Abandoned Mixtapes

A change of pace for Music Monday today. Something awesome happened last night while I was walking home, I found these abandoned mixtapes! It gave me an idea :)

Strewn from a carrier bag in a bus stop were ten’s of tapes that seemed to be abandoned, although it might have been cheeky of me, I sifted through the selection, reading the labels and chose some of the best sounding ones. As I type this post, I’ve linked up my walkman to my PC and am listening on a 1993 tape to Tom Petty – Learning to Fly! Which in my previous mixtape post is the song you can hear on the Eilizabethtown trailer. How serendipitous is this? These tapes have come to a good home as I have desk lamps made out of cassettes!

The thing is as well I sit at a computer for hours and when I can listen as a lot of people do, to music. Hours upon hours of music have been listened to as I work, I find it inspires and relaxes me and makes me more productive! I can imagine getting through these tapes quite easily when I work from home at this desk.

Seeing these tapes littering the bus stop though, gave me an idea.

What if in art galleries up and down the land (with PRS of course) there was a chair, some headphones, a walkman in a quiet spot and a selection of mixtapes that had been given to the gallery by visitors?

Epic Mixtape installations
What if in art galleries up and down the land (with PRS of course) there was a chair, some headphones, a walkman and a selection of mixtapes that had been given to the gallery by visitors. Wouldn’t that make the most awesome-est art installation? Knowing that on your lunch break or whatever you could drop in for half an hour and come away with a brand new fave song? You could also leave your comments in a guestbook and post your own physical mixtape for other people to listen to. As long as these tapes remained in the gallery and didn’t leave I don’t see why there would be a PRS issue, if it was all done properly.

Mixtapes on 6Music!
Lauren Laverne on her radio show is doing something called “Memory Tapes” where listeners send in their playlists which are then discussed and 5 tracks are then selected to be played! Here’s theMemory Tape for 4th June 2010. I can’t help but think, are mixtapes coming back in a rage against the iTunes machine stylee? Anyway here’s a classic from this tape I found in the street!

Tom Petty – Something in the Air

That would get me into an art gallery hands down!
Share the music.

Posted on Monday, June 7th, 2010