Back in the day, I really enjoyed making mix tapes. I would spend ages in my bedroom planning a playlist, making sure each song came nicely after the one before it without being a jarring change of tempo or style, then put together an epic C90 with my twin cassette deck HiFi.
Naturally, in step with the march of technology, I progressed to making playlists on Minidiscs, then CD’s for the car, and still got a kick out of compiling a playlist that would hold its own against a commercially available compilation album.
However, by the time I transitioned to listening to mp3’s and the streaming music services that followed, my previously meticulous attention to detail in crafting musical continuity became a forgotten art. In short, I somehow stopped caring and these days I will just stick a playlist on shuffle and ride the randomness it throws at me. When Moby’s Porcelain is unceremoniously followed by The Prodigy’s Smack My Bitch Up on my shuffled classic electronica playlist, I only have my own apathy to blame.