Tango Mango
Of all the recent mixtapes in Home Normal, I think this is my favourite. Synths, acoustics, and a dash of birdsong. It gently trots along taking you on its varied and happily meandering journey.
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I'm not sure what I expected when I asked a number of my friends, artists and people within our present, past and future to create a series of mixes for our 15th anniversary. For a start I only realised it was our 15th anniversary on the same day (within the same hour) that I got a phone call with some unnerving health update. I was given news that turned my life ever more on its head after a rather challenging 15 months in a physical and mental way.
As with all things in life you have to take the good with the bad. The bad often has a tendency to stick and I honestly wanted to avoid all thoughts of any anniversary for the label in previous years as the bad really hurt me personally and impacted my life after working far too much on something that was originally meant to be a platform to share some friends' music from the netlabel scene onto physical formats.
What it turned into was honestly something of a great burden, of constant expectancy and pressure over that time. Alongside my work, I found my health deteriorating over the years as I ran things whilst averaging 2 to 3 hours sleep per night. The wheels turn and it can be hard to get off and say 'no' for some of us. There's always one more release you have to put out there, one more email to answer, one more artist to support and so on.
Yet the moment I started to go through the music over the past couple of months, remembering each release and the initial beauty of that collaborative process, something changed. I went from a sense of burden to a feeling of great light and joy at what we, and yes, I, had achieved. As a label owner you're never allowed to say that it seems, but taking ownership of one's achievements to move on is one of the great challenges in life.
The feedback has been a blessing and unshackled I stopped worrying about who might be upset about not choosing a track for my own mix. It isn't personal and we (Ben and I) limited our choices to an hour per mix which isn't very much. It doesn't necessarily encapsulate the label, but it sure has been fun going over some amazing music we've had the privilege of putting out.
The Mixtape:
This mix could easily be titled 'Music for Tokyo' as each piece takes me there whether I was living there at the time or not. The environment of being on my own at night in an amazing city, listening to music that matched the environment really is special, and it was this environment that the early period of Home Normal was very much formed.
But I went with 'air travel' for the express reason that prior to my life back in the UK, I was in the air a lot. I eventually developed quite extreme anxiety of airports but never being up in the air strangely. The music reflects the positivity I especially felt coming into Tokyo from seeing my family in the UK all those years ago and the unbridled joy at returning home (to Tokyo).
I've very much created my mixes with long crossovers and blending in and out of tracks as this was how I would create my DJ mixes for friends when I first lived in Tokyo as a rather innocent 22 year old. I was alone in my apartment, no laptop or email back then, and I would buy numerous tapes and cd's, mixing all sorts of music using two cheap disc players and a rusty old DJ mixer of the most basic kind. And I just loved it.
And here I am almost 25 years later making mixes again. How touching and utterly remarkable it is to be making these mixes from a label I've curated and run for over fifteen years, not including two years of research and development into packaging, distribution and design. If I told my younger self I'd be doing this now, he just wouldn't have believed it.
A bit about Home Normal:
Home Normal came about at a time that was prior to streaming platforms, Bandcamp and all manner of modern changes, some of which I love, some not so much. I wasn't on social media nor understood it in its infancy, and the way to start a label was through the net-label scene, my own work which people knew as a result of that, and communicating with stores I had physically been to many times over the years from Smallfish (London), Boomkat (Manchester), Rough Trade (London), Tower Records (Tokyo), and my friends at P*Dis, Linus and many more. It was indeed a different time where you had to be there in person, put the work in, and this was all just before the micro-label scene kicked off about a year and a bit later.
And yes, Home Normal was at the forefront of that while I worked tirelessly to support small labels outside Japan to get distribution there. An honour. and a burden as I've said. But I worked with optimism which really left me 16 months ago, finding its way miraculously back these past few months with the help of friends, family, amazing artists, many lovely messages and a view that yes, this work matters and has meant a great deal to a number of people over the years. We all need to hear that sometimes.
So here we are. A mix of wonderful music on a wonderful label by wonderful people.
Thank you. With love and no small amount of gratitude, Ian
credits
released May 3, 2024
Music to Air Travel - A Home Normal Mixtape by Ian Hawgood tracklist:
01 Pour Un Cœur Lourd - Places for Peace (Various Artists) / 't Geruis (00:00 - 03:10)
04 El pequeño zorro colorado - El libro de los árboles mágicos / Federico Durand (with Ian Hawgood) (Also on Slow Films in Low Light by Ian Hawgood) (08:32 - 13:43)
