Pitchfork

Mixtapes are assembled for the gratification of their creators, not their recipients. Obviously, I'm not the first to say it, but seeing how Muxtape has become the spring's hottest, most annoying internet music fad, perhaps it bears repeating. As Eric Harvey has previously argued on this site, most amateur tastemaking exercises serve social rather than critical functions; they're performances of taste, but don't in any serious way threaten authoritative or professional opinions. In other words, we still need expert compilers like Harry Smith-- enthusiasts who also happen to have extraordinary ears and the knowledge and ability to make sense of their curatorial impulses.

Yeti compilations, of course, aren't just expert mixtapes. Integral to the intermittently published Portland-based arts magazine, the enclosed CD converses with Yeti's text-- criticism, fiction, interviews-- and its visual art. Issue #5's three closing tracks, for example, illustrate editor (and Pitchfork contributor) Mike McGonigal's piece on early gospel bluesman Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground". The relatively brief, but vigorous and personal essay maps the 1927 recording in the context of prevailing musical and religious currents. And when you hear its sublime penumbral moan and ghostly slide guitar, you'll understand why "Dark" is worthy of close musicological reading. But for my money, A.C. and Blind Mamie Forehand's "Honey in the Rock" is the Yeti #5 track worth the price of admission. In email conversation, McGonigal described it as "not only one of the most amazing songs of the last hundred years but... a total square one song", and I heartily cosign. If nothing else, it makes one of the most astonishing uses of a found object-turned-instrument: the lowly service bell.

Music fans who aren't already regular Yeti readers (or devotees of McGonigal's old zine Chemical Imbalance) probably won't buy this volume for its fantastic blues and gospel cuts, Scott Seward's history of folk-metal, or Justin Taylor's Will Oldham interview, but for the four songs (and pen and ink illustration) submitted by some guy named Jeff Mangum. If you're one of the legions who's been stalking Mangum since Neutral Milk Hotel's late-1990s dissolution, these old 78s won't come as much of a surprise. The two cuts by Greek folk singer Marika Papagika sound like shortwave transmissions from a century-lost world, her grave and luminous voice streaking like weak winter sunlight through a crust of hiss and pops. A choral rendition of traditional Georgian (as in Russian) folk song "Suliko" is lovely, if unremarkable, and not as exciting as the fourth track-- an unidentified waltz that's probably Asian, most likely 30s, and definitely haunting. Fed with tomatoes and radio wire indeed.

The disc also makes room for a fistful of live and previously unreleased tracks that land a little more squarely in the average indie rock listener's comfort zone: Dean & Britta performing "Tugboat", a pair of dispatches from Phil Elverum's camp, and tracks from Akron/Family, Atlas Sound, and Iron & Wine.

Fortunately, the musically voracious McGonigal has some practice mixing songs of wildly divergent genres, styles, and recording quality, so that the honey-harmonied Anglin Brothers' track rolls more gently into the squeal and squawk of Deerhoof's "Forbidden Fruits" than you'd ever think possible. If anything doesn't quite work, it's the Radio Sumatra outtakes scattered throughout. While intellectually intriguing, these sound collages are also sonically punishing and wear out their welcome long before their fourth bow. Then again, good mixtapes should challenge listeners, introduce them to unfamiliar sounds that enable them to hear familiar ones differently and, if the mix is really great, whet an appetite for exploration into deeper corners of the musical universe. And before you ask: no, I don't want to hear your Muxtape.