Las Vegas Weekly

How much music is too much?

Making mixes in 2010

Put on Japancakes. Chill out.

I have made new compilations of chill-out music for my friends every year since 2002. All these mixes share some common artists—Yoko Kanno, Plaid and Japancakes, among others—and they all fit together like a Russian nesting doll. Nearly 10 hours of peaks and valleys, guitars and keys, acoustic and electro. I’m unabashedly proud of these mixes, and if you ask politely I’ll send you one, too.

A lot has changed since I began making them. I stopped calling them “mix discs” five years ago, when everyone I knew finally got an iPod and sending out actual discs became increasingly unnecessary. I switched from paid audio-editing software like Sound Forge to open-source freeware like Audacity. But the thing that’s changed the most: the way I actually find all the damn songs in the first place.

I used to find new and new-to-me music by reading music magazines, listening to late-night college radio programs and taking recommendations from record-store employees (Alex Vaughan at the defunct Big B’s, mostly). I couldn’t conceive of a world in which this time-tested model wouldn’t work—a world in which I’d visit the record store once a month instead of weekly, a world in which my new favorite artists wouldn’t necessarily be on my favorite indie labels.

But here we are. The track listing of my most recent mix tells the story: Many of its artists don’t have product in bricks-and-mortar stores at all. I got the Durutti Column’s latest record through iTunes. I learned of the daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra purely by chance on MySpace. I heard Kettel when I rented a car with a Sirius hookup; unearthed E.S. Posthumus through Pandora; and I discovered The Flashbulb through an online newsgroup. Where I once had three or four sources for new sounds, today I have dozens.

I’d love to say that this embarrassment of riches has made it easier for me to make these mixes, but it’s actually much more difficult. In the old days, I’d know when to compromise on a mix and send it out with a couple of songs that I knew weren’t perfect, but now, I can keep subbing out one track for another indefinitely. If I don’t like the way an Aphex Twin track fits into the tapestry, I can consult one of these myriad channels and find a track that does: something by Sabrepulse, or Pogo, or one of the million other artists, signed and unsigned, in the techno and IDM genres. I now have equal access to every one of them—more music than I can absorb in 10 lifetimes. I’m lucky to finish the damn mixes at all.

That’s the new way of things, and there’s no going back. There’s lots of music out there, more than you can process, and if you do any amount of digging you’re going to find too much of it. My advice to you: Find one friend who knows his or her stuff, and ask that person for advice. Where’s Mr. Vaughan when I need him?