BC080 - Five Mixes: From the Shelves—NYC ’90s
A new series for paying subscribers—physical goods and the stories they tell
As promised, beginning with this post, I am going to be getting to cases with my newly (mostly) organized shelves of DJ mix CDs. There are, at present, 240 of them—I miscounted last week—and most of them are decidedly not canonical.
Hilariously, I’d guessed the number might run closer to 500. But 240 is still a lot—and several titles contain multiple sets, as well. That isn't counting my digital hoardings, which are far more substantial in number. (Or the streaming-only cornucopia, etc.) More to the point, this isn’t nearly all of the mix CDs I have owned—it’s probably about 5 percent. I’ve bought and sold a lot of things over the years—the latter more so, since I received free CDs in the mail for so many years (and so many CDs!). So quite a lot of stuff is gone, including favorites and classics, including a lot of all-timers.
To wit: No Jeff Mills. Only two Richie Hawtins, only one canonical (Mixmag Live!). DJ DB’s Acid Resistant II but not I (the classic). Coldcut’s (overrated) Journeys by DJ—70 Minutes of Madness, which I owned three separate times, thank you very much. Etc. I sold away a lot of great stuff over the years; a rock critic's salary was never much good, by my experience. I too went all digital in 2000 or so: I too lived to regret it. Except I don’t—and, of course, I can and plan to still re-acquire some of the above and more. Collections are for personal satisfaction.
Still, as it stands, 240 mix CDs constitutes a feast. (And if you want to be nitpicky, it’s actually 240 titles—count each individual disc and the number is closer to 300. The one I forgot to add is a 4CD set! See below.) I have things to learn from it all. Maybe you do too.
A lot of Five Mixes ideas flew out at me after I made a database with everything. There’s no timetable or march to completion; I’ll do them as I do them, and I don’t anticipate doing them all. But From the Shelves will be a regular series here, and the posts will be exclusively for paying readers: Thank you!
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