From my desk (tea cups, glue sticks, sellotape, bobby pins, a pile of read but unanswered letters), there is a clear trail of destruction (underwear, newspapers, sneakers, empty paracetamol packets) that leads to the opposite corner of the room, where, dumped awkwardly in front of my largest bookcase, two old and outmoded portable stereos are stacked one on top of the other. There are at least 20 cassette tapes and empty cases chucked carelessly around these decks, plus CDs and vinyl gathered in incongruous piles. A Public Enemy disc without its case is lying on top of Tom Waits’ Blood Money. The Adverts are leaning their 12” frame heavily against Bessie Smith’s Any Woman’s Blues, which in turn rests upon the Bush Tetras’ Boom In The Night and a thrift-shop copy of Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra. Tapes addressed to me – precious, irreplaceable gifts – are in danger of being trodden on. But the mess is past the point of being fought against; to clear it away now would be futile. I’m trying to make a mix tape. I’m trying to write an article about mix tapes. The mess – jumbled, though not incoherent, and certainly not without purpose – is a part of this process.

“Friendship is a gift which can’t be given back, although it can be taken away. That was what Guy said was its force, it was a kind of love which has its own power.” Alice Becker-Ho, quoted in The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord, by Andrew Hussey.

I’m trying to make a mix tape because one of my dearest friends is leaving the country for an extended period and I don’t know when I’ll see him again – a year? Two years? Too long a time away by any calculation. Luke lives in Brisbane and we said goodbye three weeks ago at an intersection in Newcastle – rushed hugs and kisses, the awkward phrases that you muster when you can’t say “I’ll see you soon” – but it wasn’t enough for me. I need some kind of ritual, an action to mark this moment in time. I need to make a gift that might speak for our friendship in the absence of us, something to act as a stand-in, a talisman. And making mix tapes is what I do, what I’ve always done, as a child for myself – in thrall to the precise mechanics of recording – and as an adult for those I care about most deeply: my friends. In contrast to popular mix tape mythology, I have never made a mix tape for a lover.

ON LONGING

Nadia tells me she has a badge that says: “Every mix tape is a love letter”. Almost every person I canvassed on the issue had a similar response. While I agree that mix tapes can often function as a form of letter writing (like a letter, each mix tape is personally addressed), it seems that such characterisations carry a certain nostalgic subtext. Both mix tapes and letter writing are indeed rituals – tactile, engaged, time-consuming ones – that, on the surface, belong to eras when loves and friendships were more formal than they are now. After all, love letters are the consummate objects of courtship, with all the codified exchange that this implies. Who does courtship anymore, or wooing? Who makes mix tapes?

Nostalgia is sadness without an object … like any form of narrative, it is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to reproduce itself as a felt lack.” Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.

Nadia and David both speculated on nostalgia for a time they never really had – a misremembered fondness for the 1980s, in particular – as a possible reason for their interest in mix tapes. My friend Pru thought that mix tapes might be having some kind of ‘retro’ resurgence. The former response suggests that making a mix tape is an attempt to regain some kind of ‘lost’ experience or authenticity, while the latter puts ‘the mix tape’ inside self-reflexive, pop-ironic quote marks. Expect the coffee-table book of mix tapes – a blend of art-house obscurity and Vice-style cool – anytime soon. Oh wait, Thurston Moore already did it.

I don’t think that mix tapes are a last stand of ‘authenticity’ against CD burning and mp3s, although I do think that the technology of mix tapes creates an experience that is quite different – for both maker and listener – from these newer forms. John Lee, of Melbourne electronic outfit Mountains In The Sky, says that to him, both mix tapes and CDs “Are the same thing.” Personally I would disagree, but it was interesting to see just how many people, as I was researching this article, talked about the two formats interchangeably. Also interesting were the number of people with enthusiasm for compiling music only now that digital technology has made it simple and quick to do. “I’ve only truly started to make mixes since I could make a playlist, check the running order and the mood of it all, slot in tracks to segue between moods, take out tracks that jarred, and then burn it for people,” says my friend Tim. To a Luddite like myself, who can’t go near a computer without it shutting down or sending up error messages – almost as if the machine senses my scepticism – such methods appear far from easy. On a global scale, the technology of mix tapes is still far more accessible and democratic; as my friend Ryan put it, “Tape decks are the stuff of junk piles and jumble sales.” Although ‘the CD-R revolution’ has brought a million laptop twiddlers and weekend noise bands into the realms of wider distribution, the mix tape still plays a crucial role in genres such as hip-hop, bhangra and grime, where enthusiasm is high and purchase power low. Ryan noted the connections between then and now, looking back to the 1970s. “Punk was in, unemployment was up, and the gap between the haves and the have-nots was getting increasingly wider – and very little has changed. The mix tape is a refusal of blatant BIGGER, BETTER, FASTER, MORE consumer culture.” So stick that in your iPod and shove it.

THE COMMON TOUCH

The pressing of buttons; the shuffling through record piles, feeling the weight of vinyl in your hands; changing over the CD a dozen times in an hour; unspooling tape when (God forbid) it gets munched in the machine; writing out track lists and carefully cutting out artwork to fit inside a cassette-sized cover – it’s this physically involved experience that, for me, makes mix tapes such an addictive activity, and one which is wholly different from the smooth click-and-drag of CD burning. Tactility is the key. When I was twelve, and the boy I was in love with gave me mix tapes in maths class, I’d take them home and pour over the covers with a craving eye, looking for his fingerprints, his touch.

Although it would be anathema to some, I love the awkward clunks and pauses between tracks that are the evidence of another person’s efforts; the half-seconds of discarded songs and the leakage of older recordings, like ghosts, from beneath the layers of tape. In my head, every song recorded and re-recorded becomes sediment, a silt of evidence sticking to the magnet.

This is also why I revel in the cumulative chaos that making a mix tape entails. You start quietly and neatly with a blank tape and a clear space and by the end – hours, days later – it looks like someone’s been pulling well-stuffed Christmas crackers in a present-exploding frenzy. By the end, you could have yourself a little archaeological dig, or invite a private eye over to retrace your steps backwards, from Side B to Side A. How’d you end? How’d you start? How’d you get from one to the other?

Ane Cat, who runs the mix tape distro Gato Logo out of Melbourne, describes mix tapes as “Hand-sized and heart-warming.” For writer and zine-maker Vanessa Berry, mix tapes “Form a link to an intimate space” of the bedroom. Perhaps this is why mix tapes are closely associated with love letters: because they bear the imprint of another person’s hands so absolutely.

Vanessa described for me the tapes she still has from a friend who died: “Listening to them, listening to the changes between songs, I feel a trace of her hands touching the buttons of her stereo. The air twitches a moment, as if I am feeling an echo of this long ago movement, and it is one of the few things that reminds me of her as a physical presence.”

Like letters from lost friends, old mix tapes can be time bombs, but I don’t think they are time capsules. The time they contain is always ready to be activated at the touch of a button: once put in motion, everything on the tape is alive again.

AGAINST CHRONOLOGY

“It is not the object of the story to convey a happening per se, which is the purpose of information; rather, it embeds it in the life of the storyteller in order to pass it on as experience to those listening.” Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’

I was in the staff room at work, reading one of those brain-numbingly sub-standard dad-rock glossies that, supposedly, passes for quality music journalism in the English-speaking world, when the revelation hit me: these magazines represent everything that a mix tape is against.

Let me extrapolate. These magazines (let’s call them, collectively, Beatles’ Monthly) exist in order to endlessly and obsessively reconstruct a ‘mythology’ of popular music from the socio-economic standpoint of their editors; affluent, ageing white men who’ve never quite recovered from John Lennon’s death or the demise of Led Zeppelin. These morbidly nostalgic rags expend maximum effort on freezing time within their pages; with the exception of the reviews section, music from beyond the mid-1980’s – the last gasp of these writers’ ‘youth’ – barely rates a mention. To feature in one of these publications is a kiss of death, because either you’re worm food already, or your music’s so moribund and terminally uninventive that you might as well be.

Such suffocating conservatism wouldn’t bother me so much if it was represented simply as the highly subjective, personal dreams of long-gone teenage glory days that it so obviously is. What is insidious and dishonest about these magazines is their manufactured air of ‘objectivity’, and there is no ‘objective’ sleight-of-hand stunt more beloved of the dad-rock journal than The List.

The List (50 Greatest British Tracks! 50 Best US Punk Songs! 100 Greatest Blues Artists Of All Time!) does not exist as a means of broadening a reader’s taste, or sending a person down hitherto undiscovered musical alleyways. It is about narrowing, defining, hardening. Each song is presented as a museum relic, carefully preserved behind the vitrine of cultural ‘importance’; a row of artefacts perfectly silent and each perfectly detached from every other.

“The moment of true poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” Situationist International

When you lever up the bricks from a wall and put each brick behind its own piece of glass, you don’t have a wall anymore, or even the possibility of a wall – you’ve just got a collection of bricks. And bricks by themselves are pretty boring. A mix tape on the other hand, is always an attempt to build a wall, and every mix tape is a different kind of wall – monumental, crumbling, messy, seamless, humble, serious, or a picket fence instead. A mix tape is an attempt to put songs back into a living, functioning context.

You might think that a person who obsesses over mix tapes is exactly the same kind of person who’d be into making retentive, joyless lists, but I don’t think this is the case. Mix tapes, unlike lists, are not bound by specific criteria – or even if they are (fifteen songs about the postal system perhaps, or artists beginning with the letter ‘B’), the challenge of a good mix tape is to make each entry speak to (or sometimes against) the next. A good mix tape sets up a circuitry, a conversation, a space of exchange between disparate songs. A list is just accounting, totting up ledgers in the dark.

An example. The best mix tape I’ve received this year was from my dear friend Emma who, apropos of nothing save our mutual abiding passion for all things anarchic and dissenting, posted me a tape which took the theme ‘Songs of Revolution and Rebellion’. Aside from the fact that it was packaged in an old library catalogue slip that read ‘ORWELL, George – The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol.1’, and that it turned me on to brilliant artists such as Big Youth and The Last Poets, what I love about this tape is that everything on it sounds so vital, so relevant, and so desperately alive.

Perhaps it’s the subject matter. Your average revolutionary call-to-arms is by definition going to be a more pulse-racing affair than another tedious collegiate love song, but that doesn’t entirely explain what makes this tape such a compelling and unsettling listen. It’s something to do with the way in which Flux Of Pink Indian’s snarling, rabid ‘Tube Disasters’ (“I wanna marry a TUBE DISASTER! I wannanother one LIKE THE LAST ONE!!”) sounds so skin-crawlingly prescient after those London bombings. Not because it sounds like the nihilistic manifesto of a suicide martyr bent on destruction, but because it sounds equally like the neo-Fascist foaming of a million opportunistic politicians, eager to capitalise on disaster as a means of making us perpetually afraid.

It’s also in the way that Billy Bragg’s humble, poignant ‘The World Turned Upside Down’ – his tale of England’s 17th century Diggers movement – speaks of questions and demands that the world has yet to answer. “You poor take courage/You rich take care,” Bragg warns, and the Diggers through him, “This earth was made a common treasury for everyone to share.” Meanwhile, this revolutionary murmur that has crept its way down the centuries is suddenly picked up again, 12 songs along the tape, in A Silver Mt Zion’s heart-achingly fragile ‘Mountains Made of Steam’. “This is their busted future/And this is our dream,” wobbles Efrim, and then, gathering strength, he asks “Which one do you believe in?”

This is the alchemy of a great mix tape, which is also the alchemy of a great zine or a great album or, indeed, a great piece of music writing: that questions snake and curl their way across elements that might seem to have no immediate connection, that debts are invoked between seemingly mismatched parties. The only music writer I’ve ever read who can do this, who can find the thread that somehow binds the 50s doo-wop melancholy of The Orioles to the refusal of The Sex Pistols, via medieval theologians, is Greil Marcus. “Is history,” he asks in Lipstick Traces, “ … also the result of moments that seem to leave nothing behind, nothing but the mystery of spectral connections between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language?” To that question I can only answer with a resounding ‘yes’, and also add: I bet Greil Marcus would make a great mix tape.

ORDER, ORDER

Two songs that I’ve always wanted to put on a mix tape but haven’t yet:

‘Jaimme’s Got A Gal’ by You Am I. This perfectly bruising anecdote – from back in the day when Tim Rogers had the balance between pensive introspection and throwaway rock’n’roll just so – still sounds to me like one of You Am I’s very best songs. In many ways it’s a ‘boy’s own’ story: ‘Jaimme’s got a girl/Don’t think things gonna be the same’, opens Rogers, sounding completely downcast at the prospect of a woman intruding on a close male friendship. Yet the song’s trajectory has always found a home smack bang in my own heart, because of the way it documents the strange, dislodging sorrow that occurs when close friends take flight into the arms of a newfound partner. There you are, stranded on the footpath of past togetherness, while your former comrade drives into a romantic technicolour sunset without a backward glance. ‘You sure ain’t like you were yesterday’ mourns Rogers, with just a hint of fuck-you heedlessness in his voice. I hear you boy, I hear you.

Problem is, I don’t know where I’d put it on a mix tape. As an opener it’d be a total downer, but its subtlety might be swamped if placed somewhere in the middle running. One day yet I’ll come up with a solution, which I’m guessing would involve Bonnie Prince Billy’s ‘I See A Darkness’, for its equally rare pop commentary on male companionship.

‘Something New’ by Art Of Fighting. There’s only one place this song could go and that’s at the bitter end, as it is on Art Of Fighting’s 2001 album Wires. But how to lead up to a point where such an utterly bereft piece of music would sound like a logical closing gesture? It’d be just about the most depressing mix tape on Earth, to gain the necessary (anti-)momentum which would lead to this. ‘It’s not so easy just to see you away/when you constitute the breath of my day’ sings Ollie Browne, in a quiet, quiet voice which has already had all the air knocked out of it. This song never exhales, as if to do so would be to dissipate the promise of perfect love that it so desperately clings to for seven slow-motion minutes; instead it just builds and builds to a wall-clawing strength, and then abruptly slides away. Dear oh dear. I don’t know what reservoir of sadness this band taps into that somehow allows them to maintain such studied, stately composure (“Does he channel all his misery into the songs,” asked a friend of mine recently, while watching Ollie Browne banter charmingly on stage, “so that he can remain ultra-chirpy at all other times?”), but still waters run deep, as they say. And a band who can sequence their albums to such devastating effect have, I suspect, spent many a wayward teenage year in front of the tape deck, chewing their fingernails down over track listings.

My friend Josh, who plays guitar in Sydney band Atticus, reckons that “The gut-testing art of tape sequencing” is “the best training for writing the set list that I know.” John Lee comments: “The subconscious is a marvellous thing which, on the fly, can place the most honest yet oddest of songs next to each other on a mix that somehow works.” Lee also points to the fact that great tracks on otherwise dud albums can be resurrected via the mix tape, alive and kicking once more, rather than “Lost in the void of one’s collection.”

As a finished artefact, the mix tape may present the listener with an ostensibly ‘seamless’ flow of music. But for the maker, sunk in the play-listen-pause-stop-rewind time of recording (and have you ever noticed how luxuriously, illogically drawn out mix tape time is? It might take two hours to compile and record a 45 minute side!), gaps and alleys are everywhere. It is an odd pleasure, to navigate through one’s record collection in new ways, ears alert for specific chord changes, or horn timbres, or drum beats that signal compatibility with whatever has gone just before. It makes you aware of your own musical blind spots (“Why don’t I have any vintage disco?” I thought to myself the other day), and can also throw up unexpected diversions. Looking for a mix tape moment, whole albums that have been forgotten or ignored get a well-deserved airing.

My friend David – in accordance with well-established mix tape logic – says that the first and second songs on any compilation are very important, while the last song is “super-super important.” If we return to the idea of the mix tape as a form of circuitry, then the first and last songs are the outlets from which all the energy contained between them is charged. These tracks set up the questions which are to be answered, or not, in the tape’s duration.

‘This is their busted future/and this is our dream/Which one do you believe in?’ – A Silver Mt Zion’s question still echoes around my head. And I know that one way I have of answering it – perhaps the most immediate way – is to pass the question on in the form of other songs, on another tape, the tape that I’m making for Luke. I know where I have to start. It’s with the question posed by Crass in the title of their very first recording, from 1977. “Do they owe us a living?” barks Penny Rimbaud, and in an era of ‘mutual obligation’ and ‘workplace reform’ his answer sounds even more stubborn, radical and unrepentant: “Of course they fucking do!”

RETURN THE GIFT

“The giving of the gift always requires an/other, its circulation demands an economy of sharing, a partition, a partner …” Charles Merewether, ‘The Spirit of the Gift’.

Josh tells me that the mix tape is “A simultaneous form of currency, identity, and document” and I can only agree. The currency of the mix tape is the currency of the gift, which to me is the most curious and valuable currency of all. A gift does not have to be obviously signalled as such – a birthday present, a thank you card – for it to operate as one. A gift is simply a gesture that places before you something which was not previously there – a new object perhaps, or perhaps a new way of thinking or looking – and in doing so also creates an absence. A good gift – like a good mix tape, or like the mess that a mix tape leaves behind – is intimate and excessive at the same time; it is, paradoxically, a loss. The excess is not a measure of monetary worth, but the loss is its destruction, for in destroying or overcoming the commodity value of a thing, other kinds of measurement – such as love – become the grounds of exchange.

If mix tapes are one thing to me, they are always gifts: objects stuffed with a labour that exceeds their size, valuable beyond the mathematics of 1+1+1 track = compilation. They are a document of friendship, and with one distinct advantage over a photograph: they are not silent.

+