So maybe you wonder: why the mixtape?
Music and art are inextricably linked in my head when it comes to my creative outlet. I have also been making mixes since I could press the record button on my Fisher-Price Cassette Player. Music stirs my affections for Christ.
I began exploring this idea during the fall of my senior year of college when I took a watercolor class. I had to create a diptych painting as one of the assignments. The painting, in which a friend of mine now owns, had a CD that had one song on it. The CD served to balance the composition physically (acting as the sun in the painting), as well as conceptually (when the CD was being played while viewing the painting). Since then I have made similar paintings, as well as pushed the idea further with making the CD itself a work of art with the insert, the CD (painting directly on it), and a mix burned onto the CD. This is the furthest I have gotten onto this concept - making the art portable and playing more on the idea of “mixed media”.
To me the mix is sort of an art form itself. I relate music to memories. In hearing a song I can remember a certain time, what I was wearing/feeling, where I was, etc. To me it encapsulates the moment, and so I probably put way to much thought into a mix that another may have just thrown together.
In Indian Aesthetics, there is the rasa theory. Rasa literally translates to taste/relish/flavor…as it pertains to art and the experience and emotional satisfaction that is created (more-so in the confines of music, dramatic poetry and architecture because they contain the element of time). Like western culture, their music has an octave with a type of solfege that can be rearranged into a melody, called a raga. What is particularly interesting to me is that a proficient musician is said to be able to manipulate the notes and intervals in a raga to create an emotive response. While I don’t track with Buddhist/Hindu philosophies - I think this a beautiful description.
So this music that stirs my affections for Christ - how do I use this and art for His glory? I am still working through how this plays out in my life. For now here’s what I’m listening to as of late:
1. Strawberry Swing - Coldplay
2. Reasons to Love You - Meiko
3. Divine Romance - Phil Wickham
4. Where the Streets Have No Name - U2
5. Bottle It Up - Sara Bareilles
6. Pork and Beans - Weezer
7. Homecoming - Kanye West
8. Time’s A Wastin’ - June Carter/Carl Smith
9. Wild Horses - Rolling Stones
10. Big Love - Lindsey Buckingham (from The Dance)
