Mixtape Stories

Imagine spending an entire afternoon crafting a mixtape – choosing songs from your personal collection, recording them onto a cassette one by one, making sure you fill each side of the tape end to end. Then sending it off or handing it over to one person – just for them and no one else. This might be a new lover, an old friend or someone you have only ever know by a pseudonym as a penpal for the last five years. The impetus might be flirtatious, outrageous, informative or obnoxious – but in every instance it is a gift.

Now as the functions of the cassette, record and cd player slowly become replaced by laptops, tablets and on-line cloud services, the average computer-literate person has easy and instantaneous access to a vast amount of music at their fingertips – pushing the humble mixtape into obscurity.

So this is my way of scrabbling back a bit of respect and recognition for the aesthetic of these cassette-shaped tokens of kindness.

(a) safe from the sky

(a) safe from the sky

  Marina Vishmidt and I have been friends since the early 90s when at age fifteen we became penpals and traded copies of our zines - her Plaintive Wombat Gazette for my Busy Bea's Bush . We also exchanged many mixtapes over the years...
i know who to run from...

i know who to run from...

  Ethan Swan and I met when we were both students at Antioch College. We began to talk and hang out after he noticed the Jaks patch on my backpack. Just before I was planning an internship in Alaska (which I didn't get) Ethan made me this...
Slingshot

Slingshot

GB Jones is an artist, musician and filmmaker who has been a pivotal part of the Toronto queer scene since the 1980s. Around about 1991 while in high school in the Pittsburgh suburbs I discovered her band Fifth Column and sent away for a VHS copy...