The starting point of Mixtape is the song You're No Good by musician and experimental composer Terry Riley. Recorded in 1967 (but only released in 2000), You're No Good is an arrangement lasting around twenty minutes of a sample from a 1960s soul track.

The video starts with an electronic humming – an analog synthesizer – the volume of which increases as the camera pulls back on the face of a young man with a sparkler in his mouth. The camera moves away with a jerky effect, allowing birds of prey to appear and floral wreaths forming the words “Besht Mate”. As the music arrives at its breaking point, black paint flows down the walls, accompanied by a shower of confetti. Finally, the scenes string together in quicker succession, passing from one situation to the next – from one group of young musicians rehearsing in a garage, to a Starbucks employee hiding her piercings with blue bandages, etc. – while the chorus of the original song You're No Good  is cut then replayed in a loop, thus creating a visual and audio collage effect.

The artists wanted the images to be built like a collection of sketches and scribblings. They started by collecting many images (including some found in Mixtape) but it is only after having heard Terry Riley's song that they imagined bringing them together in a film. “We were thinking about doing a book. But essentially we just had twenty or so ideas that were kicking around […]. Then, at the shop where I was working at the time, we got to play our own music. And a friend came in with that CD that he borrowed, and just played that, really loud. And I started getting ideas […] we were thinking about about doing in a book. I could see them cut to this piece.” [1]

Associating images derived from 'youth culture' – from the rastafari [2] to the groups of young people dancing in the streets, or the graffiti artist preparing his cans – set to a heady soundtrack, Nick Relph and Oliver Payne wanted: “to exhaust people – hurt their eyes and make them feel a little sick – but make the experience enjoyable.”[3]

In this way, by seeking inspiration from images of everyday urban life, Mixtape is a tribute to subculture, music, graffiti, and dance.

The insistence on these subjects refers to the film by Mark Leckey Fiorucci Made Me Harcore (1999), a documentary that deals with the emergence of the underground dance culture in England, while reflecting the collective loss of innocence of this young generation.

Géraldine Mercier

[1] Andreas Kroksnes, Hans Ulrich Obrist [eds.], Taschen: Oliver Payne & Nick Relph, Oslo, Kerber Verlag, 2004, [n.p].
[2] According to the artistes, the figure of the old man with a hammer is a tribute to reggae legend Lee Perry, who crawled through Kingston, Jamaica, on his knees, attempting to chase Satan from the earth by hitting the ground with a hammer, which they transposed to the London suburb of Chiswick.
[3] Ibid. Taschen: Oliver Payne & Nick Relph…, [n.p.].