There’s nothing like a good mix tape, the old school labour of love that involved hours of bootlegging to compile a selection of tracks designed to woo the object of your affection (or impress your friends with your obscenely good taste in music). The digital age has taken the wind out of the mix tape’s sails, with every man and his dog capable of piecing together an MP3 play list in under five minutes and last year saw Milo Cordell from The Big Pink try his hand for !K7’s Tapes series.
Cordell has trawled the nether regions of the interwebs to find an eclectic mix of artists to feature on his mix, a lot of which are previously unreleased tracks of varying technical quality. The music is of course electronic in origin, varying from sparse melancholic ghostly sounds to dubstep and a few stranger inclusions. The more noteworthy contributions are provided by The XX and Gang Gang Dance, including their rework of The Big Pink’s “Velvet”.
The problem with this release is its lack of consistency. Cordell has proven he has extensive knowledge of new and upcoming artists in the electronic genre, but throwing them all together on a compilation such as this is jarring for the listener. There is no flow, the beats chop and change too abruptly, and the minimalist electronics begin to sound rather same-y mid way through the record. You don’t get a sense of who Cordell is or an overall point he’s attempting to express, other than his trendy musical taste and he has displayed it here for the entire world to see.
Review Score: 6/10
