Crackling, a phone rings, a distant friend finally calls back, in the background faraway snatches of ballroom dancing, borrowed crooning. It all dissolves into the earthy sound of an acoustic guitar, grubbily strummed, accompanied by an Australian voice. And that’s how it begins, finally all the pieces flow together, all I need now is a title.
Since January 2001 I have been making monthly, or bi-monthly, sometimes seasonal mixes for my friends. The series is called Resolutions, for the holiday tradition of optimistically filling our plate with more than we could ever chew. I do this because I sometimes am not that good a friend; I don’t often reply to missed calls, text messages, emails, or pretty handwritten letters. The reasons for my bad behavior in this area of human contact remain obscure to me, although they probably include occasional feelings of insignificance, apathy, and general inadequacy. Do not take this to mean that I am not glad when friends call, or entertaining when they throw parties, just that my detailed knowledge of social mores does not necessarily implies that I will act on these guidelines, do as I promised, deliver on time.
As you might have guessed, I deal with pressure very badly, and expectations are even worse; I freeze, completely and shamefully unable to pick up a phone and get to work. The last mix I sent out to my friends was compiled through spring, distributed in June, and then, all through the summer holidays, my move to New York, registration, midterms: radio silence. Sure, I sent my change of address, replied to some of their kind emails, remembered some birthdays. But I forgot more. Marked emails unread to make myself reply, building an enormous backlog of unanswered guilt. It’s the reason why my university education took seven years instead of four. When a postcard makes you nervous, imagine what happens when you get a deadline, a second one, another incomplete. Procrastination is not the word; paralysis comes close.
The CD’s seem to help, when I am satisfied with them, that is (for every successful disc there are stillborns, misguided attempts at conceptual epics). So far this one sounds good. The third song is short, a choppy remix of a pianoforte piece leading into a staple of my ‘resolutions’, Christina Aguilera, albeit layered onto pretentious French shoegazer (exactly what it sounds like - music played by bored art students who look at their toes while noodling on their instruments). Then continue with dopplering independent hip-hop by Subtle, before Azure Ray clocks in with a crispy version of New Resolution, a song emblematic of my ‘struggle’, constantly remixing resolutions, making excuses, buying envelopes. It must be said though, that it’s not all bad; the constant searh for new music, my addiction, makes it bearable, new music fed intravenously into my laptop daily, literally thousands of songs fragmenting my hard drive, each one a possible deal breaker, the song that makes you smile walking down the streets looking up at the raindrops falling parallel to the glistening skyscrapers.
Yet there’s a disturbing amount of Scandinavia here: Norwegian Annie with her somehow mournfully glacial love song to the dancefloor (Heartbeat), East Village idiot Dungen with his carnivalesque freak out (Ta Det Lugnt, which my Swedish roommate, somewhat disappointingly translates as ‘Take it easy’) and The Concretes with an overhauled version of their Chico which sounds like a retired doo-wop troupe kidnapped by a band of dazed au-pairs in Montmartre. Then there are the classics: Funkadelic, the Left Banke, and Moby Grape, all semi-obscure songs from the records I left at home. A spoken interlude, where the eighties popstar leaves a message to his wife about his recent return from space, “It would be lovely to see you again, I imagine the kids are quite grown up by now, I suppose. Still, that’s progress for you.”
I compile the songs, painstakingly mix them together, re-edit and title, then send them in the mail, or get on trains to deliver them personally. I am now working on #29, and this mix is supposed to tell my friends back home about my new life in New York City. The songs should be about new beginnings, navigating the grid of the city, the tangerine glow of the Empire State Building outside my window as the sun sets earlier, the artistic frenzy leading up to the election (the embarrassed quiet after), the night when friends of new friends led me right past the long queues into an exclusive club where I saw that celebrity heiress who had so much plastic surgery she looks like a feline VISA-addict. The artists should be local, but not exclusively so, and I would need at least a single representative from the Low Countries (to let my ‘old’ friends know they haven’t been forgotten or, God forbid, replaced). There are rules to the mixtape, John Cusack explains this in High Fidelity, an inviting opener, no more than one song per artist, and my personal additive: relative obscurity. I want the songs to be fresh, and if they are not, they should sound crisp in the bright winter glaze.
As another actor, portraying another sad male obsessionist, once conjectured, most human activities can be divided in thirty-minute sections, the middle is the hardest, forty minutes have passed and the listener will have finished their day-old dishes, laundry or make-up ritual. There should be a marked change in mood and a drop in volume helps. Mine comes in the form of a piano ballad with a voice-over by the original space cadet, Captain Kirk himself. He reads a letter from an estranged father trying to reconnect with his daughters. He says the wrong things, does not apologize, and meanwhile Aimee Mann and Ben Folds sing the chorus: “Above the quiet, there’s a buzz. That’s. Me. Trying.” Me being ironic more like; self-mockery the ever-available modus operandi for the self-conscious.
The sequencing is the best part: the songs are all there, I just have to look for the hidden flow, the funny juxtapositions, the one song that feels out of place, too much. This phase is extremely micro-managing, burning dub-plates, hearing how it feels walking through the dairy aisle in my supermarket, in the park by the rollerblade disco, on empty escalators, Saturday night at 4 a.m. in bed with the window open and the Chelsea crowd fading out. It should feel true, but just a little more optimistic. (I don’t want people to think I’m depressed just because of my penchant for troubled acoustic boys with badly tuned guitars.) Each new track should make you forget the last song, seconds into the next. Turn a pencil into a drumstick, get your hips itching and sparingly twitch the tear ducts.
This is a mix that makes most sense piped into your ears, finger on the volume trigger, keeping step even when circumventing city roadworks. It ends seventy-eight minutes later with that same crackling it started out with, a Swedish accent sings the story of a wronged song, left at the department of forgotten songs by her A-side sister. I feel glad, can’t wait to get out there, test the waves of traffic with this new soundtrack, I’ll send the finished copies off after I finish my next paper (a comparison of irrational characters of the literature of modernity), then I’ll buy those pretty rainbow CD cases, padded envelopes, compare shipping prices, start burning.
I guess I have my title, NY Resolutions, or even better in lowercase: ny resolutions #1, the local abbreviation doubling for the universally Scandinavian word for ‘new’, a promise I know I can’t keep.
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