Free download Hammock Dreams. Dub mixtape by Micah Porter
Sometime, long ago, I was going to art school in LA. My family were living in Berkeley. On one late-spring weekend I was up visiting the fam. My sister Beth, her two close friends and I decided to drive out to Stinson Beach. We brought our suits and towels, to catch some rays. Beth brought along an old busted boombox. With the volume turned down super low, a sonic melange of sounds emitted from the speakers. Equal parts Dub Reggae, Abstract Jazz, early Blues tunes, 70s political poetry and children’s tales – seamlessly fading in and out of each other, glued together with environmental sounds: thunderstorms, humpback whales, rivers, oceans.
Hammock Dreams was the tape in that box, that day. It was like a slow burning fire, as we made copies for all our friends, and they made copies for theirs and on down the line. People who listened to it instantly wanted a copy and another was made. I immediately began buying dub records and digging for all kinds of weird stuff that people dumped off at the Goodwill. As my record collection grew I formulated my own sonic stew that took its queues from Hammock Dreams and went in whole new directions. Fittingly I called mine “Son of Hammock”.
As the tape player went the way of the do-do. I held on to the Hammock Dreams tape and surprisingly it has stayed with me through countless moves, junk consolidations, storage spaces and a move to Mexico. For years I’ve been meaning to digitize it and yesterday that’s exactly what I did – I borrowed my dad’s ancient tape player and hooked it up to my computer. Unfortunately, my copy is probably at least a 3rd to 4th generation dub and it’s spent years being tossed around in my collective piles of junk. The audio signal isn’t in top shape, so I ran it through GarageBand and added a few compression/limiter filters.
I casually mentioned to my sister, that I was digitizing Hammock Dreams. She was happily surprised that I still had a copy and mentioned a friend of ours who had just visited Vallarta. The subject of Hammock Dreams came up and our friend said she’d do anything for a copy. The thought dawned on me to put it up on the internet. Sharing is caring. And so, I scrubbed the audio, exported some mp3 tracks, laced the meta data, created some quick album art and uploaded the zip file to Media Fire. As long as you don’t crank it, it sounds beautiful. It’s the perfect headphone music for listening to while working. And I hope you enjoy it as much as we have. If you dig it, drop a note in the comments.
Free download Hammock Dreams.
