PatesTapes

History

Charles Pates' foray into mixtape curation began some “[s]ome years ago”, when he returned to the United Kingdom from New York City, where he had been working at a music magazine. Pates explains that, when visiting a friend surround[ed] by his collection of album's and singles” and was astounded by the music contained in the collection. The next day, he obtained a blank cassette tape and created his first mixtape. After this first tape, he continued making tapes and amassing his personal record collection from which to make tapes from. Eventually, he started making mixtapes for “dinner parties, gifts, nostalgia quiz nights” and they soon “ended up in restaurants, bars and public events”.

Eventually, Pates relocated, packed his tapes into boxes and relegated them to his attic. In lieu of his personally curated mixtapes, he was “relying on shuffled digital music,” but he found that the soundtracks selected by digital shuffling did not fit into social situations as well as his own tapes did. Thus he “started to drag the tape boxes downstairs” and play them for new audiences, who encouraged him to digitize his tapes and put them online. By the summer of 2014, the site had 12 mixtape genres, each of which contained more than twenty separate mixtapes, which were around 45-minutes in length. Users could select a genre, then a mixtape, and listen to a stream tape created by Pates; each mixtape included a track list and gave users the option to pause the tape. When the tape finished, the site would start playing the next mixtape on the list. Pates would periodically add more mixtapes to each section as he digitized them.

On July 11, 2014, PatesTapes received a letter from the Recording Industry Association of America, in which Pates was told that he must “remove ‘archived recordings’ after two weeks” and that “the ‘archive recordings’ must be longer than five hours”. In their letter to PatesTapes, the RIAA also stated: “If we do not hear from you by August 22, 2014, we will assume that you do not intend to remedy the violations and will take whatever measures we feel are necessary”. On July 14, Pates announced on the Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook sites he maintains for PatesTapes that his efforts to submit to the RIAA’s demands were not enough and he would “pull the plug tonight and we are gone... puff!”. But in a tweet from July 17, Pates stated that “HELLO CIAO HOLA BONJOUR: The site is up but mute, A couple of months to make the fixes and back in Sept. Till we meet again, enjoy in joy. C”.

On December 2, 2014, Pates tweeted “Soft launch of @patestapes web site ...check it out” and two days later tweeted “WE’RE BACK! Just in time for the holidays, with a brand new look @patestapes accompanied by artwork & pithy reviews. Check It out. C”. Due to the RIAA’s demands, the site has switched “from a ‘pick your tape’ model to more of a ‘pick your stream’ model, based on a longer set list”. The site now lists 10 genres, which contain a total of 36 streams (with more being added periodically). The streams are around three hours long, and are amalgamations of Pates’ 45-minute tapes. The site lists the song that is currently playing, but there is no way to pause. According to Pates, “because the ‘authorities’ stipulations, we ended up having to make the site more like a radio station, i.e. live and constant”.

March 2015 saw Pates in Sydney Australia booked for a four-night d-jay session at the Spectrum Now festival. On one of the evenings the 5,000 plus live audience "was so musically jacked up by the sequencing that they invaded the stage, and the security team had to shut the 'leaping about' down". It was as Pates describes it "a magnificent feeling of triumph and a chance to deliver some thunder down under".

In August 2016 the music site migrated to Soundcloud where his mission statement is, Editing The World Of Music So You Don’t Have To. The site features African Beats, Alternative Popular, Blues, Caribbean Rhythms, Classical Cafe, Easy Beat, Jazz Swing & Vocalists, John Peel Sessions, Rhythm & Blues, Soundtracks, Top Ten Trivia Quiz, World Muse. As he puts it 'Not all styles but close' and as always he repeats his motto 'enjoy in joy'.

Pates wants everyone, everywhere to be able to hear everything’. Culled from his collection of vinyl recordings, then digitized for the net, the site takes on almost all the musical styles with an almost encyclopedic gravitas. It is in fact, a brief history of music.

Process

In an interview with the music blog Friends With Both Arms, Pates described the process he uses to create a mixtape. He views the tapes as a “musical narrative” which is “built around pace and mood changes” that last around “12 to 15 minutes”. The tapes were created using a single turntable and a cassette deck, without the help of a mixer. As a result, getting songs to fit together and start without too much delay was difficult. As he explains in the interview, “you have to rewind the tape and see if it worked…often it didn’t. It’s a serious labour of love”. In terms of creating the playlists, Pates explains that they “were made mostly at night when [he] was in the groove both metaphorically and literally”. He also states that the inability to skip and pause is a deliberate choice: “I think this is really important, people are listening to music they don’t have access to, their trusting the taste, and not blowing things off. These days it’s so easy to skip, fast forward and chop and change…new technology is developing short attention spans. Maybe my contribution can get us ‘back to where we once belonged’”.

Tapes

The Tapes on PatesTapes.com are divided into genres. African Beats • Alternative Popular, Blues, Caribbean Rhythms, Classical Cafe, Easy Beat, Jazz Swing & Vocalists, The Peel Sessions, Rhythm & Blues, Soundtracks, Top Ten Trivia Quiz and World Muse which includes French Chanson, Brazilian Fado, Asian Koto, Indian...not everything, but close.