CASSETTE FROM MY EX

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Entertainment Weekly
The Must List: What’s Hot for the Week of July 14, 2008
Cassette From My Ex: Every mixtape is the soundtrack to a love story.

USA Today: Pop Candy
Few things fill me with greater sadness than thinking about today’s kids who will never make or receive a mixtape.With a tape, you were pretty much forced to listen from start to finish. Besides, there was something extra-special about the handmade, labeled product. The sweet, nostalgic website Cassette From My Ex pays tribute to mixtapes by featuring essays about tapes we’ve held on to over the years and audio of the actual recordings.

The Guardian (UK)
Before iPods and MP3s there was only one way to impress a new potential love mate - make him or her a C90 mixtape. The consequences of this were perilous: based on your choice of tracks they could conclude that you were a freak, a potential psychopath or merely incompatible due to your obsession with early-80s jazz-funk. Those who hope these errors of judgment are now filed away in some distant landfill will be disturbed to learn that this website serves as a venue where owners of said cassettes can reveal them to the world - and the world can listen in - plus their tales and the artwork. One cover features a cunning lift-up flap that reveals a photograph of the maker’s “beautiful tallywacker”. Classy.

Rolling Stone
Your Ex’s Mix, Exposed: At Cassette From My Ex, music fans share stories about the most embarrassing, aesthetically questionable and awkwardly romantic mixtapes they’ve gotten from former boyfriends and girlfriends. (Our favorite: the girl who dedicated a mix to her boyfriend’s lost toenail).  Scanned images of the handwritten sleeves and streaming audio from the tapes only add to the cringe factor.

New Hampshire Public Radio
“In a time when mixtapes have been replaced first by compact discs, and now by sites like Hype Machine and Muxtape, it’s nice to reminisce on a hand-crafted gift from a lost love. ”

Current TV
Found Magazine co-creator Jason Bitner has created a new website, Cassette From My Ex, which re-creates all of those mix tapes you may have received from an old love. Click here for handsome video.

Buzzfeed
Cassette From My Ex gathers stories behind those mix tapes that were given to you by old flames and lets you stream the tapes themselves. “This reminds me of the time someone put “I Touch Myself” by the Divinyls on a mixtape for me. TOTAL DEALBREAKER. ”

Gawker
“Things We Actually Like: Writers and other creative types share mixtapes from past relationships. Each entry has a story about the tape and the ex, as well as streaming audio of the tape.

Eye Weekly (Toronto)
Mixtapes are the ur-symbol of romantic longing for a certain subset of a certain generation. They’re also a passive-aggressive and (take note, young people) terrible way to try to get someone to go out with you, but there’s still something ineffably charming about them, even as their tweeness threatens to activate your gag reflex. FOUND Magazine co-…er, founder Jason Bitner’s Cassette From My Ex project features writers uploading real-life mixtapes they’ve received and telling the sometimes heartbreaking stories behind them. It’s uneven, but the concept has promise; the posts also include full-length MP3s of the tapes themselves, so you can be experiencing, say, “Back In Black” in an appropriately poignant and angst-wracked context.

The Stranger (Seattle)
I’m fascinated with Cassette From My Ex. It’s a blog where people—a lot of writers and musicians, yes, but then there are some actual human beings, too—describe the mix tapes that were given to them by then-lovers who are now-exes. And then you can actually listen to the tape, split up by side.”

Portland Mercury
Songs that are often cute, charming, meaningful, and/or weighted? Check.
Songs divided equally among two beautiful tape-hiss filled sides? Check.
Streaming audio of said songs? Check.
Funny and quasi-awkward recounts of past relationships? Check.

If all of the above sound good to you, please drag yourself over to Cassette From My Ex, a new blog devoted to, you guessed it, mix tapes from old lovers. It’s kind of like Rob Sheffield’s book, Love is a Mix Tape, but for those of us whosometimes forget that they still make, you know, books.

Sacramento Bee
In this age of burned CDs, podcasts and MP3s, the mixtape is a lost art form. People of a certain generation, certainly, fondly remember its significance as the seed of a possible relationship. Cassette From My Ex is a virtual resting place for those old tapes. Here, readers share playlists and stories that illustrate how a carefully edited tape (Run DMC, Mozart and Wire on the B-side? Daring!) could make or a break the deal.

Inkiostro
Perché limitarvi ad ascoltare cassettine farlocche confezionate con freschi mp3 da persone che conoscete con dentro canzoni che nella maggior parte dei casi vi eravate già scaricati (leggi muxtape) quando potete ascoltare le cassettine vere di persone che sono sì assoluti sconosciuti, ma ehi, almeno loro hanno una vita vera? E magari suonano in un gruppo? Oppure magari un loro amico conosce uno che è cugino di uno che suona in un gruppo?…

MSNBC tech blog
“Wow, what a great idea for a site! Cassette From My Ex - People share mix tapes made for them by former lovers. I have tons of old mix tapes, mostly from friends and some just made for myself from the radio. What a great resource to tap.”

Billboard blog
When Jaded Insider was a wee lad, he spent many an hour making mix tapes for girlfriends. (Pro-tip: You can’t go wrong with Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes”. Just ask Lloyd Dobler.) Now someone has come along and made a Web site dedicated to those adolescent scrawlings and random song associations. Cassettefrommyex.com collects the songs and the sometimes wistful, sometimes awkward, stories behind them.

Utne blog
Chances are, if you came of age in the ’90s and have an even glancing relationship to music, you made your fair share of mix tapes (and, later, mix CDs) for various friends and lovers. If those parties reciprocated, and if you are a pack rat, their lovingly curated compilations are probably still in storage somewhere in your home. Go dig one up. Maybe play it once or twice, if you’re feeling nostalgic (and if you still have a tape deck somewhere), and let the aforementioned wistfulness wash over you.

Then shake it off, you big sap, and submit it to Cassette From My Ex, where several contributors have already shared their musical mementos of past relationships, along with track listings, liner notes, accompanying essays, and even sound clips.

Cassette From My Ex is a natural outgrowth of our culture’s burgeoning need to document experience using various media—in this case, the lost art of charmingly cobbled-together, obsolete cassette tapes—and the proliferation of personal narrative… with prose contributions that range from irreverently funny to oddly touching.

Geek Sugar
While most sites merely use the lexicon or imagery of the mixtape, like “Muxtape” and “Mixwit”, there’s now a site that pulls at your heartstrings and discusses the real heart of mixed tapes: Cassette From My Ex. Cassette From My Ex’s blog posts are sentimental short stories of people recalling Summer romances or young loves and the mixtape that defined them. Being someone who has practiced the art of making a mixtape (and the art of dissecting one), I understand the loadedness of each song, the vulnerability bared with each track.  Didn’t think you’d get intimacy from a Website of the Day, did you?

Chicago Public Radio
Call us nostalgic, or sentimental, or maybe just old but there’s just something about the thoughtfully crafted mix tape. Jason Bitner, co-creator of Found Magazine, gets this. He helped created an online space to share both the songs, and the stories behind them, on that cassette that’s been hiding in your shoebox all these years. CassetteFromMyEx.com is the place to revisit your magnetic tape memories.

Uptown Magazine
Sure, there’s online music-sharing services such as Muxtape and iTunes to help you create custom playlists, but nothing can really replace the blood, sweat and tears that go into making a mixtape for your sweetheart…