About My Mixes

My college and grad school years were the busiest time for audio experimentation and music recording. Besides coming up with my own material, I was also madly making mix tapes. I was buying dozens of CDs, often solely to provide mix tape fodder. At first, these mix tapes were just the standard collection of songs. Then I started getting creative, getting a little bit fancy, until I reached a pinnacle around 1992-93. By that point, when I would set up to do a mix tape, I would have effects boxes, microphones, musical instruments, and sound effects tapes and CDs plugged into the mixer, and I would do the whole thing in real time, as if it were a tripped-out radio show.

I made a few interesting mixes in the mid to late 90s, trading with my friend Mike Fuller. We were calling them "audio letters," and they included spoken commentary as well as songs. After that, though, I stopped making them until recently, when the technology to burn CDs showed up. Unfortunately, mostly due to how rigid iTunes is about these things, my mix CDs have reverted to being straightforward collections of songs, which is not as much fun and not nearly as creative. I think I've still got some good mixes left in me, as soon as I figure out how to force all this new technology to let me be more freewheeling.

---jrw 09-25-03