Easy, uneasy

This is the first Mixtape Post. Remember back in the day when you’d make mixtapes for your friends? Well, this is that—and you are my friends.

As I wrote that intro, I was immediately reminded of Muxtape, that excellent website from around 2007. This was pre-Spotify, so it felt pretty groundbreaking at the time. I made my fair share of “muxes” on there. But now we’re stuck with the usual streaming suspects… and since I give my money to Spotify, these mixtapes will live on that platform.

Anyway, that was a tangent I wasn’t meant to take.

This particular collection of tunes is thanks to three separate events. The first dates back to the mid-90s, when South Africa (and more specifically, our family) got the internet. That was huge for us—so huge, in fact, that we went and started our own internet POP: Netheads.

Back then, IRC was basically all I did online. I’d spend literal hours every day chatting to people around the world. In. Real. Time!

It wasn’t long before I made a few solid connections across the globe. One of those people—novacane (their IRC handle)—was from Johannesburg, on the other side of the country. When we weren’t chatting on mIRC, we were on the phone or sending each other cassette mixtapes. I discovered so much new music through novacane, including a few of the tracks in this playlist.

Jump ahead a few years to 1999/2000. I’m living in London and working for a digital agency called Clarity Communications. There, I met a bunch of amazing people with a wide range of media tastes. I flatted with a bloke who was a singer/actor and would almost always be found playing a Nick Cave song on his guitar. Around that same time, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity was adapted into a great film, which introduced me to a whole new set of sounds.

And, of course, living in London meant I could finally see bands live that never would have toured in South Africa. A highlight was catching Sonic Youth a few times while they were touring their NYC Ghosts & Flowers album—still one of my favourites.

Which brings us to now: a time when we have access to nearly every song ever recorded. As much as I hate to admit it, Spotify’s algorithm (at least in the early days) introduced me to some absolute stunners.

There’s no real plot to this story—just a few fun memories for me, and hopefully a playlist of tunes you’ll enjoy listening to.