MC PERSONNEL

Principal Consultant: Stavroula Kounadea

Ms Kounadea has been involved in the development and improvement of mixtapes since early childhood, when she and her brothers would spend many sunny afternoons gathered around their double tape player/recorder with a microphone and a pile of old tapes. They created short radio-type programmes which would be later played back to their parents for entertainment. Kounadea’s role in those productions involved reading fairy tales out loud; making impressions of doctors; screaming; pressing the record button, and preparing track-lists. Since that time she has received and gifted many mixtapes – mainly in the context of romantic involvements – and she is now the proud owner of one big such collection. Being very good at mathematics, she would assure you that her skills in addition, subtraction and division come mainly from her life-long dedication to making all music tracks fit neatly and exactly into two sides of a 90 minute tape. Her strengths as a Mixtape Consultant lie in avoiding the sound of positioning the needle when recording from vinyl; exactness and neatness of contents duration; personalised gift tapes and the socio-historic significance of the mixtape.

Principal Consultant: Felicity Ford

Ms Ford has been consulting on mixtapes since the 1990s, a decade which she principally spent playing with her stereo, a packet of blank TDKs, and her parents’ arcane record collection. She communicated her complex teenage feelings through the medium of glittery-nailvarnish encrusted mixtapes filled evenly with MC Hammer; Roxette; The Doors, and selections from Old Gold Sixties. During these years, her appreciation for the art of mixtape creation was deepened when she received “Flick’s anti-depressant tape” – an influential gift made by Neil and Tim – containing speech; sound-FX; warped nursery-rhymes, and giggling. Her more recent recording and production work on radio and podcast projects has expanded her mixtape-making skills to include custom-jingle creation and recorded personal greetings. She explored the origins and meaning of the mixtape as a context in TAPE: The Domestic Soundscape Cut and Splice Podcast, (commissioned by Sound and Music in 2009) wherein she proposes that cassette tape was – for most of us – our first contact with domestic recording technology and processes. Her strengths as a Mixtape Consultant lie in complex sonic atmospheres; biro illustrations; sticker placement and the symbolic juxtaposition of lyrics.