Whew! Hard to believe I’ve hit ten volumes on this series! The first one was made waaay back in the summer of 1997 during the HMV Years when I first planned out The Phoenix Effect, with the next three following close behind later that year and the fourth (my favorite at the time) in the summer of 1998. Flash-forward twenty years and I start making them again in late 2018 when I was self-publishing the Bridgetown Trilogy. [There were a few related diversions in 2003-4 and 2015 during the writing/editing of it, though I consider them a separate series now.]
This one was started probably late 2023 as a way to revisit the Mendaihu Universe though that was soon put aside so I could prep Queen Ophelia’s War for release and finish off Theadia. Considering I’m almost done with the latter and once again returning to the MU, I felt it time to finish this one off and get it into my listening rotation.
I’m fascinated by how eclectic this one is. There’s a lot of shoegaze, sure, but we’ve also got some oddball electronics, a bit of jazz, a few tracks that I’m currently obsessing over (that GIFT album has become one of my favorites of the year) and more. Just like the previous mixes in this series, they’re supposed to evoke a bit of urban distraction in one way or another, whether it’s the feeling of displacement, the discomfort of a stressful situation, or the willingness of blissful disconnection.
Hope you enjoy!
SIDE ONE 1. Hooverphonic, “A Guiding Star at Night” 2. Phantogram, “It Wasn’t Meant to Be” 3. Jonathan Bree, “City Baby” 4. Kelly Lee Owens, “Love You Got” 5. Kamasi Washington, “Interstellar Peace (The Last Stance)” 6. Bodywash, “Perfect Blue” 7. Whitelands, “Cheer” 8. GIFT, “Later” 9. Corridor, “Jump Cut” 10. Iress, “Mercy”
SIDE TWO 1. Whitelands, “Born in Understanding” 2. Ride, “I Came to See the Wreck” 3. Coma, “Surrender” 4. M83, “Radar, Far, Gone” 5. GIFT, “Milestones” 6. The Chemical Brothers, “Feels Like I Am Dreaming” 7. Jenny O, “Pleasure in Function” 8. Jonathan Bree, “Steel and Glass” 9. Coldplay, “One World”
Making the new Re:Defined mixtapes have definitely been an interesting experience, as I’ve given myself a reason to work not just with tracks that are getting a decent amount of play on KEXP but deep cuts that catch my attention when I’m listening to the albums at other times. I think I’ve finally hit a groove with this mix, as there’s a certain vibe that I hadn’t reached in quite some time. Have fun and give it a listen!
Track listing:
SIDE ONE 1. Hinds, “Boom Boom Back” (feat. Beck) 2. Mavis Staples, “Worthy” 3. Orcas, “Under the Milky Way” (a lovely cover!) 4. Cassandra Jenkins, “Delphinium Blue” 5. Liam Gallagher & John Squire, “Just Another Rainbow” 6. DAIISTAR, “Tracemaker” 7. The Softies, “23rd Birthday” 8. Jane Weaver, “Love in Constant Spectacle” 9. GIFT, “Going in Circles” 10. Bastille, “Emily & Her Penthouse in the Sky” 11. Ride, “I Came to See the Wreck”
SIDE TWO 1. Orville Peck & Beck, “Death Valley High” 2. deary, “Selene” 3. BADBADNOTGOOD, “Last Laugh” 4. GIFT, “Later” 5. Quivers, “Apparition” 6. Yannis & the Yaw with Tony Allen, “Rain Can’t Reach Us” 7. Wand, “Mistletoe” 8. Glass Animals, “Wonderful Nothing” 9. The Softies, “I Said What I Said” 10. beabadoobee, “Take a Bite” 11. Iress, “Mercy”
To celebrate the start of my major rewrite of Theadia, I created the fourth mixtape/playlist for it, and I think this one works exceptionally well as feels more cinematic and score-like than the previous three. I’m quite happy with this one and have already listened to it multiple times over the last couple of days! Hope you enjoy it as well!
Side A: 1. David Holmes & Raven Violet, “Stop Apologizing” 2. The Fauns, “Spacewreck” 3. Big Wreck, “White Lies” 4. Torres, “Collect” 5. Eluvium, “Vibration Consensus Reality (For Spectral Multiband Resonator)” 6. Brittany Howard, “What Now” 7. Sea Lemon, “3A” 8. Cast, “I Have Been Waiting” 9. Middle Kids, “Bend” 10. Calibro 35, “Apnea”
Side B: 1. Eluvium, “Endless Flower” 2. The Fauns, “Afterburner” 3. Trevor Horn & Seal, “Steppin’ Out” 4. Ducks Ltd., “Deleted Scenes” 5. Topographies, “Red-Black Sun” 6. Salt Cathedral, “Terminal Woes” 7. Torres, “Artificial Limits” 8. Horsegirl, “Anti-Glory” 9. Four Tet, “Daydream Repeat” 10. David Holmes & Raven Violet, “It’s Over, If We Run Out of Love”
[PS. I can’t seem to remember if I’ve posted the other three here or over at Welcome to Bridgetown, so I suppose I’ll have to follow up with those as well if I have not!]
Unlike last year, where I was just too preoccupied with Real Life and other things and hadn’t allowed myself to really get to know the new music I was acquiring, I’m making a concerted effort to pay attention to what’s coming out these days, and I’m quite happy to say that I’m finding a lot of really good stuff out there!
These two mixtapes were basically holdovers from late 2023 where I’d started a list of songs but hadn’t gotten around to completing it and arranging the tracklist flow. I’m quite happy with how they came out, however, and I hope you enjoy them as well!
From the Open Skies:In My Blue World 2, created 14 January 2024. No, I have not written the sequel to In My Blue World just yet! I only have a very rough two-page outline of an idea, but I think it’s worth working on as a future project later on in the year! All I’ll say that it involves our heroes facing off a new foe with a much stronger and creepier ability to siphon magic for their own nefarious uses! And what better way to prep for a future novel project than creating a mixtape soundtrack for it? [Note: for those of you playing along, the title here is borrowed from another ELO song, heh.]
Walk in Silence XXVIII, created 30 January 2024.First of all, I can’t believe I’m already up to twenty-eight volumes of this series!! (Then again, I’ve been making them since 1988, so…) This, Listen in Silence and Untitled have pretty much become my own NOW That’s What I Call… compilations that just won’t quit. This one came out surprisingly well and I’m finding myself returning to it more and more.
Why am I continuing this particular series, you ask? Especially since it’s no longer part of the Thirty Years On? To be honest, I felt I’d left the last entry up in the air, and the full story of what was going to happen within the next two years while I lived in Boston hadn’t even really gotten started. There’s a lot more to go here than just leaving college and figuring things out.
Two things happened in January of 1994: One, I was excited about starting this new story idea, even if the style and genre were completely new to me. I hadn’t felt this excited about a project for ages and I wasn’t about to pass it by. Two, JA introduced me to a girl one evening at a restaurant we sometimes went to, and one thing of course led to another and we were going out. D and I were…well, let’s just say that in retrospect we were great for each other when it came to creativity, humor and a love of music, but emotionally we should not have been in the same room. A great friendship that became a rollercoaster relationship and an interesting co-writing team. That is, when we were both not falling into our own worst moods and habits.
Mixtape, Nocturne OST, created January 1994. My science fiction story idea had taken root and on my days off and in the evenings when I wasn’t out with friends, I would work on a bit of worldbuilding for what was now entitled Nocturne. A few name changes and a major change in setting — and eventually even a map drawn for reference — and I was rolling. I even made the first mixtape, initially on the backside of my Belief in Fate mixtape that I’d made in the summer of 1989 — of songs that were decidedly different from the bloated soundtrack of the Infamous War Novel. [This playlist is missing the first track, Curve’s “Fait Accompli”.] This story might have had its origins with the IWN, but it certainly wasn’t going to be the same one I’d been trying to revive and revise all these years.
Course of Empire, Initiation, released 18 January 1994. I remember WFNX playing the above remix of the “Infested” single as it did something most metal/industrial bands didn’t do at the time: throwing incongruous yet perfect samples into the mix. In this case, Benny Goodman’s “Sing Sing Sing (with a Swing)”. It’s a wild and bizarre track but it was a perfect example of the Gen-X absurdist sense of humor.
Beck, Loser EP, released 18 January 1994. This song just exploded everywhere when it dropped early in the year, partly because it was such a perfect Gen-X theme song and partly because no one knew what the hell he was even singing about. Beck had been around in one indie form or another for a few years by this time, but this one song broke him into the mainstream for years to come.
Soundtrack, Faraway, So Close!, released 24 January 1994. Wim Wenders’ sequel to his brilliant 1987 movie Wings of Desire may not have been as big of a hit — let’s be honest, it had a lot to live up to — but it is a lovely movie nonetheless.
Kristin Hersh, Hips and Makers, released 25 January 1994. The Throwing Muses lead singer finally releases her own first solo album and it’s so delicate and fragile and so much the opposite of the Muses’ chaos that you’re afraid to break it. And yet “Your Ghost” remains one of her best and most beloved solo songs ever. It was well worth the wait.
Alice in Chains, Jar of Flies EP, released 25 January 1994. I’d been a passive fan of AIC, but I loved this release and played it endlessly on my Walkman. It’s quite different from their previous grunge style, instead focusing on a style that’s not quite folk rock but not quite indie either. Every single song on this EP is a banger. And yes, this one ended up as a high-repeat player during my writing sessions, not only during these years but later during the Belfry Years.
Meat Puppets, Too High to Die, released 25 January 1994. This band never quite got as famous as, say, Nirvana, even though they were friends and the latter would cover multiple songs of theirs during their MTV Unplugged session. “Backwater” ended up in heavy rotation for a number of years on alternative radio.
Tori Amos, Under the Pink, released 31 January 1994. Tori’s second album wasn’t nearly as devastating as her first, but she wasn’t about to let go of her quirky piano style just yet. I kind of prefer this one out of her early records as she seems to be having more fun exploring different styles and lyrical avenues with this one.
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Coming up: Creativity sparked, story and poetry ideas bursting forth, and another job lost
Okay, so before we go any further, I have to show you this picture.
[Miraculously, I managed to find a somewhat recent picture of it online. I can confirm this is indeed 213 Beacon St #5C, the same place I lived from September 1993 to August 1994.]
This was the shoebox apartment. Almost the entirety of it. What you see there is 95% of the apartment itself: a single room with a single window and a tiny loft — the photo is taken from the narrow kitchen/entryway that also included the stove, a sink and a fridge, and the super tiny bathroom is around the corner to the left. It really was that small, and it cost $500 a month. I could have looked for cheaper, but that would have meant moving to one of the outer neighborhoods and depending wholly on public transit to get anywhere. By living here I had much better and walkable access to work, entertainment and the few people I knew who still lived in town.
This is where my adult life started. This is also where my writing career started.
My plan was to start at Day One with the writing. I had my spiral bound notebooks and my typewriter, a foldout table, a TV and a hand-me-down VCR, my stereo and boombox, and most of my music collection, and that’s all I needed. I knew I had to start somewhere, so I relied on the reliable: yet another attempt at writing the Infamous War Novel, at this time called Nocturne. This must have been the fourth or fifth iteration, but the first not to explicitly take place in a small town. I also attempted a resurrection of the Two Thousand project I’d started a few years earlier in my sophomore year.
I was broke, I was lonely, I was always hungry, I had a smoking habit (Newport Light menthols at the time), and I was moody as hell, but I was also committed to writing. I wasn’t about to let that go.
I just had to keep going. I learned how to find entertainment cheaply if not freely: T rides up to Harvard Square to hang out and people-watch, walks on the Esplanade and through Back Bay, visits to Waterstones Books to read and chill, visits to Tower Records to see what they had in the listening booths and rent a few movies for a few bucks, and digging for gold in dollar bins at the used record stores.
Mixtapes, Good Grief, More WAUGH!!! Vol 3 and The WAUGH!!! That Wouldn’t Die… Vol 4, created September 1993. These two cheesefest mixes follow up on the “songs I like but don’t have in my collection at the moment” and clearly sourced from the family collections over the years with a few of my own dollar bin purchases thrown in. These were my favorites of this series and got quite a lot of play on my headphones. Noted: the Volume 3 title is a nod to the Charles Schulz Peanuts paperback I owned as a kid.
U2, “Lemon” single, released 1 September 1993. This oddball track from Zooropa got some pretty heavy airplay on WFNX. It’s my least favorite track on the album, but I’ll admit it’s catchy as hell too.
Chapterhouse, Blood Music, released 6 September 1993. I really liked this record, even though it unfortunately didn’t get much airplay anywhere that I knew of, other than hearing “We Are the Beautiful” on WFNX every now and again. It’s a much headier and heavier record than their previous one but it’s just as great. A few years later I’d discover that a UK edition had a remix cd entitled Pentamerous Metamorphosis by a duo called Global Communication added to it, which would become a Belfry writing session mainstay.
Prince, The Hits/The B-Sides, released 10 September 1993. I never had the money to buy this until years later, but it was hard to resist wanting it considering it was the first official ‘best of’ collection for him. For the time being I made do with the cassettes of his I already owned.
Counting Crows, August and Everything After, released 14 September 1993. It was hard to escape “Mr Jones” that autumn, as it was played EVERYWHERE, constantly. I wasn’t the biggest fan of the band and ended up lumping them in with the earthy-crunchy 90s hippie bands for a while, but I eventually grew to enjoy them. I did in fact like the single “Round Here”.
Morphine, Cure for Pain, released 14 September 1993. These local boys always put out fantastic blues rock with their unique bare-bones sound that sounded just that little bit boozy. I picked this one up on cassette and loved it, especially the deep cut “In Spite of Me”.
Dead Can Dance, Into the Labyrinth, released 14 September 1993. This one got some seriously heavy play in the shoebox during my writing sessions. I’d always loved their work, but this record went in a slightly different direction, sneaking out of their chamber music style and veering towards folk music but not without dropping an amazing nightmarish goth staple in “The Ubiquitous Mr Lovegrove” single.
Soundtrack, Judgment Night, released 14 September 1993. I remember seeing this movie with JA but I’ll be damned if I remember any of it other than the heavy-as-fuck soundtrack made up of hard rock/rap duets. Helmet and House of Pain’s “Just Another Victim” got some major play on WFNX that season.
Cocteau Twins, “Evangeline” single, 17 September 1993. Three years later and the trio finally release an absolutely lovely — and yes, autumnal-sounding — single preceding their upcoming new album. I’d hear this one all the time on the radio and it would make it onto one of my next mixtapes as well.
Buffalo Tom, Big Red Letter Day, released 21 September 1993. I loved this local band since first hearing “Birdbrain” a few years previous, and this record proved they weren’t going to stop putting out amazing albums any time soon. I’d hear “Soda Jerk” on the radio all the time, but my favorite track from this album is “I’m Allowed”, which I know I’ve posted here a few times already. Highly recommended.
Curve, Cuckoo, released 21 September 1993. I was so on the fence with this particular record that I ended up not picking it up for a few years, but when I did it became a Belfry staple for a good number of years. While not as tense and dense as Doppelganger (which I loved, especially “Fait Accompli”), this album is just as moody if not more atmospheric. It’s since become my favorite of their catalog.
Nirvana, In Utero, released 21 September 1993. It took me a while to grok this third album of theirs, and it still feels a bit disjointed and desperate, but it also features my favorite Nirvana song “All Apologies” which would pop up on a few of my mixtapes over the years.
Melissa Etheridge, Yes I Am, released 21 September 1993. I remember this album being a huge thing when it dropped because at the time mass media rarely provided us with such a positive message of sexual and gender self-expression. Not to mention that the glorious “Come to My Window” was one of her biggest hits ever.
James, Laid, released 27 September 1993. Yes, that band with that one song of theirs most alternative stations will ever play, and sadly it’s become my least favorite because of that. It’s a great album regardless, especially with a single like “Sometimes”.
Pet Shop Boys, Very, released 27 September 1993. It had been a good couple of years since their last studio album (Behaviour in late 1990), and this was quite a welcome return. They were still slowly moving towards the heady techno sound that would become their style for the next several years, but this one still had the feel of their last couple of albums, creating a nice middle ground.
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Next up: A chance video rental and a trip to the laundromat changes the course of my future.
Welcome to another installation of the Twenty Years On series, in which I revisit some albums, singles, compilations and soundtracks that got some serious play in the Belfry while I wrote the Bridgetown Trilogy!
This time it’s 2003, a transitional year for me personally and creatively. I was just about wrapping up Book 2 in the trilogy, The Persistence of Memories, which I’d managed to write in exactly one year — a first for me, as my previous novels usually took me a year and a half to two. I was extremely proud of that book; I still am, and consider it my favorite of the three. I’d soon start off on The Balance of Light, which…well, more on that later!
So let’s begin, shall we?
Rainer Maria, Long Knives Drawn, released 21 January 2003. One of many bands I’d heard of (thanks to HMV) but never got around to following until some years later. This is a great album full of driving tunes and “Ears Ring” made it to my year-end mixtape and favorites list.
Laika, Lost in Space, Vol 1 (1993-2002), released 21 January 2003. This too was a band I discovered later on, and this is a curious compilation of singles and rarities I found myself enjoying during my writing sessions. Not quite electronica, not quite trip hop, not quite alt rock, but something somewhere in between.
Calla, Televise, released 28 January 2003. I believe I found this one through a review in CMJ — I’d often read the reviews while at Newbury Comics and then pick up what appealed to me — and this jumped out as an interesting find. Arty and angular indie rock that fit the soundtrack of my trilogy perfectly.
Clearlake, Cedars, released 3 February 2003. I believe I’d first heard “Almost the Same” on LaunchCast and thought hey, this is like ‘what if Robert Smith sang for an emo punk band? and picked it up right away.
Johnny Marr & the Healers, Boomslang, released 4 February 2003. Marr’s first official solo album after several post-Smiths years of session work and he hit it straight out of the park from the beginning. You can kind of tell he’s still feeling the waters a bit and he’s not nearly as adventurous as he’d be ten years later with his album The Messenger, but there’s no mistaking his wonderful songwriting style.
Massive Attack, 100th Window, released 10 February 2003. Their long-awaited follow up to their brilliant Mezzanine may not have been as flawless, but it’s an interesting album nonetheless. Essentially recorded by main member Robert Del Naja on his own (the two other members, Mushroom and Grant Marshall, chose not to work on this one), it’s somewhat strangely upbeat compared to previous albums. The Sinead O’Connor-sung “What Your Soul Sings” ended up on many mixtapes, but also ended up as a key phrase in the Bridgetown Trilogy as well.
Stars, Heart, released 11 February 2003. Another ‘heard of but never heard‘ band I finally started to follow. I loved their curious mix of pretty balladry and oddball indie pop, and this one also got a lot of Belfry play.
The Postal Service, Give Up, released 18 February 2003. A side project between Death Cab for Cutie’s Ben Gibbard and DJ/producer Dntel, this was essentially what if Death Cab was an electropop band but “Such Great Heights” was so huge (and still gets played on the radio!) it’s considered a classic album.
Mixtape, Re:Defined 01, created 24 February 2003. The first mixtape of the year, and the first where I decided not to use the Walk in Silence/Listen in Silence/Untitled/etc theme, instead going for a streamlined mix of Songs I Love at the time. This first one is understandably a mix of songs from the new year and tunes from late 2002, but I found myself listening to this one a lot during my commutes to and from work. This boded well, and I’d keep the Re:Defined theme into 2005. I’d even make CD versions for Belfry play!
The Notwist, Neon Golden, released (US) 25 February 2003. This German indie rock band had a small but considerable following in the States but this album broke them and helped kickstart the indietronica movement. “Pick Up the Phone” is one of my favorite songs of this particular year.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, Nocturama, released 25 February 2003. Nick Cave is someone I always enjoyed but never quite got around to collecting his albums. I was fascinated by this album, however, as it sounded so different from their previous records, as it sounds so much more vibrant (and dare I say, even a bit less funereal?) than them.
This one’s a long one…a three-taper made in late Spring 1998 in the middle of my stint at HMV Records. This was kind of a transitional time for me — purging old personal drama, starting a brand new science fiction novel and writing more songs and poems, working down in the Belfry at night, going on long road trips, learning how to get rid of all that negativity from the first half of the decade. I stopped hiding and started living again, especially now that I could once again afford to do so.
This mixtape got a lot of play in my first car — a 1992 Chevy Cavalier I’d named the Mach V, in which I’d recently had a tape deck installed — and contains a mix from two sources: the current playlist of WFNX which I’d listened to constantly to and from work, and the extreme expansion of promotional copies of cds that I’d begun to acquire at work. Some songs are alt-rock radio standards today (Flagpole Sitta, The Way) while others are loved deep cuts (Playboys, Fall On Tears), Belfry regulars (God Lives Underwater, Superdrag) and soundtrack songs (mostly from Great Expectations, which I listened to on the regular).
Out of most of the multi-tape mixes, I think this one holds up as one of the best. It’s consistent with only one or two filler tracks, and it contains quite a few of my favorite late 90s tracks.
[Only one track missing and not available on Spotify: Foo Fighters’ cover of Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street”, placed between Goldfinger’s “This Lonely Place” and Tonic’s “If You Could Only See”.]
Technically, this next volume of Songs from the Eden Cycle would be volume nine, given that I’d started to make volume eight a few years ago but only got as far as nine tracks before abandoning it. But I digress.
As I start the actual writing of this new version of MU4, I’m thinking about what music I’d like to listen to this time out. As I’d mentioned previously, I’m trying to break out of the habit of hyperfocusing on new releases, so pretty much anything that catches my ear and/or gets me in the mood for the story is fair game. As you may have guessed, I’m currently writing this entry while listening to Wire’s 154, their third album from 1979 and my favorite of their Mark I era. “On Returning” is the first song to officially be added to the SftEC v8 mix.
It’s been quite a while since I’ve purposely done a deep dive into my music library to search for writing session music to this degree, so I’m sure two things will happen: one, I’ll default to some mainstays from the Belfry years (Blue Wonder Power Milk, Sea Change, And You Think You Know What Life’s About, and the usual 1997-2004 albums, soundtracks and compilations) when I can’t think of anything else to listen to…and two, I’ll rediscover some absolute bangers I’d completely forgotten about over the years. Add this to the new release which I promise I won’t obsess over, and I think that soon enough I’ll have myself another official soundtrack list. And maybe I’ll even post a few of them here as they surface…?
What to name a mixtape you truly enjoy, but can’t come up with a decent one? By this time I had Walk in Silence, Listen in Silence, The Last Home Year, Cimmerian Candlelight, and so on…names for themed series. But what about a chaotic mix that was essentially my favorite indie tunes at that point in time?
And so the Untitled series was born. Cheeky, but it worked.
This is a mix of songs I’d heard on Amherst College’s WAMH, WMDK out of Peterborough, recent 120 Minutes episodes, with a sprinkle of deep cuts, records borrowed from Chris, and to top it off, promo singles he and I had “borrowed” from the local radio station that they were obviously never going to play. The original mix features versions taped from the radio or off the TV speaker as well as actual source material.
Like Listen in Silence II, it was a mix primarily made as a catch-all for songs I liked but didn’t necessarily have in my collection. This would explain the strong beginning and the somewhat meandering end…but yet it works and still stands up so many years later. Also like LiS II, it was a mix to be listened to while mowing the cemeteries for my summer DPW job. Since my favorite college radio station was off the air for the season, this was my mix to fill that gap.
[Missing from the Spotify mix due to unavailability: The Feelies’ “Away” (after “Makes No Sense at All”) and Robyn Hitchcock & the Egyptians’ “Swirling” (after “Charlotte Anne”).]
Walk In Silence 