This mix and your words are a beautiful tribute to a visionary artist who is greatly missed by many.

It’s 3 years since the death of Mark Linkous. For most of that time, I’ve found it too sad to hear his music, which goes under the name of Sparklehorse. Then, around the turn of the year, I happened to hear some again by accident, and found a way of listening that didn’t make it quite so upsetting. If I just focused on appreciating the instrumental parts, the rhythms and the textures, which were things that I’d always particularly appreciated about his music anyway, then the tears didn’t come into my eyes quite as much as if I were thinking about the words and the songs and their meanings. 

So at that point I resolved to make this mix, also inspired by the idea of there being a Sparklehorse beat-tape out there in the world and thinking that perhaps making this would be a good way of spreading his music to people who could appreciate it from this different angle. As someone who has both played in ‘guitar bands’ and made a lot of ‘beatey music’, I’d always found Sparklehorse to be a touchstone for transcending that kind of divide because of the way that the rhythms would get me head-nodding in the same way as when I would listen to beats. I think I remember reading in an interview with Dangermouse around the release of Dark Night of the Soul that Mark Linkous really knew his hip-hop apparently, so perhaps it should come as no surprise. 

Obviously there are lots of examples that it wasn’t possible to include because of not being able to separate out enough of the instrumental to loop – Heart of Darkness being a particular regret. And then I’m sure some people might object to other omissions – at this point I feel bad that I hadn’t got round to properly checking out the 4th album before he died, and then there is the Fennesz album and Dark Night of the Soul that I could have also included. But overall it made sense just to use the first three albums that I knew best, and which had had such a deep effect on me growing up – I feel incredibly grateful to have heard the Vivadixie album at a formatively young age, and all of his work has been an education and an inspiration ever since. 

I hope no-one feels I’ve done a disservice by presenting this music without its words – obviously anyone who likes what they hear should go and listen to the original recordings and become spellbound by the beauty of the songs and their language. This film is also a wonderful introduction

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukHU5Ho59tQ

Listening to the mix in retrospect, without the voice there, feels a little bit like walking around an empty house, but then I guess that captures the sense of loss that has caused it to be made in the first place. And perhaps it is suitable to create this kind of haunted tribute to a man who wrote so much about ghosts and spirits. So I hope that this haunts in the way that it should...      

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Tracklist:
Gasoline Horseys
Dog Door
Little Bastard Choo choo
Gold Day
Rainmaker
Pig
Cow
Painbirds
More Yellow Birds
All Night Home
Sea of Teeth
Apple Bed
Homecoming Queen
Saint Mary
Box of Stars
Comfort Me
Good Morning Spider
Junebug
Most Beautiful Widow
Weird Sisters
Homecoming Queen
Sunshine
Come On In
Eyepennies
It’s a Wonderful Life

Trees Will Turn To Soil - A SparkleHorse Tribute Mix by dissolvingPath

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