Sound Check — Geoff Carter: Poring over ingredients for out-of-fashion mix tapes

Friday, Oct. 15, 1999 | 9:02 a.m.

Geoff Carter's music column appears Fridays. Reach him at carter@ vegas.com

I fly to Thailand in a little under three weeks. No special reason, other than having never been there. You know how these things get started -- somebody sees a Rough Guide or Lonely Planet special on the former Siam, you find out how low round-trip airfare really is ... The next thing you know, you're getting shots, shopping for backpacks and preparing mix tapes for the 18-hour flight.

These will likely be among the last mix tapes I'll make for myself. Mix tapes are pretty much a late 20th century thing. I'll miss them terribly, but they're just too time-consuming to make, and the new options for recording music are just too enticing. I have to roll over for the juggernaut. Come January, I'll likely go MP3 with the rest of the techno-rubes.

Making MP3 files of CDs is just too easy, and the price of portable MP3 players is dropping too fast to not indulge that convenience. The new Diamond Rio 500 portable music player, which holds roughly 80 minutes worth of music even without a memory card, retails about $270. That may sound steep, but consider this: Sony has just leaped into the fray, and it wasn't that long ago that a portable CD player set you back $120 or more. Within three years, I imagine, the price of portable MP3 players will drop to within the $150 range, and cassette tapes will seem like so much fragile, wasteful plastic.

That said, what is lost in the convenience of recording an hourlong record within a half-hour? What's the trade-off for never having to muck with cassettes in a moving car again? The answer, predictably, is of a sentimental order: We will lose the soul.

Mix tapes are character soundtracks. No two are alike: Even if, by some bizarre dint of fate, two boys on opposite sides of the world make a Rage Against The Machine/John Coltrane mix tape with the songs in the exact same order, the tapes will be different. There will be varying amounts of silence between the tracks. One may be more bass-heavy than the other. And it goes without saying that they'll have different titles: "Eric's Mix," for example, or the more provocative "Mischa's Mix."

MP3 files are computer files -- coldly efficient, no-nonsense little buggers. They do not recognize human flaws or impatient edits. (You want to cut "Layla" in half? Break out the editing software.) MP3 recorders and players reconstitute data. The Coltrane/Rage mix will sound the same in Pittsburgh as it does in Prague, drawn from the same software and played on the same hardware.

I'll miss the ability to mix my songs with crazy bits of film dialogue. Quentin Tarantino makes tapes that way -- just listen to the soundtrack of "Pulp Fiction." (He makes movies that way, too.) I'll miss the imperfections mix tapes acquire over time -- the drops, the inexplicable parts where the tape runs backwards. No software could duplicate that. It can only mimic it, just as Beck did by starting the CD of "Odelay" with the sound of a crackling vinyl LP.

That's progress for you. Doesn't give much thought to the old school. I believe I'll miss the things I sacrifice for time and convenience. I'll have plenty of time to think about it on that 18-hour flight. At least I'll have my handmade "(Groucho) Marxist Travellers, Vols. 1 through 8" on hand, to stir those sentimental thoughts.

Stereo Dynamics

David Bowie, "hours ...," Virgin Records America

When a rock star gets to a certain point in his career, one has to say, "Well, at least he or she doesn't suck as badly as he or she could." Every rock star, that is, except David Bowie. He is as good as good can be, or beyond the basement of where you thought awful was, depending on the day you catch him.

Today's offering from the Thin White Dad, "hours...," indicates a good week may be in the offing. Coming off his previous release, the numbing "Earthling," the reductive air of "hours..." is a welcome one. The record takes Bowie back several years, before he learned to hide behind the current beat and the exaggerated riffs of guitarist/collaborator Reeves Gabrels. He almost seems naked in the quiet context of "Seven" -- a rueful, "Hunky-Dory"-ish acoustic number that reminds you of why Bowie became a legend in the first place: he writes some really, really good songs.

About half of "hours..." is steeped in Bowie's charged nostalgia, particularly "What's Really Happening?" and the delightfully edgy "The Pretty Things Are Going To Hell." They represent some of the best songwriting he's done in years. And now that he's parted company with Gabrels -- well, to paraphrase The Flaming Lips, all of his bad days will end.

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