a sea of tranquility

5 things that make life better

1. hyperlinks
2. black filt pens
3. reverb
4. the A4 format
5. headphones

in that order.

reasons why i love the internet:

la blogotheque’s “take away shows” is definitely one of them. amazing bands performing songs on the move. in HD.

have a look:

patrick watson performing “the storm” in the paris metro:

bon iver playing “for emma, forever ago”

arcade fire doing “neon bible” & “wake up”

Well, at least he's honest

clientsfromhell:

Once a client asked me to create a logo for his mechanics workshop. I asked him what kind of work his shop primarily focused on to determine a “main theme” for the logo. He told me that it was average mechanic work: tune-ups, replacement of faulty parts, and other maintenance. He insisted that the logo had to include a chicken.

Me: What? Why? Your business has nothing to do with chickens. The name of your workshop is “Acme Mechanics”. It has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with chickens.

Client: I know, but… well, what can I say? I LOVE CHICKENS.

I'm making a website dedicated to one-artist mixtapes

(Photo by BlazerMan)

I’ve always been fascinated by the art of mixtaping. As a kid, my Mom was our in-house mixtape pusher, and most of my musical upbringing I owe to her cassettes and long car rides. Mixtapes, to me, are an act of passion, frustration, seriousness and love.

The time I mixtaped a darling for a darling

I’m also an avid Beatles fan (again, thanks to my Mom), and a while ago I made a strictly Beatles mixtape for a lovely girl (“You haven’t heard Abbey Road?! That’s it, I’m making you a compilation”), so she could get to know their music better (and I could get to know her better). After two days buried in my Beatles collection and Garageband (a horrible application for mixtapes, by the way), I left my room with 60 minutes of what The Beatles meant to me, to give to her. Yeah, I know…

So i started thinking

Besides the hidden agenda and the girl, the proces of mixtaping one single artist/group got me thinking on how other people’s Beatles mixtapes sound like. What would they put before and after “Helter Skelter”? Did I miss an obvious connection between “Good day Sunshine” and “Dear Prudence”? What would Beatles sound like if arranged in a strict pattern of Lennon / McCartney / Lennon / McCartney compositions?

And then I thought: This is only one band. What about all the other artists this could be done with?

Holy shit…

Hooked on a feeling

I want to be introduced to other people’s darlings, your darlings, by listening to the ways you love them. And I want to challenge myself and others to grab the bull by the horns and make more mixtapes of the artists we love.

The website

So I’m making a website for this, code named: Mixtape Your Darlings.

I put a few hours to use yesterday and made initial wireframes for the site. I’m posting them here for two reasons:

1. To challenge you to start making a mixtape of the one artist that you love the most.
2. To let you know that there’s a site underway for said mixtape.

I also want your suggestions and input to the idea, which is still all-paper-no-code.

My thoughts about the platform so far are:

• It’s about the mixtapes. You could make a lot of stuff like artist band page, user profiles and facebook integration. None of these technical bells and whistles are needed just yet.
• Users control quality on the site, so they will be able to vote mixtapes up when logged in (similar to Digg.com or Facebook’s “like” function).
• The two most important ways of discovering new mixtapes are: Artists and Quality. Navigation on the site should honour that.
• Musical taste is a sensitive issue and flame wars are enevitable. This is not the site’s purpose, so there won’t be comment fields.
• It’s 2009. People use iPods. “Download as mp3” should be an option.
• The same goes for decent RSS.
• The rights for the music used for the mixtapes can, for obvious reasons, never be cleared with the rightholders. Because the music industry is a bunch of mentally disturbed vampires on a rampage, this might pose a slight legal problem at some point. We’ll cross that river when we get to it.

Obviously there’s still the issue of actually designing the site and developing the platform. This is what I’m most curious about right now:

• Has this been done by anyone else? (There’s no reason to re-invent the wheel).
• Would you, yes you in front of that screen, make a mixtape and submit it to the site?
• Got ideas for the functionalities and/or design? Want to make sketch it up and show me?
• Are you a developer and got an idea on how to code this?

Then hit me up, I’m all ears.

The wireframes:

Go to my set on flickr to view the wireframes in full resolution and leave comments on the idea. Or hit me up on twitter @ jonasmaaloe.

Front page:

Mixtapes by artist

Submit mixtape:

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