James Hayford's ‘Paper Cuts Mixtape’ is a chopped up, and fuzzed out, beats-meets-psych-dub journey, made up of eleven tracks as one twenty-five minute mix, tied together with interstitial noise and recurrent sampled themes. James has explored this type of extended mixed album for the Numero Group label with his acclaimed ‘Eccentric Breaks and Beats’ album, and his blended edit suite ‘Slow Soul Flow’.
The tracks featured in ‘Paper Cuts’ started back in 2007, while James was completing the classic releases ‘Resoled’ Volumes 1 & 2 (Plimsoll Records) under his Shoes alias.
These compositions began as a series of rough chopped samples mixed with influences from the album ‘Donuts’ by J Dilla, and the dub explorations of Scientist. These musical sketches were made quickly, rough, and left with all clicks and messy swing of the moment.
Inspired to find more spontaneous influence through collaboration, he gave the songs to his long-time Shoes collaborator, Joe Andrew.
Joe channeled his college influences of space and psych rock from bands like The Flaming Lips and Spiritualized.
While sitting on the floor of his apartment with a guitar, microphone, effect pedals, and a four track tape recorder, Joe creates layers of hypnotic melodies and noisy harmony that perfectly go with this collection.
Over the course of the pandemic isolation, James revisited the ‘Paper Cuts’ compositions by remixing, rearranging, and fusing more samples and clamorous sonic themes that turned these ideas into a unique, trippy, and addictive mix.
The mixtape is complimented by the original photographic artwork of Caural, who said about the album - “I've listened to this thing like 6 times. I can not stop!”
Programmed and Mixed by James Hayford
Guitars, Vocals, Noise, and Melodica by Joe Andrew
Executive Producer Stereo 77
Mastered at Filtered Deluxe Recordings
Original Photography by Caural
Design by Bryan Covet
Tracklist:
Fizzy Bist
Fizzy Bist (joe1)
Done Key Moo
Silencio
Goon *
So In Dub
Mischeev
So Much Love Fin
Sub_Sam
Silencio Feb12
Fizzy Bist (joe1) Reverse Reprise
* Portions of ‘Behold A Golden Throng’ by Felt Battery utilized with permission
