It’s a little fascinating to go back and revisit these mixtapes because it offers an opportunity for me to not only look at these playlists that I made back at the time, but to also re-experience how my artistic capabilities have grown.
I’ll look at the second aspect of that sentence first. For this one, I pretty much adopted the design of “Character” edition of the series of ‘AGI BCN Congress Guides’ for the Alliance Graphique International in 2011, and designed by Astrid Stavro Studio. It was around this time that I began to realise that these mixtapes were basically part of an ongoing series which I had dubbed Mixtape.
I started looking at it as many compilation series back in the day would just be numbered entries under a wider title and alter their artwork. For example, look at triple j’s Hottest 100 compilation series. All of them would use the phrase ‘triple j’s Hottest 100’ in some way, and simply utilise new artwork while referencing the number of this particular volume.
So that was what I did here, and I began to think that ‘Mixtape’ needed to be mentioned on the artwork whenever it was possible. Given that this was the third volume, I didn’t need to do much alteration to the original art. While I believe the original design utilised the three semi-circles to represent the ‘C’ in the “Character” edition it was designed for, I figured that three semi-circles would work perfectly to indicate the third volume of my own series.
It’s not exactly too deep.
Now, when it comes to the music itself, the curation process was largely centred around me trying to dig out as many Australian songs from a larger playlist I had set aside and placing them together in a pleasing way.
I always had the same sort of criteria whereby the genres should be somewhat similar, only one song per artist, and the entirety of the allotted time should be used. So in this case, since it was a 70-minute CD at first, I took as many song as possible, put them together, and then realised I had a bit of spare room.
My musical library had countless Australian songs which were short, or designed to be little interstitial tracks between other songs, and I figured they’d finally have a use by filling in the gaps these playlists featured.
So this is the first mix in which I started utilising hidden tracks. I have them mentioned here, but they’re absent from the original artwork. Hidden tracks aren’t a novel concept, but I was really inspired by the artwork to TISM’s 2001 album De Rigeurmortis which featured 31 songs, though the album artwork featured a lot less. These hidden tracks weren’t officially named for many years, and it was fascinating to look at the artwork and wonder just what these tracks were. Often, they were spoken-word segments, or shorter musical compositions.
That was sort of the plan here as well, especially since many of these hidden tracks were too short to be recognised by services like Shazam, and you couldn’t exactly Google the lyrics because they were so bizarre. In this case, I opened the mix with ‘Hey! There’s Chip’ by Nancy Vandal, from their 1998 album Bikini High Pool Party Massacre 3: Who Invited The Undead?, which is sadly absent from streaming services.
I really enjoyed the idea of my wife listening to these mixes, having no clue of what the hidden songs were, and being unable to find them unless she asked me what they were. From memory, she didn’t ask me too often, because I think she may have just assumed they were part of the songs which they either preceded or followed. Oh well, live and learn.
Lastly, the quote on the back flap comes from the lyrics of Ben Lee’s ‘Cigarettes Will Kill You’.
Mixtape, Vol. 3 – Gallery
Mixtape, Vol. 3 – Tracklist
Side 1:
1. ‘Hey! There’s Chip’ – Nancy Vandal (1998) (Hidden Track)
2. ‘I Like Your Old Remix Better Than Your New Remix’ – Regurgitator (1998)
3. ‘Ruby Wednesday’ – Eskimo Joe (1999)
4. ‘Rip It Up’ – Jet (2006)
5. ‘Colour Day Tours’ – Trial Kennedy (2008)
6. ‘What’s My Scene’ – Hoodoo Gurus (1987)
7. ‘Don’t Go Now’ – Ratcat (1991)
8. ‘Here Comes September’ – Waikiki (2002)
9. ‘Cigarettes Will Kill You’ – Ben Lee (1998)
10. ‘The Captain’ – Kasey Chambers (1999)
11. ‘Songbird’ – Bernard Fanning (2005)
12. ‘Light On Your Shoulder’ – Rhubarb (2002)
13. ‘Mind’s Eye’ – Wolfmother (2005)
Side 2:
1. ‘Fast Girl’ – Gyroscope (2005)
2. ‘Berlin Chair’ – You Am I (1993)
3. ‘In The Summertime’ – Thirsty Merc (2004)
4. ‘Russell Crowe’s Band’ – Frenzal Rhomb (2003)
5. ‘Everybody’s Getting A 3 Piece Together’ – The Fauves (1995)
6. ‘Sunday Driver’ – Transport (2007)
7. ‘What’s The Deal?’ – 28 Days (2002)
8. ‘Vitriol’ – Bluejuice (2007)
9. ‘All Alone’ – Jackson Jackson (2008)
10. ‘Ice Cream’ – Muscles (2007)
11. ‘We Get Around’ – Urthboy (2007)
12. ‘Anthem’ – Butterfingers (2006)