an extreme example but you can have meditation music and black metal on the same tape, as long as you work your way up to it. The trick is finding those transitional songs that bridge the gap. It might take several songs but you’ll get there. I’ve noticed putting voice samples between the songs can speed up the process a bit though, causing a kind of energetic soft reset. And the transition from Side A to Side B can be a good point to change tone, but you don’t want too drastic of a change or it will be like two different tapes.
3. Editing in Post
You can always edit the tape if you come across a song later that would have been perfect for your Themed Mixtape if only you had known about it, or if you decide you don’t like a song or just want to rearrange the track listing, but remember to time the song you’re recording over so it doesn’t go over the next song too (the easiest way is to just look the song up online so you don’t have to sit there with a stop watch). Unless you’re just going to rerecord the whole rest of the side after that point (happens sometimes). I would caution against doing this on a Type II tape or a Type IV tape, because often the eraser head on your cassette deck won’t be strong enough and you’ll still hear the song you recorded over faintly in the background (this is why I purchased a magnetic bulk tape eraser, to record over used Type IIs; even then though it erases the entire tape, which you might not want to do if you’re just taping over one song).
Only go against these guidelines if you think you can get away with it.
V. Utilizing Your Space
Some people will leave several minutes of blank space at the end of the tape. I find this maddening. Very lazy and wasteful. It might be unavoidable for there to be a minute or so of blank space at the end, not quite long enough for a full song, but I like to find filler when this happens. Look for a really short song, an instrumental track that you don’t mind being cut off, maybe some rain sound effects, or some sort of voice sample. If you have a cassette voice recorder you can even put your own voice on the tape and pretend you’re a DJ. People leave blank space on their tapes to solve the opposite problem though, having a song cut off at the end of the tape when you run out of room. I try to be mindful of how much tape is left as I record so this doesn’t happen. You can bridge a song from Side A to Side B if worst comes to worst, but it’s not ideal and should be avoided. If you take the effort before recording to add up the times of all the songs so that you know what will fit on the tape this problem can be easily avoided, but keep in mind sometimes the times on the tapes aren’t exact, you might even find them to be a minute or two longer than they say they are. I don’t always plan my mixes out so meticulously because sometimes I like to be spontaneous, but it does work.
VI: Cataloging and Decorating Your Mixtape
The label on the inside of a cassette case is called a J-Card, and will usually feature rows of lines for you to write down your track listing, maybe a space for the recording date and the method of recording, and space for your title on the spine. This is the standard, but sometimes I’ll draw something on them instead. See my Wizard of Oz Character Study tapes for an example. You can make your own J-Card too if you want it to be more artistic. If you’re really tech-savvy and good at graphic design, you can even print something out and make it look professional. The titles should be written in a legible font. I like to do fancy fonts on mine sometimes, or even create my own sort of logo for the tape and incorporate little drawings.
Cataloging your mixtapes is important for organization. I keep a notebook to jot down the track lists of my tapes, so if it ever gets lost or eaten up I can remake it. Some people make spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel, but nothing beats pen and paper. You can also note where the tape might sound warped, or where it was eaten up in the past (assuming it survived the ordeal). I also number my tapes, so I know what chronological order they were recorded in at a glance. Some of the old blanks give you a space on the spine of the J-card for a number, but most don’t.
You will probably want to stick to normal Arabic numerals, but I like to overcomplicate things. My numbering system might be strange to outsiders but I’ll explain. When I was a teen, I vowed that after I reached 100 mixtapes, I was going to stop. This happened in 2004, and I did stop for about a year and a half. But I just couldn’t stay away from mixtaping. So in 2006 I started going into negative numbers, to sidestep my earlier vow. I was a lot less prolific in my 20s, doing one tape every two months on average, so I didn’t reach -100 until 2018. You could say I had 0 mixtapes at that point since the negative numbers cancelled out the positive ones. I had no plans on stopping this time, so I started using Armenian Numerals after a short break. I reached 100 (Ճ) on that series just a few months ago after five years, but I’m going to just keep going with the Armenian Numeral series until I die at this point. I thought about switching to Roman numerals, Ancient Egyptian numerals or cuneiform numerals, but they take up too much room.
Here are a few of my prettiest J-cards:
Top two (The Masquerade and Coffin Classics) came from fliers I found at a gothic nightclub, The Castle in Tampa, Florida, and cut and folded into makeshift J-cards. Then we have Satan from the movie The Adventures of Mark Twain on the cover of a tape where every song is Satanic (fun times were had), Music Nonstop with the Goddess Hathor (as she appears in my webcomic of course) and the God Nehebkau, and a doomer on the cover of a tape of Russian post-punk.
After this step, you’re pretty much done. I wait at least three days before giving it the first listen-through, so it’s still fresh in my mind, but not entirely. That’s when you might do your edits too. So the tape is not really complete until after the first listen.
I often ponder the question of who is going to be listening to these tapes after I’m gone. Where will these cassettes be in 100 years? Are they destined for a landfill? Will they get erased in a gigantic solar flare? Detonated in a nuclear blast? Or will they become family heirlooms? Sold off to collectors? Maybe even fossilized and discovered by future archeologists. Probably not the latter two, at least some of them if not all of them are probably destined for the landfill after enough years go by, and it will be like I never existed, but I can dream. I feel like I have uploaded my consciousness onto these tapes. They contain my memories. If I were to lose them it would be like having amnesia. But if someone plays them after I’m gone, I will live again.
