Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Micachu's Filthy Friends Mix

This mixtape will be perfect for:

A. discovering 
B. exploring
C. laughing
D. hero-worshipping
E. escaping

you can download it right HERE.

My current favorite band is Micachu & The Shapes ... I was looking at her myspace page and happily discovered that she'd made a mixtape (called the Filthy Friends mixtape) ... so, being exhausted from a very successful weekend where I displayed and sold my paintings at the Magic City Art Connection festival, I decided to throw the ball into the East London court and expose folks to the sound scene that's going on over there ... This mixtape is unique in the fact that when you listen to it, you realize that many of the songs were written especially for it because the bands performing on it are all Micachu's friends (and sometimes Micachu herself)...

below is a video she did for an early version of the song "Ship" (here it's called "Attac") from the very-playable "Jewellery" album:









Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Totally Random Mix 1

This mixtape will be perfect for:

A. doing anything random
B. driving to work, school or home
C. not being able to make up your mind
D. softball practice
E. wondering if it's gonna rain or not

HERE it is for you to download.

This has been a crazy week ... the combination of getting all of my paintings done for the Magic City Art Connection festival (this weekend! April 24th, 25th and 26th at Birmingham's Linn Park) and having softball practices and games has made me incredibly sore, but hey! it's so worth it ...

The idea behind this particular mix came to me while I was delivering Black and White magazines (I do this twice a month) ... I had my ipod on shuffle and it dawned on me that I was really enjoying the order of the songs and the song choices that were popping up on the ipod ... so I started jotting them down and basing this mix on the total and complete randomness of it all ... it gave the whole process a nice element of surprise and I enjoyed making it in a very different way than I usually enjoy making mixes ...

Speaking of this mix, the 1st song on it is performed by my new favorite band, Micachu & The Shapes ... I cannot stop playing they're amazing "Jewellery" album ... below is a video of their (very brief) song "Lips" from that album:


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On a softball note, I composed a catchy themesong for our team (the Bad News Bearons) and at tonite's game, it'll be premiered ... hopefully it'll get the crowd going and some nice chanting will develop! This is a very simple version (there may be funny raps and shout-outs in it later!) but HERE it is, if yer interested.







Tuesday, April 14, 2009

Electric Whirlwind Mix

This mixtape will be perfect for:

A. on & off dancing in the privacy of your bedroom
B. getting a huge pile of random things done
C. driving around running errands
D. trying to meet deadlines and such
E. jogging on a windy day

You may now download it right HERE.

Speaking of whirlwinds, I feel like my Life has been in one lately thanks to the fact that Magic City Art Connection is right around the corner (April 24, 25 + 26 at Birmingham's Linn Park) and I've been getting 60 plus new paintings ready for it, on top of joining a really awesome co-ed softball team called (don't laugh!) the Bad-News Bearons (okay, you can) ... We've had 3 practices and one game (we lost 5-14 but hey it was our 1st game!) but so far it's been a ton of fun ... our 2nd game is tonight!

On the day of our 1st game, my friend Laura was in town visting from Washington, D.C. and we had a great time catching up, getting lost in Reed's Book Store & Museum of Memories, taking pictures (witness Laura's photographic evidence below!), dining at Makarios and searching for stripey softball socks at Romeo's sports outlet ... 

Speaking of Laura, she had the idea of me possibly bundling all of my mixes on here into affordable packages (which I may or may not have time to do!) to sell at MCAC, and with this in mind, I burned all of the mixes so far onto an mp3 disc and started listening to them in order as I painted and painted for the festival, and it's been quite an experience so far (especially since I hadn't listened back to any of them since I started making them!) ... in a way, it was a bit like reliving those days all over again, but very abstractly inside my head ... hard to explain ... ther's a sense of nostalgia and sentimentality involved, but not in the way normal memories happen ... more like listening to the soundtrack of a memory instead of watching the movie ... haha

While Laura was here, we listened to Wolf Parade's "At Mount Zoomer" album in her car and it turned out that she hadn't heard their 1st one, "Apologies To The Queen Mary", which is one of my all-time favorite albums ... so I agreed to make her a copy of it, but she ended up leaving before I had a chance to do so ... 

so to whet yer appetite, Laura, here's the music video to a song off the album ... hope you dig it:
 



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On another note, Elise's 9-year-old son Nolan sent me a list of spelling words he typed out on an old typewriter and for some reason I thought it'd be funny to make a song using the list as the lyrics:


HERE is the Spelling List Song!








Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Sleep + Dream Mix

This mixtape will be perfect for:

A. drifting off to sleep
B. attempting to drift off to sleep
C. spending some quality time with a lit candle
D. taking a long bath
E. doodling random things on napkins

You can download it right HERE.

My great friend Lucy, who  i met in high school, came from California and paid a visit to Peter and I  ... we had a ton of fun taking pictures (Peter took most of the ones below), listening to music, eating cookies, playing with dolls, tape recording ourselves, sipping wine and enjoying a backyard fire ... We hadn't seen her in almost ten years and ended up reminiscing a good deal ... one thing that brought big grins to our faces was remembering a documentary we had seen on public television back in the teenage years ... it was called "Best Boy" and featured someone called Philly ... Here's the gist of it:

"It came out of nowhere to win the best documentary Oscar in 1980, and by now "Best Boy" should be ackowledged as one of the finest documentaries in film history. Filmmaker Ira Wohl took as his subject his own cousin, 52-year old Philly, a retarded man who had lived his entire life with his parents. Seeing the physical decline of the parents, Wohl suggested they prepare Philly for living away from home for the first time in his life."

The part that grabbed us the most when we 1st saw "Best Boy" was when the camera man asks Philly what he's doing and, although he's simply standing there with nothing in his hands, he happily responds "I'm eatin' chicken!" (This happens at 6 minutes and 33 seconds on the video below) ... Lucy loved this line so much that she ended up naming her cat Chicken ... ENJOY!



and HERE is the 3rd installment of the Mystery Tapes series.