NPR : The Mix Tape: Art and Artifact

Thurston Moore, of pioneering art-rock-noise band Sonic Youth, explores the magic of the mix tape in a new book, Mix Tape: The Art of Cassette Culture.

Before the iPod and the random playlist of the MP3, there was the original: the mix tape.
The advent of the cassette tape some 30 years ago made it possible for anyone with a tape deck and some tunes to be a record producer, mixing and matching songs, genres and bands. And become at-home record producers we did....

I'm going through my big box of old mix tapes from the seventies and eighties... one tape has three long songs (a minimal mix at best) - Boz Scaggs "Somebody Loan Me A Dime", Traffic "Low Spark of High Heeled Boys" and Elton John "11-17-70". Somewhere in the big box of several hundred cassettes, many unlabled, there's a breakup tape at least 30 years old, old party tapes, demo tapes, new release tapes when I worked at Warner Bros with 10 second snippets of Fleetwood Mac, Asia, Quarterflash, Van Halen with voice over hype... aah the memories...

And in this corner, a big box of unlabled mix CDs...

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