KAMP fire [mix five]

01. The Sea & Cake - Lamont's Lament
02. Kaada - Burden
03. The Talk - Worst Chest Pains
04. Call Florence Pow - 3 & 4 Part Tones
05. Built To Spill - Car
06. Camera Obscura - Eighties Fan
07. Vicious Vicious - Oh, I Would Do Anything For My Girl
08. Tangiers - I Don't Love You
09. Loose Fur - Elegant Transaction
10. Brian Straw & The 6/7 - Now Like Photographs
11. Destroyer - The Music Lovers
___________________________

My time hosting a radio show or two at KAMP was frequently spent browsing the stacks and reading dusty reviews of obscure college radio music when I wasn't in charge of the decks or abusing a microphone.

Usually, by the end of a browsing session I'd have a stack of "I want this NOW!" albums that I'd then get about halfway through burning before falling asleep or passing out or forgetting about them.

I'd take the copies home, and listen to them once through before stashing them carefully in one of a few large black CD binders. Except for the occasional alphabetical stretch, these binders are organized in no particular order.

Other times, when I wanted something cool to air for the show and I'd run out of my own stuff to play (hard to imagine, I know) or wasn't happy with the top 10 new albums, I'd browse the other new stuff. Not surprisingly, most of it was crap. On the rarest of occasions, I'd come across a gem of an album. Slightly more frequently, an album would have one track that was designated as must play.

Possibly my smartest idea in college was to collect these tracks onto burned discs that I labelled with dates and peppered throughout the binders.

My last source for this mix are the albums I wrote reviews for during this same period. Most of the time, I got the stuff that came highly recommended but nobody ever heard of before. Much of it was hype, but the occasional track was fun; those I pushed hard while touting the entire album as genius so other DJs would play my reviews.

Anyway, tonight I went through those binders and picked out the memories. This mix is the result, and I have no idea what to think about it. These tracks don't go together at all, and sequencing them was a real bitch. But they're all still intimately connected in my mind, sorta like how Rob reorganizes his albums biographically.

These songs are, perhaps, the quintessence of my taste in music. They're all just super-catchy pop songs, in and of themselves. Outside of that context they don't relate, they don't sound good, and they mean almost nothing. It irks me that there's no rap and no country and not really any electronica or any kind of variety between them, really.

There's no accounting for taste, I guess.