The Ultimate Fop-Pop Explosion
When I hit the astroturf I knew it was serious. By the time I got to Battersea the next morning, my ankle resembled the Graf Zeppelin and each gear change felt like an angle grinder slicing through my leg. Only another […]

It May Not Be Hot – But It Sure Is Warm
This tape was made for me in April 1998 by a Dutch music journalist as a prize for coming second in an online pop lyrics quiz held on a mailing list I was on. The top three were all called Graham or Graem[…]

Let’s All Get In The Boat
The title of this CD-R, which I made in Seattle in October 2000 for my girlfriend, comes from one of my favorite quotes. Studs Terkel, writing acerbically (as usual) about Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, was talking a[…]

We Will Never Give It Up
I have never really made mix tapes or discs or things like that for myself. For others, yes, sometimes due to love, other times due to, well, education (starting in 1994 or so, after a complaint from my mom that all my genera[…]

The Qt Of Blood Technique
Having spent the latter half of 1999 away from tape making due to self-imposed mix detox, the acquisition of a CD burner during that year’s Yuletide sent me back into the hobby with a mad frenzy. I didn’t fall of[…]

Emergency Ward
Art‘s “Ugly People with Fancy Hairdos”–just the intro, please, none of that “we’re all boat people” stuff–is one of the most vicious songs I’ve ever heard, a sneering indictment of […]

The Origin Of The Species
The tape itself is some fifteen years old, from a time when buying new blank tapes seemed as big a thing as buying shoes, so the same four or five were recorded over again, and again, matted with sound and fuzz. This one pro[…]