Brian used to tell me about these mix tapes his older brother Michael made. He would take tiny snippets of songs and fill a cassette tape with them. Brian described his brother’s selections as only the part of a song that totally kicked ass. This was in the late 1980s when the relatively new combination of “tape decks” with record players and CD players made music-loving teenagers into DJs all across the nation.
For some reason, I never heard these tapes. I only heard about them. So, when I found Michael on Facebook a few years ago, I asked about those legendary mixes! Coincidentally, Michael replied that he had just completed his first set of new mixes in many years. He called them 99 MegaMixes: 99 songs in 20 minutes! He kindly sent me a 3-disc set with these custom-collaged comic-themed inserts.
Mars Will Send No More 
Wow that is really cool! I remember recording snippets of songs on tapes when I was younger, it was so much fun.
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It’s fun isn’t it? They inspired us to do some snippet sampling too. It’s a different game in the digital age!
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Yea man those were good days, I used to try and find obscure taped theatrical plays and record bits from tv I could cut up to sound rude. Nowadays it’s like using samples for music, there’s no difficulty in finding whatever loop you want. It’s too easy.
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Electronic access to more media than anyone can comprehend in one life has made it pretty easy to find usable samples, and the tech has made it so easy to chop up and rearrange sounds.
It’s a different environment than 20 years ago when we were layering semi-random sounds from vinyl LP’s in the basement archives of the radio station to come up with Robert Fripp versus whale songs or the Rolling Stones played backwards and upside down on a roll of duct tape, which involves removing the end of the turntable arm and putting it on upside down so it plays the bottom of the record on the duct tape roll. Now that’s analog.
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That’s impressive, I never tried that one. Another point is the care and precision that was required, like if you didn’t get the pause/play at exactly the right time you’d have to rewind and keep gnawing away at your desired cue, until if you messed up so much that you’d have to rerecord the previous sample because you couldn’t hear it’s final word etc. Nowadays it’s just “click undo” for any mistake that can be made.
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