My newest mixtape is entitled “The Labour & The Shame”; for me it was a way to process the feelings I have about working in the videogame industry. Side ‘L’ imagines the PoV of labourers: It’s full of reminders to protect yourself whilst creating art for money (and reminders about why we sought out creative work in the first place). Side ‘S’ imagines, often from a first person PoV, the class of executives & boss guys from whom we need protection… you know the ones.

Running all through this mixtape are tracks from Gentle Giant’s “The Power & The Glory”, which is a concept album about how power reveals things. I’ve been listening to it a lot lately! In the ‘seeking power’ stage, the antihero of this record cloaks themself in altruism (paying lip service to whatever ideals their community wants them to have); but later, in the ‘having power’ stage, the actions they take begin revealing that special sort of villainy that we can locate within executives or politicians etc.

Today you can get quick streaming access to like, every single song ever recorded, just by typing its name into Spotify! It’s a horrible deal for everybody but that’s how it is now, haha.

In an era of Total Entertainment Forever, we know that all this abundant ‘content’ comes to lose its appeal; what matters instead is stuff like the curation of content, the sequencing of it (“the digging of unostentatious holes to bury the stuff in”, as Joseph Conrad once put it). So, that just means I’m getting back into mixtapes now!