Transit Tapes is what Lucy Kruger calls music for women who move furniture around. The title conveys the restlessness that the artist channeled into her third LP. Following the Sleeping Tapes, Transit Tapes is a meditation on movement, stillness, and the strange place in between. Transit is not the same as travel, it is a going from one place to another but with an eye on the process, on the moving through, on the passing by. It hones the journey rather than the destination. The album conjures an atmosphere of gazing out of the window of a moving train into landscapes that have been turned into blurs of color by the speed. Now the artist put together a mixtape of songs that pay “homage to these moving homes and the freedom, movement and soft melancholia they offer”.
The mixtape she exclusively complied for NOTHING BUT HOPE AND PASSION, like the record, lives in the paradoxical state of intimacy and alienation that we find with strangers on the train. All going in the same direction, but how often do we break the silence? As if there were some common agreements amongst strangers to remain exactly that. Yet, for the duration of the ride we inhabit a shared space. On her record, Lucy examines those spaces, the in-betweens and the almost, the melancholia and promises that transit holds. Not really a search, but an ache for something else we hope to find even if it is just by moving the couch from one place to another. If you like to know more about Lucy Kruger I also strongly recommend you to take a look of our extended feature story from last year.
Photo by Josh Rijneke
Here’s how Lucy describes the Transit mixtape in her own words:
Sometimes the moments in between two spaces – on a train, on a boat, in a car, on a plane – are the most peaceful for me. All futures are both possible and suspended. The hours of dreaming before the expectation of action. Resting, but in motion.
I am without context and therefore complete. I don’t know the passengers around me and they don’t know me. We are history-less, but for our physical baggage, and for a short time they become my community as we settle into the make-shift village of the moving container.
Alone, but very much together.
Still, but not stagnant.
These are the things I love about trains, cars, boats, planes.
An introverted extrovert’s dream.
A balm for the steady restless.
This mixtape pays some kind of homage to these moving homes and the freedom, movement and soft melancholia they offer.
It was put together by Liú Mottes and Lucy Kruger from Lucy Kruger & The Lost Boys and consists of snippets of guitar from Liú as well as the artists you’ll find below.
‘Transit’ – Tracklisting
01. Exploded View – Open Road
02. Adrianne Lenker – Steamboat
03. Colleen – Push the Boat onto the Sand
04. Vashti Bunyan – Train Song
05. Nick Drake – Come Into The Garden
06. Cat Power – Silver Stallion
07. The Breeders – Forced To Drive (Ioho Version)
08. Elizabeth Cotten – Freight Train
09. Cindy Lee – The Last Train’s Come and Gone
10. Mothers – PINK
11. Smog – Teenage Spaceship
12. Gillian Welch – I Dream a Highway