dimanche 16 Déc 2007, 21h31m
*FOR SOME REASON THIS MP3 FILE DOESN'T LIKE WINAMP. I SUGGEST RUNNING IT IN ITUNES. I HAVE NOT YET TRIED IT IN WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER*
I Am Remembering You (You Were Sparkling)
Claire Love
1. Boards of Canada - Wildlife Analysis
2. Aphex Twin - Xtal
3. Pass Into Silence - Voices
4. Madonna - Drowned Word/Substitue for Love
5. The Chemical Brothers - Hold Tight London
6. Kylie Minogue - Can't Get You Out of My Head
7. The Postal Service - Such Great Heights (John Tejada Remix)
8. Junior Boys - In the Morning (Hot Chip Remix)
9. Domink Eulberg - Afriad of Seeing Stars
10. Rilo Kiley - Breakin' Up (Hot Chip Remix)
11. My Brightest Diamond - We Were Sparkling (Haruki Remix)
12. Arovane - Instant Gods Out of the Box
13. Manual - 1986
Firstly, in all my years of mix making, this is my first attempt at making a DJ-like mix in Audacity, so some of the transitions are rough. If you listen, be kind to me. I tried really hard. And also that thing above about not listening to it in Winamp. Yeah.
The inspiration for this mix was Hot Chip's remix of Rilo Kiley's Breakin' Up, two of my favorite artists despite RK's disappointing recent effort. Breakin' Up takes a page out of Postal Service's book, and is one of the salvagable songs on Under the Blacklight. Anyone familiar with the original knows that that is a cheeky, upbeat, and even exuberant take on the end of a relationship. Hot Chip's remix removes every element of fun from the original. Jenny Lewis's voice hangs eerily over icy synth beats, and the joking tone of the original turn is turned into an angry, bitter retort that is infused with a haunting sadness.
I didn't really intend for this mix to tell a story, but of course that's what it ended up doing. It is a story about love, a certain kind of love. The kind that comes to you when you are hurt and that is surrounded with the hurt you can see it bringing you. And perhaps that is the truest love of all, I don't know. The first three tracks are innocence and sadness, the solemn wandering of a romantic unmoored, able to find beauty in life, but sort of quietly resigned to loneliness, and not looking for love.
Then, during the fourth track, love and lyrics drift in for the first time. Our lovely protagonist has given up love and sought success and happiness on their own, and has succeeded, but now in the face of this surprising new person, they realize the hollowness in the sounds of the earlier tracks, the melancholy that haunted their happiness, is because their was no love. So they give up, they give in.
The next track is infused with the passion of new love, but there is still that biting doubt, that sense that their new lover is not safe, that they will be hurt. There is the war between heeding the "warning," or telling the other person of the danger, of your baggage, and just giving into to this terrible fear. But of course there is denial, and in this case the refrain "Don't worry, nothing can go wrong," is more of a mantra that you use to convince yourself that it's true.
So, now you're totally crazy in love and you can't get them out of your head and you reach such great heights, and the next two songs are in that stage of obsession, of passion, of love and addiction and the belief in perfection, but the tone stays haunting, stays desperate, stays almost said because this is the desperate fucking you do in the dark to stay alive, to prove that this will not fall apart.
Then it does fall apart. Someone is a jerk. Someone owns up to the fact that it isn't going to work, or as is more likely in this case and with this mix, someone's terror overcomes them because they realize maybe this actually could work. And this means it could hurt even more, this is terror of being too in love. So they make up reasons it can't work, or worse, bring up the original reasons our protagonist was wary of but chose to ignore. So, of course, the retaliation to this coward is, you're afraid of this love, "you're afraid of seeing stars," and there is a frantic scramble to keep them close. There is also the joy that can only come from breaking up and getting back together over and over and over…until the Rilo Kiley song comes in and you finally break up, and this time, does it hurt enough for you? Is your heart broken enough that you won't go back? And it is, we're breaking up, I'm breaking up.
And then all that is left for you, for our protagonist, to do is to sit and remember, and to still be in love. You are clinging to those memories tight because that is the only place there is any love left to be had. The last songs are haunting sadness, a return to that wordless fog of the beginning of the mix that takes on a rhythm and then slowly, hauntingly, fades out into a fog of memory. Your former lover seems now to be only a dream, some figment of your imagination, and all you are left with is your sadness and the ghost of a memory that is ever so slowly fading away into sounds and smells and senses until all you are left with is your sadness, your aloneness and, if your are lucky, your resignation.
I, of course, have never experienced any of these things in real life, being an unfeeling robot.
Here is the sendspace link for the mix: I am Remembering You (You Were Sparkling).mp3. It is all one track mixed together compressed into one mp3. Please be kind on me when considering the transitions. This was my first time out with something this complicated. I used Audacity and did my best. Album art is original, please no takey. And like I said, the file is not a big fan of winamp.
