Tiny Mix Tapes ain’t alone when it comes to providing an online space to discover the work of overlooked musicians. What we do here, with words and multi-media sapience, some do with digital curation. Such a place, like Mitamine Lab, allows artists to contribute a mix, of any length and breadth, to their SoundCloud page. In each mix, the chance to blend influences, (de)construct a concept of the musical self, and guide us along with obsessions, fascinations, and musical detritus, is highlighted, encouraged, and welcomed. Some mixes, meant for the dancefloor, make you groove. Others, meant for headphones, weave together arhythmic, atonal work, beckoning you to get lost in sonic materiality. Most mixes blend both trajectories, bouncing from the commercial to the noncommercial, the well-received to the unreceived, the nameable to the unnameable. As a result, Mitamine Lab’s SoundCloud page operates as a lens or filter or map or probe or perceptual membrane with which, and through which, we aestheticize the world.
I could have chosen any mix to write about; this latest one, from Simon Chioini aka DJ Violá, got me all up in the feels. Towards the end of this mix, a blanket of buzzy noise eases me down; I feel like I’m on a balcony somewhere in Midtown looking out over all kinds of blinking neon signs, each one a password to a shadow realm. The shifting surfaces and smooth modulations of tone, from the urban to the astral and back again, pulls you into something sometimes melodious and sometimes cacophonous. Everything melds, everything forks.
Take a listen below, and make sure to keep a tab on Mitamine Lab’s web presence:
More about: Simon Chioini aka DJ Voilà
