Like so many people, my love of mixtapes is tied up in the idea of love itself — both romantic and platonic. Though I admire many mixtapes put out into the world, my personal favorites have been gifts to and from people I care about. In fact, the very first person I traded cassette mixtapes with remains one of my best friends. Sooner or later one of us made the other a mix on CD-R. It was called ‘The End of Tapes?’ The answer, of course, was ‘no.’
Craig Eley’s work revolves around the history and application of recorded sound technologies. He has a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Iowa, and is currently working at To the Best of Our Knowledge, a weekly arts and humanities radio show produced by Wisconsin Public Radio. He’s on the editorial board of ASAP/Journal, published by the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and is chairing a committee on best practices for audio metadata for the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology.He is working on a book project based on his dissertation, “Making Silence Audible: Sound, Nature, Technology, 1890-1970,” which is a cultural history of nature records. He has recently published essays in *Velvet Light Trap* and *Antennae: A Journal of Nature and Visual Culture*.
