I’ve been making music mixes since the 70s where I was taping music to cassette from the radio, frequently getting annoyed at DJ’s who talked over the end/beginning of songs. Over time I graduated to cassette to cassette taping, taking pride in mastering the art of having noiseless transitions from one song to the other. And I always made covers for my cassettes thanks to the photographic genius of National Geographic.

As the years passed it became harder and harder to find blank cassettes, never mind finding a car with a cassette player (mind you my Dodge Stratus that existed up to just past 2010 still had a cassette player I used regularly).

So I moved on to mixed CD’s and larger cutouts of National Geographic pictures.

The CD’s fall from grace to the bin where the blank cassettes used to be in the Dollar Store was pretty swift. The big shift in mixing that occurred during the CD’s heyday (although one that foreshadowed its’ demise) was away from mixing with hard copies to leveraging the brave new world of  internet downloads via sites like Limewire. Suddenly a whole wide world of music (and computer viruses) was accessible freed from the limitations of my wallet.

The mixes got better.

Below you will find the next step in the evolution of my mixes by way of Mixcloud. In the spirit of my ongoing adventure in loving music the content grabs from literally any time and anywhere. So, there’s the gratuitous, the gorgeous, the direct, the ambiguous, there’s literally every kind of music form I could wrap my head around from any and all places around the globe- Disco, punk, post-punk, instrumental, soul, surf music, reggae, hip hop, country, alternative, electronica, pop.

Whatever sounds good is good.

The length of the mixes tends to run around 90-minutes in a nod to those first cassettes I made. The covers you see are largely still from National Geographic with some of my own photography mixed in.

Over the past few months of 2020 I’ve ventured out to do Podcasts. The idea here, exploring a certain point in time- the music, the people, the events, with an eye on revisiting the time, expanding my point of view now and considering what that time/music was from a variety of angles. Mainly though it’s about reveling in the unknown of the seemingly known.

Podcasts

Summer Cassette Series, 2017

Summer Cassette Series, 2018

https://www.mixcloud.com/DCclarke14/summer-cassette-2018-bonus-60-minute-cassette-12-queen-st-south/

Winter Wax Mixes, 2018-19

Spring Mixes, 2019

Summer Shade Mixes, 2019

Fall 2019

Four for February 2020

The Quarantine Tapes 2020

Summer of What? 2020

Fall 2020