by LORRAINE CARPENTER

If you're a music-lover with a sizeable stack of albums, a cassette player and a tendency towards nerdy and mildly obsessive behaviour, chances are you've made a mix tape. Not a dashed-off compilation of cool songs for your Walkman, car or workout, but a mix with meaning, a tape of carefully chosen and sequenced tracks with a theme, a therapy or a special someone in mind. I've done it - the crush tape, the bitter, jilted tape, the get-your-life-together tape - and, if Nick Hornby's High Fidelity wasn't proof enough, now I know I'm not the only one.

"It deals with music's power, but not just music, specifically the mix tape's power to act as this extra linguistic aid," says U.K. pop artist Jane Pollard, explaining her upcoming exhibition, Everybody Else Is Wrong. It's a project co-created with her longtime collaborator (and lover) Iain Forsyth. Together, they've produced an incredible array of multimedia installations, shows, films and posters since the early '90s, all somehow celebrating the music and media they love.

Among their exploits, they painstakingly recreated David Bowie's last Ziggy Stardust concert, as well as the Cramps' infamous performance at the Napa State mental institute. The mix tape, however, is a recurring theme in their work, a theme drawn from the dawn of their own romance.

"The very first Christmas we were together, we spent apart," recalls Pollard. "It was a 10-day stretch, and in that time Iain made me about seven or eight compilation tapes as a way of keeping up a dialogue between us."

Dancing tape to tape

Everybody Else Is Wrong is the premiere exhibition at Pavilion, a promising, pliable new art space on the Main. A series of events will unfold there, parallel to the exhibition's three-week tenure, but the show itself consists of a half-hour film, tightly spliced and diced interviews with a series of local mix-tape makers, examining the significance of their tracks and the personalities behind the compilations. In addition, the walls will be adorned with an ever-growing number of cassette inlay cards submitted by the public - yes, Iain and Jane want your tapes (go to www.nonewnextnowwave.com for details).

Similarly, I Love You to the Moon and Back (another of their mix tape works) consisted of two blown-up, poster-size inlay cards titled "A Tape for Iain" and "A Tape for Jane," each with their handwritten list of song titles and band names.

"They have their own internal poetry, and it's different for each reader. If they know some of the songs, they could almost put a soundtrack to the text, but they might be going on the titles alone and building an imaginary narrative from there," says Pollard. "The tapes themselves chart out a narrative, and there's always a vagueness about the message being sent, but also an intensity in the meaning of that message."

In a love tape, that message isn't necessarily literal and lyrical, though there's no shortage of songs about lust, sentimentality, heartbreak and spite to draw from. But that old cliché, "our song," has a tendency to come about purely by accident.

"You know when somebody's made a really honest tape, it'll always have a couple of truly embarrassing tracks that just happened to be playing when you first spoke to that person or when you first kissed. Every relationship has them."

Killer cassettes

The exhibition's title, Everybody Else Is Wrong, is a song by Epic Soundtracks that holds special significance for Iain and Jane, and a phrase that, they feel, sums up a compiler's mindset.

"You could make thousands of mix tapes from your record collection, but it's the idea that this is the selection, this is the sequence, and the most meaningful song - well, first track, first side."

Following their residency at Pavilion and return to the U.K., Iain and Jane will delve into Home Taping Is Killing Music, a media project based around a Web site that will allow people to compile, document and record mix tapes old and new, with the goal of archiving a dying art.

"There's a drive in this strain of our work to get out there before this medium, the mix tape, is utterly dead and forgotten, and it's on its way out. I'm sure they'll still be made with MP3s or on CDs, but there's something about the procedure and the obsession and the industry in making a mix tape that lends itself so well to the idea, that amplifies its meaning. There's just so much invested in them."

At Pavilion (1206 St-Laurent) until Saturday, Feb. 28. Vernissage with the Ten Commandments, DJ Alex Lemieux and Wolf Parade on Saturday, Feb. 7 at 5PM

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