VA - 2015 - Sherlock Holmes C60

Private Release – none

Track Listing:
-------------
A1 The Tough Shits - Early Grave
A2 DMX - Reading Raibow
A3 Dump - Raspberry Beret
A4 Ben & Bruno - 100 Grim Reapers
A5 Finn. - You Will Be Replaced...
A6 Electric President - Hum
A7 Fireflies - Flowers
A8 Sparks - Sherlock Holmes
A9 First Floor Power - God Damn Your Fingers
A10 Catlandgrey - Interlude #1
A11 Teddy And The Frat Girls - Clubnite
A12 Polvo - My Kimono
A13 Embrace - Building
B1 Wolfman Jack - Right Now
B2 The Yolks - Sit in Silence
B3 Dylan Nyoukis - Mohair Pants
B4 Directions In Music - (Untitled)4
B5 Dump - When U Were Mine
B6 Enon - Rubber Car
B7 Fire Engines - Hungry Beat
B8 East River Pipe - What Does TS Eliot Know About You
B9 Ego Summit - Illogical
B10 Sectret Boyfriend - Your Hearts Not In It
B11 Chain Of Strength - True Till Death
Made by my friend (Tony Morabith) & me before his death. RIP

Sherlock Holmes did not begin with a funeral bell. It began the way many nights between James Boyd and Tony Morabith began: somebody came over, drinks appeared, records and files started moving, tattoo equipment found its way into the room, and the evening loosened itself from whatever plans either man had carried through the door.

They had done versions of this for years. Sometimes the night extended toward a show, a party or separate dates with their girlfriends before the two friends somehow found each other again. Sometimes the destination was simply the room itself. Music, alcohol, conversation, skin, ink and whatever happened next were enough.

By 2015, Tony may have been visiting Oakland from somewhere else or staying near Mosswood Park with people connected to NOBUNNY and other musicians. The exact address has blurred, but the social geometry remains recognizable. Tony was nearby again. James had a tape deck, a room at the Purple House and a sequence beginning to form.

James chose most of the songs. He tended to hear mixtapes through movement before language. The next track needed to enter at the correct speed, pressure and emotional temperature. Genre could change completely as long as the body of the tape did not stumble. A garage song might lead into damaged pop, bedroom electronics, punk, collage or something barely identifiable because the pulse beneath them felt related.

Tony, already drinking, would occasionally take control and throw in something James would never have selected at that exact moment. Every few songs, the tape changed drivers.

That is the collaboration inside Sherlock Holmes. James maintains the road. Tony occasionally grabs the steering wheel and points toward a billboard nobody else noticed.

The Tough Shits’ “Early Grave” starts Side A with a compact, forward-moving piece of garage punk. James selected it partly because he wanted Tony to hear the title, but the night did not immediately become a dramatic intervention. The song entered the same atmosphere as the drinks, tattoo plans and ordinary pleasure of being together. Its warning sat inside the room without yet stopping the party.

Tony answered by placing DMX over the Reading Rainbow theme.

The transition is hilarious. It also establishes the rules of the tape. No feeling will be allowed to remain pure for long. Threat becomes children’s television. Seriousness is struck from the side by absurdity. Whatever emotional meaning James places on the table, Tony is likely to set something strange beside it and watch the two objects argue.

This was not avoidance so much as Tony’s method of participation. Humor could keep an evening open after a difficult subject entered it. A heavy statement did not have to be denied, but it might need its knees kicked out before everyone became trapped beneath it.

Dump’s “Raspberry Beret” follows with a homemade tenderness that seems to reduce Prince’s bright pop architecture to a smaller room. The famous melody remains recognizable, but its scale has changed. It sounds less like an event designed for mass recognition and more like someone remembering a song while leaning against bedroom furniture.

Then Ben & Bruno arrive with “100 Grim Reapers.”

The first four tracks already contain a miniature version of the entire tape: an early grave, a children’s show, romantic clothing and a crowd of death figures. Yet the sequence does not feel like a thesis. The tempos fit. The tonal pressure remains steady. Meaning grows afterward, in the spaces between songs, the way weeds appear between pavement slabs without asking whether anybody intended a garden.

Finn.’s “You Will Be Replaced…” is brief and uneasy. It enters almost like a typed notice slipped beneath the door. At the time, it could remain a good title attached to a song that belonged in the sequence. Years later, it develops another argument.

People can be replaced by function. A new neighbor can live down the street. Another musician can play bass. Someone else can occupy the empty place at a party or answer a phone at two in the morning.

A person’s particular way of loving cannot be replaced.

Tony had already demonstrated this years before Sherlock Holmes existed. James met him during a period when North Oakland became an accidental survival structure assembled from punk houses, musicians, disabled passengers, converted buses, free food, pirate radio and people who did not require a clean biography before letting someone sit down.

James had arrived in California in 2007 after leaving Chicago in a suicidal crisis. Aquarius Records became the location where his intended ending changed direction. Andee Connors saw him collapse, called John Benson and placed one life into the hands of another person who knew how to make room.

John had played bass in A Minor Forest, a band James had toured with several times between 1995 and its final tour in 1998. James had left that last tour halfway through, shortly before the group broke up. The band jokingly blamed him, but the joke touched something real. James had often felt like the younger person inside that traveling family, trying to hold together relationships whose fractures he could feel but could not repair.

When John came to get him in 2007, the reunion did not resemble a band story. John simply included James in daily life. For several weeks, before James found work, they spent nearly every day together. James talked through the collapse he had carried across the country. John drove paratransit for Easy Does It, transporting people with disabilities around the Bay Area, and James entered a world built from practical kindness rather than grand declarations.

John knew people everywhere. Musicians, paraplegic passengers, squatters, artists, neighborhood figures and people who had assembled entire lives outside normal institutions passed through his days. He also had an old AC Transit bus converted into a mobile music venue. Bands played inside it constantly. The city briefly seemed capable of producing a show anywhere a vehicle could stop.

The Purple House at 5716 Genoa Street belonged to this ecosystem. It had carried punk history through different generations, partly through people scattered from Barrington Hall after its closure. Free Radio Berkeley had once operated from a downstairs room. Food Not Bombs used the house as a Sunday cooking space for years. Vegetables, bread and pizza appeared on the porch. The free box absorbed neighborhood objects and redistributed them according to whoever needed what had been discarded.

Around the corner stood Hellarity at 537 57th Street, a more openly unstable squat with its own legendary history of court battles, changing owners, eviction payments, returns and people occupying the gaps between official versions of reality.

The Purple House and Hellarity were close enough for their backyards to nearly touch. One had become the somewhat older, more continuous sibling of the other. Both gave shelter to people for whom conventional shelter often arrived with too many conditions.

Tony and Alan Dunn drove from Cleveland to Oakland in a van and found Hellarity needing occupants. Tony entered James’s life through that tiny North Oakland radius.

During a cold Christmas season, when most people had left to visit families or partners, James and Tony remained. The Purple House had no central heating system. Blankets, alcohol and human company supplied what warmth existed. James cried about his daughters and the life he had left in Chicago. Tony stayed near him.

This was not dramatic heroism. It was the kind of care that becomes visible only later: remaining in a room, letting somebody repeat the same grief, knowing when to make a joke and when not to leave.

When James’s daughters came to live with him in 2010, Tony was delighted. He loved them, and his understanding of family did not require simple biology or ordinary household boundaries. The friendship extended through parenthood, neighborhood life, music, dating, drinking and all the small occasions that rarely survive into official history.

Electric President’s “Hum” arrives after “You Will Be Replaced…” and feels like the continuation of something beneath speech. A hum can be comfort, machinery, electricity or the involuntary sound made when words have become unnecessary. The tape’s surface becomes less crowded for a moment.

Fireflies’ “Flowers” follows. The song opens into a soft emotional field without abandoning the pace James has been maintaining. Flowers do not yet belong to graves. They can remain gifts, color, attraction, apology or simply the title of a song that sounds correct in this particular position.

Then Tony chooses Sparks’ “Sherlock Holmes.”

The tape receives its name after it has already begun becoming itself.

This matters because Sherlock Holmes was not a concept imposed upon the sequence. It was a discovery made inside the night. Tony’s contribution supplied the title, but the title then seemed to illuminate everything around it.

A detective examines relations. A mark becomes meaningful because it appears beside another mark. A speck of dirt, an odd phrase, a timing discrepancy or a piece of fabric acquires force through placement.

A mixtape works similarly. No song has to surrender its original meaning, but every song changes slightly according to its neighbors.

“Early Grave” beside DMX becomes less solemn and more human.

“Raspberry Beret” beside “100 Grim Reapers” becomes a bright object surrounded by death.

“You Will Be Replaced…” becomes stranger when followed by a hum and flowers.

Sherlock Holmes enters and suddenly the listener starts looking backward for clues.

The danger is that hindsight can invent a mystery where none existed. Tony’s later death does not mean the tape predicted it. The night had not begun as a vigil. Two friends were hanging out, drinking, planning tattoos and making music together because that was something they enjoyed.

The serious conversation came later.

By then, the title track had already entered the cassette. The party had already found its rhythm. The warning at the beginning had been heard, joked around and carried forward.

At some point, James told Tony what had become difficult to keep inside casual conversation. Tony’s drinking was too extreme. This was not their first discussion about detox or rehabilitation. The subject had appeared before because the consequences had already entered their friendship.

James had daughters to raise. By around 2013, he had needed to establish a limit on nights with Tony. There was a point when the drinking became too wild and the visit had to end. Morning required elementary-school routines, breakfast, getting dressed and delivering children into a world that did not care how late the adults had stayed awake.

The boundary was not punishment. It was an acknowledgment that love without limits could become another route toward damage.

On the Sherlock Holmes night, James told Tony that he believed the drinking would eventually kill him. He asked him to enter treatment. They cried.

This conversation did not transform the entire tape into a memorial while it was being made. It became one element inside a larger night. Drinking continued. Songs continued. The friends remained themselves rather than turning instantly into symbols.

That is where the earlier versions of the write-up tilted too far. Death eventually entered the story, but Tony was not death walking around in a musician’s body. He was a friend with jokes, taste, affection, recklessness and the ability to throw DMX onto a mixtape at exactly the moment James had created too much emotional gravity.

First Floor Power’s “God Damn Your Fingers” comes after Sparks and pulls the tape from deduction back toward touch. Fingers operate tattoo machines, turn records, press buttons, hold drinks and point during arguments. They are the instruments through which private intention becomes physical evidence.

Catlandgrey’s interlude offers a brief chamber of altered atmosphere, an excerpt from something called A Bald Cell’s Diary. The title introduces confinement, writing and bodily oddness without requiring the listener to understand the source. It works as a corridor between songs.

Teddy and the Frat Girls’ “Clubnite” kicks the door open with crude social energy. Polvo’s “My Kimono” follows through guitar shapes that seem to turn corners inside themselves. Embrace’s “Building” closes the first side with a slower emotional weight.

“Building” does not need to become an obvious symbol, yet the title inevitably gathers the houses behind the tape.

The Purple House was built in 1908, but the structure James knew was continually rebuilt through use. A room could be a bedroom, rehearsal area, pirate-radio station, temporary refuge or place where two friends made a mixtape while drinking and preparing to tattoo each other.

Hellarity was also a building whose identity came from occupation more than ownership. Legal paperwork declared one version of the property while the people inside produced another.

James’s life had been redirected by buildings that behaved like communities. Aquarius Records had been one. John Benson’s converted bus had been another, a moving room for music. The Purple House gave James time to imagine surviving. Hellarity delivered Tony into the neighborhood.

Side A ends without resolving any of this. The tape flips.

Depending upon the version, the sequence around the side break can vary slightly, another reminder that this object had more than one physical life. One handwritten list includes Jacuzzi Boys before Wolfman Jack’s “Right Now,” while another later transfer begins the reverse directly with Wolfman Jack. The mixtape was not guarded like scripture. Copies could mutate.

“Right Now” turns radio language into command. The phrase could advertise a product, introduce a record or insist upon an action that cannot be delayed. Inside the later history of the tape, it carries the urgency of treatment, but in the original room it also functions as propulsion. Side B is here. Start again.

The Yolks’ “Sit in Silence” immediately complicates that urgency. Right now, sit in silence.

This is one of the tape’s best transitions because the titles oppose each other while the music preserves continuity. Urgency meets stillness without the sequence feeling broken.

Dylan Nyoukis’ “Mohair Pants” follows with a title too tactile and absurd to support any heavy interpretation for long. It reminds the listener that James and Tony were not producing an art-therapy assignment. Their taste allowed serious beauty, punk comedy, avant-garde sound and pure nonsense to share the same cassette.

Directions in Music supplies an untitled piece, opening another wordless passage before Dump returns with “When U Were Mine.”

The earlier Dump track had transformed “Raspberry Beret,” a song built around a remembered encounter and a vivid article of clothing. The second Prince cover enters through loss. The grammatical tense looks backward.

At the time, this was still a song chosen for its mood, familiarity and place in the sequence. After Tony died, the title acquired a different room. This is not prophecy. It is one of the ways music continues changing after everyone involved has stopped touching it.

A record does not know which future memory will eventually claim it.

Enon’s “Rubber Car” pulls the tape out of reflection through unstable motion. Fire Engines’ “Hungry Beat” gives rhythm appetite. The sequence starts moving outward again.

East River Pipe asks, “What Does T.S. Eliot Know About You?”

The title challenges every attempt to turn Tony into a clean literary subject.

What does any writer know about the way he entered a room, the exact tone of a joke, the timing of his DMX choice or the way he cared for James during that first cold Christmas? What can an obituary explain about years of friendship compressed into ordinary visits?

Public history prefers stable nouns: musician, alcoholic, friend, neighbor.

Private memory is made from verbs: stayed, listened, drank, interrupted, laughed, loved, left, returned.

Ego Summit’s “Illogical” follows and quietly defeats the detective. Sherlock Holmes can examine evidence, but logic cannot always explain the human need beneath self-destructive behavior. Addiction may appear irrational while still performing a function inside the person. It can soften panic, mute memory, supply social ease or create a temporary feeling of control.

Recognizing the function does not remove the danger. It explains why information alone may fail.

James and Tony knew the facts. The conversation was not the first time the consequences had been named. Knowledge existed in the room alongside the drinks.

Secret Boyfriend’s “Your Heart’s Not in It” arrives near the end. The title can suggest romantic withdrawal, emotional exhaustion or a person continuing an action after the internal reason has disappeared. The song does not have to testify about Tony. It belongs in the sequence first as sound. Yet the words continue generating relations around it.

Chain of Strength closes with “True Till Death.”

The phrase lands with hardcore certainty. Loyalty remains pure until the body stops. The cassette now appears to have constructed a bridge from “Early Grave” to “True Till Death,” but the bridge formed through feeling, pacing and shared choice rather than a planned argument.

This is where the tape becomes more interesting than a consciously written concept album. The unconscious relationships are not hidden messages from another world. They are evidence that emotional knowledge can influence selection before the conscious mind has translated it into language.

James knew Tony’s drinking frightened him.

James also wanted to hang out, make a tape, do tattoos and enjoy his friend.

Both realities entered the sequence.

The original cassette carries that night more intimately than the later editions. It is a Fuji ZII 60, a high-position tape with a black shell and pale hubs. The factory language, “Master quality high position tape,” remains visible beneath large white painted characters.

One side says SHERLOCK.

The other says HOLMES.

The title is physically incomplete until the cassette is turned over.

The lettering resembles a private script rather than an ordinary label. The forms bend and flare, as though the alphabet has been forced through a personal filter. They sit across the existing Fuji design instead of replacing it.

The original cover is a field of hundreds of tiny white shapes scattered across black. They resemble broken letters, short paths, electrical fragments or the tracks of microscopic creatures. The eye searches for a repeated system but cannot settle upon one.

The track list is handwritten on the reverse, surrounded by another dense field of marks. Oakland Mixtape Club appears at the bottom. This was before James fully understood Private Release as the name for the wider artistic practice these objects were becoming.

The original is unmistakably handmade. Its strength comes partly from that immediacy. It belongs to one night, one room and the hands that produced it.

Later copies changed the problem.

James wanted to give the mixtape to other people, including Pookie from Pookie and the Poodles, a friendship that had come through Tony. Recreating the entire handwritten cover each time would have turned circulation into endless repetition of labor. A reproducible J-card allowed the object to travel without becoming anonymous.

One later edition uses a black-and-white image of a silent-era woman holding a dark cat. SHERLOCK is painted beneath her. The reverse carries the handwritten track list and the line:

Tony’s last mixtape to me...

That sentence belongs to a later time. It could not have appeared on the original tape because Tony was still alive when the first object was made.

The cassette inside is a transparent Memorex 120 with bright yellow hubs and colored geometric shapes. Red painted lettering divides SHERLOCK and HOLMES between the sides. The visual language is more controlled and reproducible, yet still visibly handled.

Another J-card uses a collage of Taylor Swift, a woolly mammoth, movie-guide text, plaid fabric and commercial catalog material. That version belongs more clearly to the developing Private Release method: found print reorganized until ordinary images enter a new private system.

The difference between the original and the later copies is not a hierarchy where one is authentic and the rest are inferior. They represent two stages of understanding.

The first object records an event.

The later objects allow the event to circulate.

James began realizing that “homemade” did not have to mean visually apologetic or accidental. Reproduction could become part of the artwork. A cover could be made once, copied and distributed without pretending to be a factory release. The personal method could remain visible even when several objects shared the same design.

That shift helped Private Release become itself.

The photograph of Tony at Divine’s grave belongs beside these objects because it captures his particular collision of irreverence and affection. Divine, central to John Waters’s films, had already transformed insult, excess and rejection into an underground form of power. Tony crouches barefoot beside the grave marker and touches it with his tongue.

After Tony’s death, the image inevitably attracts foreshadowing. A living person is physically joking with a monument to someone dead. But the photograph should be allowed to remain funny before it becomes tragic.

Tony is not studying his future.

He is clowning around at Divine’s grave.

His bare foot is in the grass. His tongue touches stone. Somebody with him recognizes the gesture as worth photographing.

The same protection belongs to Sherlock Holmes. Hindsight cannot be permitted to turn every title into an obituary. Tony was alive while making it. He was selecting music, drinking, hanging out and interrupting James’s smoother emotional movement with choices that kept the tape unpredictable.

The later conversation about treatment became part of the night, but it was not the whole night.

James and Tony had a long-established ritual of meeting, splitting apart into other social lives and finding each other again. They might attend shows, parties or dates separately, then regroup. Friendship became a recurring point of return.

Sherlock Holmes is one return preserved on tape.

The sequence moves according to James’s sense of tempo and mood, but Tony’s periodic selections puncture the continuity. DMX is the clearest interruption. Sparks is the most consequential because it names the object.

This uneven structure feels more truthful than a perfectly shared alternating playlist. Collaboration does not require equal arithmetic. One person may provide most of the road while another changes the meaning of the journey through several well-placed turns.

The tape’s later grief comes from the fact that those turns can no longer be added.

Tony’s selections stop at twenty-five tracks.

The blank future remains outside the cassette.

Yet the object does not preserve only loss. It preserves the pattern by which two friends occupied a room together. James chooses through feeling. Tony occasionally inserts a crooked answer. The songs continue.

“Early Grave” is serious, but DMX follows.

“100 Grim Reapers” appears, but so do a raspberry beret and flowers.

“You Will Be Replaced…” is answered by a friendship that proves the title wrong.

“Building” closes one side inside a history of houses that caught people falling from ordinary life.

“Right Now” meets “Sit in Silence.”

Sherlock Holmes meets “Illogical.”

The tape ends “True Till Death,” but the living night does not behave like a slogan.

James and Tony drink, plan tattoos, argue, laugh and eventually cry. The emotional register changes several times because actual friendship cannot remain inside one genre.

That is the write-up the cassette needs. Not a biography stapled to a track list and not a detective story in which every song predicts the ending. Sherlock Holmes is a night whose later history keeps shining backward through it, altering details without erasing their first meanings.

The first tape belongs to Tony and James in the room.

The later copies belong to everyone the friendship reached.

Side A says SHERLOCK.

Side B says HOLMES.

The answer is not hidden in the lyrics.

It is in the way one song hands the night to another.

Mania - 2010 - Insidious And Alone C30

BUY or D.I.Y

Insidious and Alone presents isolation not as an empty room but as something that grows inside contact. The body on the cover is not hidden. It is photographed close enough for skin, piercings, tattoos and small imperfections to become the entire landscape. Yet the word curved across the chest is LONESOME. Visibility has not produced intimacy. The body can be displayed, decorated, touched by ink and still remain sealed inside itself.

The front photograph is cropped so tightly that identity disappears. There is no complete face, no surrounding room and no ordinary social context. A mouth barely enters the upper edge while the torso carries most of the information. A small devil figure, webbing, curved lettering and metal jewelry turn the skin into a private graphic system. The person has become both the bearer of the message and the surface upon which it is written.

LONESOME does not appear as a printed title added afterward. It has entered the body. The word follows the curve beneath the throat, permanent enough to outlast whatever mood first produced it. Loneliness has been converted into decoration, warning, autobiography and emblem. The tattoo does not tell the viewer whether the person wants solitude, fears it or has simply accepted it as part of their design.

The photograph continues across the unfolded insert, but its pieces are separated and rearranged. The main panel carries the chest and LONESOME tattoo. The right panel reveals another portion of the same body, marked with a spider, script, the word HARD and a date. The figure is never restored into a complete portrait. The more the insert opens, the more information appears, yet the person remains fragmented.

That contradiction gives the artwork much of its force. Usually an object becomes easier to understand as it is unfolded. Here the opening creates additional uncertainty. The body has a history written across it, but the photographs provide no key. HARD might describe endurance, self-protection, desire, attitude or the surface identity built to defend whatever remains tender beneath it. LONESOME and HARD occupy the same skin without canceling each other. Hardness may be the consequence of loneliness. It may also be the costume worn to survive it.

The narrow left panel carries the PRIVATE RELEASE strip over another sliver of the photograph. The label is physically attached rather than seamlessly integrated. Its torn or cut edges remain visible, allowing the act of construction to stay inside the finished cassette. Nothing pretends to have arrived from a factory as one immaculate design. Image, paper, type and tape have been brought together because their friction creates another meaning.

Then the J-card opens and the human body disappears.

Inside is a single large orchid, pale white with a yellow and coral center, emerging against softened green and blue. Part of the lower image has been torn away, leaving a white paper edge that follows the irregular shape of the flower. The orchid is not presented as a tidy rectangle contained by its original photograph. It appears to be rising through damaged paper.

The transformation from tattooed torso to orchid is immediate but not simple. Both are bodies carrying elaborate surfaces. The tattooed person has been marked intentionally through ink and metal. The flower produces its markings biologically, opening into a form that can appear ornamental, intimate and almost impossibly engineered. One surface has been authored through personal intervention. The other has grown according to a design no individual person can claim.

The orchid also complicates the title. Insidious suggests something advancing gradually, entering unnoticed, spreading beneath ordinary awareness. A flower grows this way. Roots work below the visible surface. A bud forms slowly, then opens as though the event happened all at once. Loneliness can behave similarly. It accumulates quietly until the person realizes it has become part of the architecture.

Alone is the visible condition. Insidious is the process that led there.

Mania’s recording appeared through Freak Animal Records in 2010 as a C30 containing six untitled pieces. Four occupy the first side and two occupy the second, creating an uneven architecture within an already compact format. The first half advances through shorter, more distinct concentrations. The reverse gives most of its space to one piece lasting nearly ten minutes before closing with a final three-minute section. The tape gradually moves from a sequence of separate enclosures into a larger sustained condition.

The absence of titles prevents the pieces from becoming illustrations. No phrase tells the listener which image, action or emotional condition should be assigned to a particular stretch of sound. They remain numbered only by position: first, second, third, fourth, then the two movements on the reverse. The listener is given structure without explanation.

That refusal fits Keith Brewer’s work as Mania. The project often creates environments where industrial noise, power electronics and damaged human presence remain close enough to contaminate one another. Electronics are not simply used to produce aggression. They create pressure around the voice, the room and whatever emotional material has entered the recording. Machinery does not replace the person. It makes personhood sound increasingly difficult to maintain.

Insidious and Alone is relatively focused, with the tracks operating as concentrated blocks rather than one continuous wall. Each section establishes its own pressure, works upon it and withdraws before familiarity can turn the experience into background. The shorter pieces on the first side behave like separate examinations of related material. Texture accumulates, breaks apart and reforms under another set of conditions.

The second side changes the proportions. Its long opening piece allows repetition and duration to become more invasive. A sound encountered briefly can remain an event. A sound sustained long enough begins altering the listener’s sense of the room. Small changes acquire disproportionate importance. What first seemed fixed develops movement inside it, while what seemed chaotic begins revealing a grim internal order.

The final piece does not function as a comforting exit. It feels more like the residue remaining after the larger structure has finished applying pressure. The tape ends because its magnetic territory has been exhausted, not because loneliness has been resolved.

The title is especially effective because “insidious” and “alone” describe different kinds of threat. One moves secretly. The other appears static. Together they suggest isolation arriving through gradual internal occupation. Nothing dramatic is required. Relationships narrow, trust erodes, habits become rooms, and eventually solitude feels less like a circumstance than a substance circulating through the body.

This is where the cover photograph becomes more than provocative imagery. The tattoos do not merely decorate the package with underground toughness. They show language made bodily. LONESOME has been carried beneath clothing and through everyday life. It cannot be removed when the photograph ends. The word is no longer describing the person from outside. It belongs to the person’s physical presence.

HARD answers it from another section of skin. The two words form a compact psychological circuit:

Lonesome becomes hard.

Hard becomes lonesome.

Neither condition knows which came first.

The small devil, spiderweb and other tattoo fragments add further pressure without assembling into a readable biography. They belong to familiar vocabularies of danger, entrapment, rebellion and self-invention, but their exact personal meanings remain inaccessible. The cassette respects that inaccessibility. It uses the image without pretending the photographed person can be completely known through it.

The clear plastic case places another transparent layer over the fragmented body. Light reflects from the clamshell while the photograph remains visible underneath. The person is on display but also behind a barrier. The case protects the image by making direct contact impossible. That physical separation is ordinary cassette construction, yet beside the word LONESOME it becomes difficult not to feel.

Inside sits a brilliant orange-red cassette with a pale green label. The colors have almost nothing in common with the severe darkness normally expected from industrial and power-electronics packaging. The shell is bright, synthetic and impossible to ignore. It could belong to a toy, emergency equipment or some cheerful educational object whose purpose has been reassigned.

Typed onto the green label are only the essential coordinates:

MANIA

Insidious And Alone

The plain typewriter lettering steadies the collision of orange and green. No illustration is needed on the shell. The title sits above the window while the white reels and dark magnetic tape remain visible through the center. The cassette looks both homemade and exact, playful in color but emotionally sealed.

That color combination changes the recording’s physical character. A black shell might have confirmed the sound’s darkness too easily. The orange refuses agreement. It gives the noise a body that appears almost alive, warm and chemically radiant. The pale green label introduces another organic suggestion, quietly corresponding with the orchid hidden inside the J-card.

Skin outside.

Flower inside.

Orange machine between them.

The materials form a progression from human surface to biological growth to manufactured carrier. All three contain patterns. Tattoos pattern the body. Petals pattern the flower. reels, screws, ridges and windows pattern the cassette. Insidious and Alone moves among these forms without declaring one natural and another artificial. Each is a structure through which identity becomes visible.

The orchid is particularly important because it prevents the artwork from becoming trapped inside toughness. Open the cassette and a different emotional intelligence appears. The flower is not weak, despite its delicacy. It has survived long enough to bloom. Its softness is highly organized. Its apparent vulnerability conceals a design capable of reproduction, adaptation and persistence.

The torn white paper beneath it makes the bloom feel newly exposed, as though the image has been uncovered rather than pasted into place. The rip repeats the fragmented construction of the exterior, but here tearing does not divide the body. It releases the flower from the rectangular page.

That movement offers no cheap promise of healing. The music does not turn from harshness toward serenity merely because an orchid waits inside the package. Beauty and isolation remain simultaneous. A person can bloom while suffering. A flower can be admired while completely alone in the frame. The interior does not solve the exterior. It gives the exterior another nervous system.

Insidious and Alone becomes strongest where these contradictions remain unresolved. The photographed body is exposed but anonymous. LONESOME is public but private in meaning. HARD is visible but unexplained. The orchid is delicate but structurally fierce. The cassette is brightly colored while carrying intensely abrasive sound.

Nothing matches in the decorative sense. Everything matches in pressure.

The Private Release edition gives the original recording a physical interpretation without reducing it to a literal illustration. Loneliness is not represented by an empty chair or a solitary figure standing beneath a streetlight. It appears through closeness without access: skin that can be seen but not known, words that can be read but not fully understood, a flower opening without witnesses, a voice or human trace caught within machinery.

The title names the condition.

The cover carries it.

The music slowly enters the room.

By the time the orange cassette stops turning, being alone no longer feels like the absence of something. It feels like something that has been present the entire time, quietly growing beneath the surface.

Edwige ‎- 2007 - Play The Game Or Leave The Bed C10

Private Release – none

Play the Game or Leave the Bed lasts only a few minutes per side, but its physical edition creates a larger room around those minutes. The original 2007 seven-inch by Edwige already carried the concentrated violence of a short-form noise release: two untitled pieces, one on each side, no lyrical foothold, no gradual invitation. This Private Release cassette does not simply transfer that sound onto magnetic tape. It gives the recording another visual body, assembled from torn fashion imagery, flowers, clear plastic and a title typed plainly enough to resemble evidence.

Edwige brought together three artists already associated with distinct strains of severe noise: Keith Brewer of Mania, Sam McKinlay of The Rita and Dan Johansson of Sewer Election. The combination does not sound like three projects taking turns. Their methods are compressed until individual authorship becomes difficult to isolate. Harsh textures scrape across one another, low frequencies create weight beneath sharper movement, and the sound continually changes pressure without settling into rhythm or narrative.

The name Edwige points toward Edwige Fenech, whose presence in European erotic cinema, thrillers, comedies and giallo films gave her image a complicated mixture of glamour, danger, humor and display. The title Play the Game or Leave the Bed was borrowed from an English title associated with a 1969 adaptation of Madame Bovary in which Fenech appeared. Even before the record begins, the language establishes a world of desire governed by terms. Participate, accept the arrangement or withdraw.

The sentence sounds playful until its structure becomes clear. It is not a question. It offers two permitted actions and leaves no comfortable middle position. The bed is not presented as rest or tenderness. It becomes a field of rules, expectation, fantasy and power.

The cassette artwork approaches those ideas without reproducing a film still or placing Fenech’s face on the cover. Instead, the exterior begins with a tightly cropped fashion photograph. Skin, white ribbed fabric and black material decorated with green reflective shapes occupy most of the frame. The original context has been removed. There is no complete person, no pose to interpret and no advertisement left intact. The body has become planes of color and texture.

A torn white channel runs vertically through the central image. The tear is not drawn or simulated. Paper fibers remain visible along the edge, making the interruption physically present. The photograph has been divided, and the divided portions no longer line up according to the original page. One section has been displaced, leaving a gap that the eye instinctively tries to repair.

The exterior therefore performs a small act of withholding. Enough of the image remains to suggest intimacy, clothing and proximity, but not enough remains to stabilize the scene. What might once have been a straightforward commercial photograph has become an arrangement of skin, textile, darkness and reflected green ornament. The body is present without being offered as a complete spectacle.

On the right panel, the black fabric and green jeweled pattern become more prominent. A pale limb crosses the lower portion of the image, while the printed page number 61 survives near the edge. That tiny number is valuable because it reveals the picture’s former life. This was not invented as underground-noise artwork. It was removed from a numbered publication, torn from an ordinary sequence and placed into another sequence entirely.

The source material may once have instructed the viewer what to desire, purchase or imitate. Private Release removes the product information and leaves the charge. Commercial imagery is made strange not by exaggeration, but by subtraction.

The PRIVATE RELEASE strip occupies the narrow left panel. It appears on a separate fragment laid over another portion of the photograph, with a rough edge still visible beneath the lettering. The label does not behave like a polished logo stamped onto a finished design. It looks attached, almost provisional, as though the object named itself during assembly.

That looseness is important. The cassette is not attempting to impersonate an official Edwige edition. It openly carries the evidence of another person’s decisions: printing, cutting, tearing, shifting and folding. The visual identity is not inherited whole from the seven-inch. It is rebuilt through contact with unrelated printed matter.

Then the insert opens, and the entire atmosphere changes.

Inside is a dense field of yellow flowers. Daffodils dominate the upper section, crowded together in bright repetition, while the lower strip introduces green leaves, red blossoms, purple hyacinths and smaller white flowers. The image is abundant, almost cheerful, and dramatically more expansive than the compressed exterior.

Outside, the body is fragmented.

Inside, the flowers multiply.

The contrast does not require a single symbolic explanation. Flowers can represent beauty, reproduction, decay, offering, domestic life, spring, funeral ritual or the simple excess of living things. Their meaning changes according to what surrounds them. Placed inside a cassette named after an erotic actor and carrying a title that turns intimacy into an ultimatum, the flowers become difficult to keep innocent.

At the same time, the noise prevents them from becoming decorative. Their brightness does not soften the recording. It creates another pressure against it. The yellow blooms are open, repetitive and exposed, while the sound remains abrasive, enclosed and resistant. The cassette holds both conditions without asking one to explain the other.

This is where the Private Release edition becomes more than an alternate cover. The exterior and interior behave as two different states of attention. The closed cassette presents fragments, interruption and physical nearness. Opening it produces color, density and growth. The listener has to pass through the first image to reach the second.

The clear cassette shell continues this structure. Nothing about the mechanism is hidden. Black reels sit inside transparent plastic, with the magnetic tape visibly wound around them. The title is typed directly onto a simple label:

EDWIGE 2007

Play The Game Or

Leave The Bed

The typography is plain, almost administrative. It does not compete with the title’s suggestiveness. This restraint makes the phrase more severe. The words resemble a rule entered into a file rather than a theatrical slogan.

Because the shell is clear, the label can be read in reverse from the opposite side. The title remains present but becomes mirrored, less immediately usable. The second face of the cassette contains the same information transformed by the material holding it. One side states the command. The other allows the command to appear backward through the body of the tape.

The black reels are especially striking inside the transparent shell. They resemble two dark apertures, compact circles slowly exchanging the recording between them. A C10 does not carry enough tape to create the long gradual movement of a C60 or C90. The transfer happens quickly. The object seems almost all mechanism and event.

That brevity matches the original seven-inch. Play the Game or Leave the Bed does not establish a world and invite the listener to live comfortably inside it. Each side applies pressure for several minutes, ends and demands another physical decision. On vinyl, the needle must be lifted and the record turned. On cassette, the shell must be flipped or reversed by the deck. The title becomes strangely connected to playback: continue the game or leave the machine.

Side A enters as a dense abrasive field. The sound gathers into layers that rub, swell and buckle against one another. Lower frequencies provide a shifting mass while sharper material continually roughens the surface. The piece has motion but little that resembles conventional rhythm. Pressure thickens in one area, tears open elsewhere and briefly loosens before another layer closes the space.

The absence of a track title matters. There is no phrase directing the imagination toward a specific event or image. The listener receives only the project name, the release title and the sound. Meaning remains mobile.

Side B feels shorter, sharper and more concentrated. Its textures seem to cut across the field with less accumulated weight, although no stable instrument or source remains easy to identify. The sound does not describe violence through realistic effects. It creates the conditions surrounding force: proximity, repetition, restricted space and the inability to remain a neutral observer.

The exterior fashion image acquires another meaning after hearing this. The body in advertising is normally arranged to be consumed without resistance. It is lit, cropped and presented according to a commercial purpose. Edwige reverses that relationship. The listener is no longer given a passive image to examine. The sound pushes back.

The gaze is returned as pressure.

The flowers inside produce a different reversal. Floral imagery is often used to make difficult material appear elegant or tasteful. Here the flowers are too abundant and too plainly reproduced to function as sophisticated camouflage. They feel almost ecstatic, a wall of biological color hidden inside an object producing mechanical abrasion.

That contradiction suits the larger Edwige construction. Erotic cinema, Madame Bovary, glamour, noise, flowers, skin, commercial print and a clear cassette shell are not naturally unified materials. Their coherence has to be made through proximity. The release does not discover a secret fact that all these things already shared. It creates a situation in which their differences begin generating energy.

The torn paper is central to that energy. A cleanly cropped photograph would have presented a controlled selection. Tearing introduces force and chance. The edge records where the page resisted. It turns editing into a visible event.

The white vertical rupture on the front also resembles a barrier, a beam of light, a damaged film frame or an opening through which nothing can quite be seen. It separates two portions of the same printed body while confirming that they once belonged together. The cassette does something related with its two untitled sides. A division exists, but the material remains continuous.

The title’s command can therefore be read beyond sexuality. Every artwork establishes conditions for attention. Some invite casual entry. Others demand participation or refusal. Play the Game or Leave the Bed makes that demand explicit. The listener can accept the noise on its own terms or stop the machine. What it does not offer is a polite distance from which the experience can be consumed without consequence.

The Private Release edition strengthens that demand through handling. The case must be opened. The floral interior is discovered. The transparent cassette is removed. The typed title passes into the hand. The reels become visible before the sound begins. Listening is preceded by a sequence of small physical encounters.

None of these gestures is expensive or technically elaborate. Their force comes from arrangement. A page from one publication, a flower image from another source, torn edges, a typed label and a clear C10 become enough to build a complete visual environment around eight minutes of noise.

The result is not an imitation of the original seven-inch and not simply a convenient cassette copy. It is a second encounter with the recording, shaped by materials that allow desire, beauty, damage and domestic printed matter to occupy the same small case.

Outside, the image is divided.

Inside, the flowers open.

The tape turns between two black circles.

The game lasts only a few minutes, but the bed has become an entire room.

VA - 2014 - Tear Cry I Blue C90

Private Release – none

A finger had to remain near the record while “I Count the Tears” was being captured. Without slight pressure, the needle wanted to stay inside one damaged groove and repeat the same moment forever. The song was already about counting tears, and the record had developed its own method: one tear, one revolution, one tear again. The hand did not repair the record or remove the damage. It merely persuaded the song to continue.

That small act contains much of Tear Cry I Blue. This is not a collection of clean masters arranged beneath a clever theme. It is a mixtape made from records that have lived. Dust has entered the grooves. Surfaces have been worn, scratched, neglected and rescued. Songs arrive with static clinging to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes so heavily that the music must push through it like a distant station crossing bad weather. The damage is not outside the listening experience. It is one of the voices.

B.J. Thomas’s “I’ve Been Down This Road Before” is surrounded by dirty electrical snowfall. The static does not merely announce an old record. It changes the road. The song now seems to come from farther away than the singer intended, already carrying the abrasion of having traveled that route too many times. His voice remains warm and recognizable beneath the damage, but the surface noise makes every return feel physical. The road is not only remembered. It has grit under it.

The Drifters’ “I Count the Tears” begins inside a thick crust of surface dirt. Before the arrangement can fully appear, the record itself speaks. Crackle gathers around the opening like a crowd at the doorway. Then the song starts skipping, attempting to trap its sorrow inside a tiny circular prison. The pressure of a finger becomes part of the transfer, an invisible performance added decades after the original musicians finished theirs.

There is something almost too perfect about a damaged copy of “I Count the Tears” refusing to advance. Counting requires sequence, but the skip destroys sequence. One tear cannot become two because the groove keeps returning to one. The hand supplies time. The record resumes.

Little Milton’s “Can’t Hold Back the Tears” enters beneath so much static that the beginning is nearly buried. The title says the tears cannot be contained, while the record sounds as though the song itself can barely escape its surface. His voice rises out of the dirt rather than floating above it. The static does not make the emotion less clear. It makes the effort of reaching the listener audible.

That is one of the pleasures of dirty vinyl transferred to MP3. Digital storage is commonly used to remove age from music, to present an ideal signal separated from the damaged object that carried it. These files do the opposite. They allow the record to remain attached. Crackle, mistracking, sudden distortion and repeated grooves are carried into the digital copy as events. The MP3 does not preserve only the song. It preserves this particular encounter with the song.

Tear Cry I Blue was organized around four words, but the organizing principle is stranger than the title first suggests. Tear, cry and blue operate through direct meaning. They name an object, an action and an emotional color. The third element is not simply the pronoun “I.” It is the long I sound moving through words: high, why, lie, die, goodbye, cry, night, right, time, softly sliding through one title or lyric after another.

The mixtape is partly semantic and partly phonetic. Meaning selects some records. Sound selects others. A word does not need to describe sadness directly if its vowel belongs to the emotional language being constructed. The long I becomes a thread heard in the mouth before it is understood by the mind.

That changes the opening completely. Leon Patillo’s “High on You” is not an optimistic exception placed before the sadness begins. High contains the I sound immediately. It introduces the vowel that will keep returning through lonely roads, convincing lies, rights to cry, goodbyes and death. The tape starts elevated, but the sound inside “high” is already waiting to descend into “why.”

B.J. Thomas supplies the road and the I. His record sounds scarred, but the performance continues carrying a peculiar tenderness through the noise. “I’ve Been Down This Road Before” is less a statement of wisdom than an admission of recurrence. Knowledge has not prevented repetition. Recognizing the road has not kept anyone from entering it again.

That feeling belongs to the period surrounding the tape. A relationship of roughly five years had apparently ended, or was ending, when the sequence was made. The breakup does not need to be announced track by track. It exists beneath the selection process, changing which records felt necessary. Songs were not recruited to illustrate a factual account of what happened. They were chosen because their emotional pressure could help a person remain inside sadness without being destroyed by it.

The tape does not explain the breakup. It provides company for the part afterward.

This is why feeling governs the sequence more strongly than literal wordplay. A title might satisfy the theme, but the record still had to belong emotionally beside its neighbors. Carole King’s “It’s Too Late” does not merely contribute another useful I sound. Her performance changes the temperature of the entire tape. The song contains the exhausted calm that can follow a relationship once argument has burned through all available fuel. Nothing dramatic remains to be proved. Something loved has reached a condition where love alone cannot restore it.

The records around it were selected through this kind of recognition. One song leans toward another because their feelings understand each other, even when their genres, decades and production styles do not. Country sadness can pass into doo-wop, gospel, soul, teen pop, jazz or novelty music because the tape listens beneath category.

The sequence does not ask whether Mickey Gilley and Marvin the Paranoid Android belong in the same respectable musical history. It asks whether their loneliness can occupy the same room.

“Marvin I Love You” is comic on the surface, but its sadness is exact. An artificial being receives love and cannot escape the architecture of depression built into his personality. The declaration does not rescue him. Love arrives, and misery remains. Within a tape created after the end of a long relationship, that failed rescue loses much of its novelty. Affection can be real without being sufficient.

The songs then accumulate tears until tears become almost a physical recording medium of their own. “Tears of the Lonely.” “I Count the Tears.” “Can’t Hold Back the Tears.” Two different “How Many Teardrops.” “Before the Next Teardrop Falls.” The language circles the same substance, but the records refuse sameness. Each singer places a different weight inside the word.

Dolly Parton and Lou Christie both ask how many teardrops, yet their questions emerge from different emotional bodies. The repetition is not duplication. It is comparison by feeling. One title becomes two rooms. The mixtape allows the listener to walk between them.

Then crying becomes an argument:

“You and I Have a Right to Cry.”

“Crying Won’t Help You Now.”

“Just Let Me Cry.”

“You Can Cry on My Shoulder.”

“Big Girls Don’t Cry.”

The songs disagree without requiring arbitration. Crying is a right. Crying is useless. Crying requires permission. Crying can be shared. Crying must be concealed. This is how grief actually behaves. It produces conflicting instructions from moment to moment. Let it out. Stop. Call somebody. Be alone. Grow up. Fall apart.

The mixtape does not decide which instruction is correct. It plays them consecutively until contradiction becomes honest.

The Four Seasons’ “Big Girls Don’t Cry” arrives with bright pop confidence, but its command becomes harsher after the preceding songs have fought for the right to weep. The record smiles while enforcing emotional discipline. A catchy chorus can carry cruelty without ceasing to be catchy. Tear Cry I Blue allows both facts to remain.

“I Left a Note to Say Goodbye” moves the tape from crying into departure. Goodbye contains the I sound, stretched inside the act of leaving. Dion’s “I Wonder Why” follows naturally, not because the titles form a plot but because one song creates the question the next one inhabits. A note has been left. Why remains.

“Convincing Lies” extends the sound and the wound. A convincing lie is not simply false information. It is a falsehood shaped closely enough around desire that the listener helps it enter. After a breakup, memory becomes full of such revisions. What was known? What was ignored? Which promise was believed because belief kept the relationship standing for another day?

The I sound travels through lie and die until “Too Poor to Die” expands personal loss into a harsher social absurdity. The phrase is almost humorous, but its trap is real. Even death appears to demand resources. Survival can continue without hope simply because every exit has a price.

“Killing Me Softly with His Song” was not selected through a perfect title puzzle. It entered because it belonged by feeling. That matters. A mixtape made only by rules becomes a demonstration. A mixtape made through feeling can violate its rules and become alive.

The song contains enough of the long I current to remain connected, but its deeper role comes from what it does emotionally. Someone hears another person singing her life with unbearable accuracy. Music reaches into a private wound and begins describing it publicly. The experience is both loving and invasive. Recognition becomes a soft form of death.

That is also what this tape needed from music. Sadness and love had to arrive from outside, through other people’s voices, so that the person making the tape did not have to carry every feeling alone. The singers become temporary nervous systems. Their grief can be borrowed for three minutes. Their language can hold what ordinary speech cannot.

Near the end of “Killing Me Softly,” the record skips. The song has already described emotional repetition, being struck again and again by recognition, and then the physical disc begins repeating too. The groove becomes caught inside the exact mechanism the lyrics have created. The damage is not symbolic because the record did not plan it. That accident is why it feels stronger than symbolism.

A planned effect says, “Notice what this means.”

A skip simply happens, and meaning rushes toward it.

The Mills Brothers’ “The End of the World” follows, allowing private sorrow to spread across the entire horizon. The record does not need apocalypse in the theatrical sense. Heartbreak already performs the necessary distortion. One relationship ends, yet clocks continue, strangers eat lunch, traffic lights change and the sun behaves as though no universe has collapsed.

The old song asks why the world continues. The damaged source partly answers: it continues imperfectly, covered in wear, occasionally stuck, still rotating.

Neil Sedaka’s “Stairway to Heaven” then extends the long I sound through its phrasing while providing an upward route after the world has ended. Its heaven is compact, melodic and romantic rather than monumental. The song feels less like religious arrival than the mind searching for somewhere else to place love once earthly circumstances can no longer contain it.

Carole King returns the tape to the ground. “It’s Too Late” does not offer transcendence. It offers recognition. Her voice carries a sadness that no longer needs to scream in order to be complete. The relationship has reached the stage where calm can hurt more than conflict.

From there, blue takes over.

“Once in a Blue Moon.”

“Blue Moon.”

“Mr. Blue.”

“Blue Velvet.”

“Death Rattles.”

Another “Blue Velvet.”

“My Blue Heaven.”

“Blue Money.”

“Paranoid Blues.”

“Party Blues.”

Blue becomes more than sadness. It becomes rarity, night, personhood, texture, death, domestic fantasy, money, suspicion and social music. The sequence does not define blue. It watches the word mutate.

Erroll Garner’s “Blue Moon” is essential because it allows the theme to survive without lyrics. By this point, blue has already entered the ear. The piano does not need to say the word. Touch, timing and harmony carry it. The mixtape proves that the theme was never only verbal.

The two versions of “Blue Velvet” repeat the earlier strategy of “How Many Teardrops.” One title passes through different voices, eras and arrangements. Between those two velvets sits Woods’ “Death Rattles,” a piece that interrupts the smooth fabric with bodily finality.

After “Death Rattles,” the second “Blue Velvet” can no longer sound untouched. The listener has crossed something. Velvet becomes funeral cloth, theater curtain, interior darkness, the softness placed around mortality. The record remains identical to what it was before the mixtape used it, but sequencing has changed its emotional chemistry.

“My Blue Heaven” follows death, making heaven uncertain again. Is it comfort, memory, domestic fantasy or the room beyond the last sound? The tape does not decide. “Blue Money” drags the color back into commerce. “Paranoid Blues” turns it inward until sadness begins distrusting its surroundings. “Party Blues” finally permits blue to enter a social space.

The party does not erase grief. It gives grief rhythm and witnesses.

That closing gesture matters because Tear Cry I Blue was not made to worship sadness. It was made to use sadness. The songs provided a structure strong enough to enter, inhabit and eventually move through. Love remained present in the act of choosing them. The tape became assistance, a handmade emotional technology built from records that already knew how to hurt beautifully.

The dirty surfaces are central to that assistance. Perfectly restored audio might present the songs with greater clarity, but it would remove the evidence that these particular objects had also survived. Static says the record was here. A skip says the groove was damaged but still approached. Finger pressure says someone cared enough to help the music cross the wound.

These vinyl rips do not preserve ideal performances floating outside time. They preserve rooms, equipment, worn records and decisions. Little Milton pushing through near-obscuring static is not the same experience as hearing a spotless digital master. The dirt becomes resistance, and his voice becomes the thing refusing to disappear.

Tear Cry I Blue was built from records selected by association, vowel, title, texture and emotional necessity. Some choices satisfy the four-word system exactly. Others enter because they feel right beside it. That looseness is not inconsistency. It is taste refusing to become bureaucracy.

The long I moves throughout the tape like a person trying to locate the self inside language:

high

I

why

lie

die

right

cry

goodbye

night

time

The sound rises in the mouth and opens outward. It is both personal pronoun and phonetic ache, identity and exclamation. The tape keeps returning to it because heartbreak makes the self suddenly loud. I loved. I lost. I remember. I need. I cry.

Yet the word I never remains alone for long. Other voices surround it. The Drifters count. Little Milton cannot hold back. Dolly asks how many. Michael Jackson offers a shoulder. Roberta Flack is recognized by a stranger’s song. Carole King admits the ending. Joe Williams brings everybody to the party.

The mixtape begins with one damaged heart searching through records and ends with an entire history of recorded feeling answering back.

The skips are answers.

The static is an answer.

The finger resting lightly against the record so the song can escape its loop is an answer.

Tear. Cry. I. Blue.

Four pieces of language, thirty-two recordings, ninety minutes of damaged beauty.

The groove catches.

The hand helps.

The sadness continues forward.