Jeff Siegel creates clandestinely at the Private Sector. While Ian Mathers is immune to nearly any weapon.
Link: http://www.mediafire.com/?4n0o5nw8ulv8z3m
Making this mix took longer than we thought it would, but that’s fitting; it’s summer, and everything takes longer in the summer. Either it’s hot and humid and you don’t want to move, or it’s beautiful and you don’t want to work. Personally, when daylight starts elongating and the grass withers and dies, I find myself retreating back to what I know (summer generally hosts my least adventurous listening every year), so I sent Jeff a bunch of the kind of thing I’m comfortable with, stuff that seems to mirror the heat haze and lack of air conditioning in my neck of southern Ontario. I tend to revert back to songs under the circumstances: some I’ve lived with for years (Royal City’s despondent and very Canadian “The Sound of the Street Cars,” Radar Bros. sadly out of print “Open Ocean Sailing”), some brand new (Julianna Barwick’s sunny, abstract “Bob in your Gait”), some just sound like the sweaty end of summer to me (Religious Knives’ spooky/grinding cover of “96 Tears,” Space Needle’s organ-slurred “Before I Lose My Style”).
Jeff responded with parts from an odder, shaggier beast, none of which I’d ever heard before. But I still get the gauzy, tripped-out refrains from Maria Minerva’s “Noble Savage” stuck in my head, weeks later, and thanks to him I can fully understand how krautrock auteurs Popol Vuh, king of Arabic guitar Omar Khorshid, analogue synthesist Dylan Ettinger, and Ensemble Economique’s post-Muslimgauze soundworld all summon up summer (the Muslimgauze track was my pick, though).
Personally, I think the combination is stronger than whatever we would have each done on our own, both of us dragging the other to/away from conventional song forms in turn, creating a mix that ranges all over the sonic and geographic world (mostly down to Jeff) without ever losing sight of that nebulous summer afternoon mindset. So far I’ve worked to this mix, drank to it, played Freecell for a solid hour to it, and it can take anything I can throw at it.
Jeff did most of the hard work of actually assembling the mix (finding better quality files than I provided to him, sequencing it), and when I proved especially bad at trying to think of a title for the thing (all of my attempts were so pretentious I wouldn’t even share them), he suggested Galapagos. Fitting for a mix where we each threw our own stuff in the pot with blessedly little concern for matching and emerged with a surprisingly cohesive blend, neither of us really know what the title’s about (or else he does and he’s not telling me), but it makes sense. Enjoy the island.
—Ian Mathers
Tracklist:
1. Ghost Note – Kapwa
2. Julianna Barwick – Bob in Your Gait
3. Popol Vuh – Lass Loss
4. Religious Knives – 96 Tears
5. Ensemble Economique – Shacks Built From Plyboard
6. Music A.M. – Ecstasy
7. Dylan Ettinger – Ceti Alpha V
8. Marsen Jules – Anenome
9. Maria Minerva – Noble Savage
10. Royal City – The Sound of the Street Cars
11. Timber Timbre – Bad Ritual
12. Francis Bebey – Sassandra (Guinea)
13. Susanna and the Magical Orchestra – Condition of the Heart
14. Dalglish – 10.7.2005
15. Muslimgauze – Turkisk Sword Swallower
16. Omar Khorshid – Sidi Mansour (Master Monsour)
17. Radar Bros. – Open Ocean Sailing
18. Space Needle – Before I Lose My Style
