| Cowboys and Indies |
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Cowboys and Indies is a song and sound clip-based mix that jumps from one style to the next at a breakneck pace. Initially I just wanted to do a quick mix of songs I've been listening to over the past months, but as with most of the mixes I start working on, a theme arises and I find myself struggling to make irregular pieces fit together. The song structure of Cowboys and Indies is taken from a series of mixtape cassettes I made as a teenager called Liquid Obsessions. Each mix in the Liquid Obsessions series was named after a different cocktail and the songs were a mixed bag of lounge music and contemporary pop. I was inspired by bandleader Xavier Cugat's album, Cugi's Cocktails, wherein every song was themed to a popular mixed drink. Cowboys and Indies follows the structure of my original Liquid Obsessions mixes by buffering contemporary Indie music with quirky pop and Hillbilly music (I'm also working on an entire mixtape devoted to 40's/50's Hillbilly music).  Since all of the songs on Cowboys and Indies are dissimilar in style, I decided to use sound clips to help pull them together. Songs featuring steel guitar, walls of 50's pop, and the static strains of Buffy Sainte-Marie brought to mind Boy Scouts, 16mm Educational Films, and Cowboys and Indians. I watched several classic campy Westerns for the first time: Broken Arrow, Little Big Man, Garden of Evil, and Johnny Guitar. Soon, realistic visions of frontier life was clashing with portrayals of American Indians as evil savages. Sound clips from these various Westerns constitute about 2/3 of the sound bits used on Cowboys and Indies. Mixing these film clips with 16mm Educational Film segments leaves a mixtape that I can only describe as the sound of a mid-20th century home economics class being attacked by the ghosts of angry Native Americans.  My next mixtape project will be a career retrospective of Mama Cass. I've been compiling audio clips of Cass over the past few years and I think I might finally have enough audio now to put together something fantastic. The majority of the show's music will be pulled from analog tape. Now if I can just whittle down the music playlist from 50 songs to a respectable and listenable 20.  |
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