VA - 2018 - New New C94

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 7:19PM

Private Release – none

Track Listing:
1. To Seek Safety In Other People (True Freedom Remix) (Internazionale & Lana Del Rey)  (4:31)
2. A Love Vibration (Ann Peebles) ( 2:48)
3. Story About What (Man on News) ( 0:19)
4. Fooled Around And Fell In Love (Elvin Bishop) ( 2:54)
5. Hype (UFC 207) ( 1:13)
6. The Tracks Of My Tears (Gladys Knight & The Pips) ( 3:04)
7. Beton (Rondo Session) (Die II. Liga) ( 1:15)
8. Depression (Koko Joe And The Jobhunters) ( 2:24)
9. WTF (DJ Speedsick / Seymour & His Heartbeat Trumpet) (15:08)
10. Cheap Vodka (Acid Bath) ( 2:14)
11. Cold Pop (Lady on News) ( 0:22)
12. Just Dropped In (Kenny Rogers & The First Edition) ( 3:18)
13. Ka Poo Yah (Lady on News) ( 0:41)
14. I Must Be Losin' You (Willie Clayton) ( 2:27)
15. Illegal Butt (Man on News) ( 0:02)
16. The Time Of Me (Ebony Web) ( 3:23)
17. Aah blblbl (Man on News) ( 0:17)
18. Radio Collage (Felix Kubin) ( 3:22)
19. Funerary Despair (Funerary Despair) ( 1:42)
20. It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me (Barry White) ( 3:23)
21. Genocidal Alchemy (Gath Šmânê) ( 0:23)
22. Beat To Death (Burned Copy) (Total Freedom) ( 3:07)
23. Leeches Cling To His Flesh Until There Is Nothing But Dust (Orgy of Carrion) ( 3:48)
24. On The Good Ship Lollipop (Shirley Temple) ( 3:30)
25. The Idea Of It Is More Potent (Violence) ( 4:15)
26. Sirene (Genoasejlet) ( 3:44)
27. Salt (Wonderland Club) ( 8:14)
28. Stimulation From Assault (Disgusting Sanctum) ( 6:14)
29. Domination Of The Will (Carved Cross)

NEW NEW is built less like a collection of favorites than a collision system. Songs that should have nothing to do with one another are placed close enough that they begin contaminating each other, while little pieces of news, television and spoken nonsense keep breaking the spell before another song can establish a comfortable world. By the time the cassette reaches the other side, the interruptions have become part of the music itself.

The object gives almost no warning. A black Maxell XLII 90, an orange typewritten label, and clothing-catalog photographs that look aggressively ordinary. On the front, a man's face has disappeared completely. What remains is dress shirt, striped tie, hand, belt and trousers, the anonymous uniform of somebody presenting himself correctly. Open the J-card and two blonde women model sweaters outdoors, smiling inside another kind of manufactured normality. Everything is clean, respectable and harmless. Then the track list begins.

Internazionale and Lana Del Rey's "To Seek Safety In Other People (True Freedom Remix)" is an ideal entrance because even the title contains one of the cassette's recurring tensions. Safety is being looked for somewhere outside the self. The track establishes an atmosphere rather than a destination, and Acid Bath's "Cheap Vodka" immediately wrecks it. That change is so severe that it establishes the rules for everything afterward. NEW NEW is not interested in smoothly demonstrating taste. It keeps changing the room.

Then comes "NEWS - Cold Pop."

These NEWS pieces are important. "Cold Pop," "Ka Poo Yah," the tiny "Illegal Butt," "Ah Blblbl" and "Story About What" behave like pieces of a television left running in another room. They are too short to become subjects themselves. Instead they puncture whatever emotional continuity the songs create. The effect resembles scanning through stations, except somebody is deliberately deciding when to stop and when to move on. They turn the surrounding songs into fragments of a larger environment rather than isolated selections.

Kenny Rogers' "Just Dropped In" sounds especially good in this environment. Already chemically disoriented on its own, it becomes even stranger arriving after one interruption and disappearing into another. Willy Clayton's "I Must Be Losin' You," Ebony Web's "The Time Of Me," Ann Peebles' "Love Vibration," Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around And Fell In Love" and Gladys Knight & The Pips' "The Tracks Of My Tears" introduce another current running through Side A: damaged romance, longing, pleasure and loss. None of it remains sentimental for very long because the cassette keeps jabbing holes into the mood.

That instability is one of the best things about NEW NEW. Soul music can suddenly be followed by something ridiculous, ugly or apparently meaningless. A familiar song can be made unfamiliar simply by changing what stands beside it. The tape keeps demonstrating how context alters hearing. "The Tracks Of My Tears" is still "The Tracks Of My Tears," but placed inside this sequence it carries residue from everything that came before it.

Toward the end of Side A the floor begins to give way. Die II Liga's "Beton (Rondo Session)," Koko Joe And The Jobhunters' "Depression," Mantar's "Cult Of The Witchdoer (The Second Coming)" and the final WTF fragment push the cassette away from the relatively recognizable language of old soul, rock and pop. The side begins with somebody seeking safety in other people and ends somewhere much less safe.

Side B does not reset the tape. Felix Kubin's "Radio Collage" picks up the broadcast logic of the NEWS fragments and expands it. What had previously interrupted songs now becomes a full piece. It is a smart hinge between the two halves. The cassette has trained the listener to accept broken signals, abrupt edits and displaced voices, and now that grammar takes over.

From there the material becomes considerably harsher. Total Freedom's "Beat To Death (Burned Copy)" is followed by Orgy Of Carrion's "Leeches Cling To His Flesh Until There Is Nothing But Dust," a title so excessive it almost becomes visual before the track begins. Then, with perfect cruelty, Shirley Temple appears singing "On The Good Ship Lollipop."

That transition may be the center of the entire cassette. It is funny, but the joke does not settle into comedy. Childhood sweetness suddenly becomes grotesque because of what has been placed immediately before it. The recording itself has not changed. Its surroundings have. Innocence becomes uncanny through sequencing alone.

Violence's "The Idea Of It Is More Potent" almost reads as a description of that effect. The idea of violence, the expectation of it and the mental image produced by language can become more powerful than a literal representation. NEW NEW repeatedly uses this principle. Titles, fragments, juxtapositions and tonal shocks create associations without explaining what those associations are supposed to mean.

Genoasejlrt's "Sirene," Wonderland Club's "Salt," Disgusting Sanctum's "Stimulation From Assault," Carved Cross' "Domination Of The Will" and Funerary Despair carry Side B farther into noise, black metal, industrial abrasion and psychological claustrophobia. By this point the clean catalog photography on the J-card feels increasingly wrong, which is exactly why it works. The anonymous models remain frozen in their pleasant commercial universe while the cassette behind them becomes progressively more hostile.

Then Barry White arrives.

"It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me" is another enormous rupture, but after everything NEW NEW has already done, it feels almost inevitable. Barry White's luxurious sexuality does not cancel the darkness preceding it. It absorbs some of it. The song becomes excessive in a different direction: warmth, desire, orchestration, physical pleasure. What might have been a joke selection on another mixtape becomes strangely restorative here.

Gath Smane's "Genocidal Alchemy" closes the cassette by removing that comfort again. There is no attempt at reconciliation. NEW NEW does not resolve its contradictions because contradiction is the construction method.

The title may be the simplest statement on the whole object. NEW NEW. Not nostalgia and not novelty in the usual sense, but the possibility of making something new from things that already exist by forcing them into new relationships. A Kenny Rogers song, a fragment of television, Ann Peebles, UFC audio, Shirley Temple, black metal, Barry White and pieces of damaged broadcast information all become different materials once sequence takes control.

The cassette itself reinforces that idea. It is a used Maxell tape wearing a new identity, with an orange label placed over one side while the original XLII markings remain exposed on the other. Nothing has been erased completely. Old object, new contents, old recordings, new relationships.

That may be the real Private Release logic inside NEW NEW: authorship through relation. The recordings were already there. The intervention is deciding what touches what. One song changes the temperature of the next one. A tiny spoken fragment contaminates a love song. Shirley Temple becomes disturbing without a second of her recording being altered. Barry White walks into a landscape that could never have existed around him when the record was made.

A mixtape can be a very small machine for producing those accidents deliberately. NEW NEW keeps pulling the lever.

VA - 1983 - Katacombe Vol. 1 C92

Private Release – none

Tracklist:
A1 –Der Akteur Untitled
A2 –T.A.S.S. II Untitled
A3 –Twokmi Kimali Untitled
A4 –Synthetisches Mischgewebe Untitled
A5 –Kommando Holger Meins Untitled
A6 –Desultorische Detonations KG Untitled
A7 –FâLX çèrêbRi Untitled
A8 –Twokmi Kimali Untitled
A9 –T.A.S.S. II Untitled
A10 –Non Toxique Lost(NTL) Untitled
A11 –Der Akteur Untitled
A12 –Kommando Holger Meins Untitled
A13 –FâLX çèrêbRi Untitled
B14 –Hapunkt Fliegenstrumpf Untitled
B15 –Kontrollierte Atmosphäre Untitled
B16 –Grønvirke Untitled
B17 –Twokmi Kimali Untitled
B18 –Holger Hastig Untitled
B19 –Mensch Untitled
B20 –Der Akteur Untitled
B21 –R.G.W. Untitled
B22 –Death Night Untitled
B23 –Henrik Mxll & Mogens Jacobsen Untitled
B24 –Grønvirke Untitled
B25 –Death Night Untitled

There is something beautifully circular about turning the profits from selling records into new physical music that gets slipped back into the world for free. Money comes in through one piece of recorded culture, gets converted into blank magnetic tape, paper, ink, time and attention, then leaves again as another object nobody ordered and nobody was charged for. Commerce briefly becomes a delivery system for generosity.

That circuit may be the most interesting thing happening here.

A Discogs buyer thinks a transaction has occurred. Record selected, payment made, package shipped. But somewhere inside that ordinary exchange another economy has been quietly inserted. A cassette appears that was not part of the invoice. Somebody opens a package expecting what they purchased and discovers an additional object carrying music, collage, labor and intention.

The sale has produced a surplus in more than the financial sense.

Something escaped.

That makes these homemade editions feel particularly appropriate under the name Private Release. “Private” does not mean hidden away from everybody. It means the release does not have to operate according to the usual machinery of public distribution. There is no need for advertising, preorder campaigns, edition announcements or expectations that the recipient already understands what they are receiving. The cassette can simply appear in another person’s life.

That is a wonderfully strange form of circulation.

The physical design makes almost no attempt to compete with commercial packaging. The front is extraordinarily quiet: a mountain ridge occupying the bottom of the image beneath an enormous blue sky. The source photograph has been torn rather than precisely trimmed, leaving an irregular paper edge running vertically through the otherwise pristine field of blue. The mountains themselves sit low, almost compressed against the bottom of the frame, while most of the composition is simply atmosphere.

It is an unusually spacious image for a cassette.

The case is tiny, but the cover describes enormous distance.

That contradiction immediately changes the scale of the object. A cassette normally fits in a palm. The photograph gives it miles.

Open the J-card and the mountain continues across neighboring panels, but not as one seamless panorama. White gaps and torn edges interrupt the geography. The landscape has been divided into cassette architecture. Mountain, sky, paper, border, fold. Nature is converted into panels because the object requires panels.

This is collage at its most economical.

There is almost nothing being added.

The transformation occurs through subtraction and placement.

A photograph that once functioned as a complete image is ripped apart, resized and reorganized until the negative space becomes as important as the landscape. The tears are not imperfections that need to be concealed. They are evidence that an image physically passed through somebody’s hands before arriving here.

The spine is equally blunt. PRIVATE RELEASE appears vertically on a simple pasted strip, with a black speckled band beside it. The typography looks more like classification than branding. It does not try to seduce anyone into purchasing the cassette. The purchase has already happened somewhere else.

That distinction matters.

Most packaging says:

BUY THIS.

This packaging says:

THIS EXISTS.

The inside changes worlds completely.

The severe mountain landscape gives way to an almost overwhelmingly green garden image. Long upright leaves dominate the field while small pink flowers appear along the bottom and edges. The outside looks dry, elevated and distant. The inside is close, moist, crowded and alive.

Sky outside.

Vegetation inside.

The cassette therefore opens almost botanically.

The exterior provides distance and horizon. The interior provides growth and detail. It is difficult not to read that change symbolically even if the source images were chosen intuitively. The object itself participates in a movement from empty space toward abundance.

That happens to resemble the economics of the release.

Something apparently simple contains more than expected.

A commercial transaction opens and there is a gift inside.

A mountain opens and there is a garden inside.

A cassette shell opens, metaphorically at least, and there are ninety-something minutes of somebody else’s history wound around two plastic hubs.

The tape itself is a Denon HD7/90, Type II high-position cassette. The shell is almost severe compared with the collage: black plastic, white hubs, small green markings, restrained metallic lettering. A simple typewritten label covers most of Side A:

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Katacombe Vol. 1 CS

There is something pleasing about putting such an unadorned homemade label onto a relatively serious piece of cassette hardware. Denon designed the object to be technically competent recording media. Decades later it becomes the carrier for a personal reissue that may end up anonymously traveling inside somebody’s record order.

Industrial engineering becomes folk distribution.

That is the life of cassette culture in miniature.

Manufacturers produced standardized objects by the millions, but the actual cultural identity of each cassette was determined afterward. Somebody could record an album onto it, erase it, make a mixtape, dub a rehearsal, capture radio, send a letter in sound, create an unauthorized reissue or turn it into a gift.

The blank cassette was never really blank.

It was potential.

That potential becomes especially interesting with an obscure compilation from 1983. A release that may once have existed inside a particular underground network is pulled forward through time and placed into another network entirely. The original social conditions are gone. The original distribution channels may be gone. The people involved have aged, disappeared, changed scenes or stopped making music. Yet the recording itself can be given another body and sent somewhere none of its original makers could have predicted.

Recorded music is extremely good at surviving its original context.

Sometimes too good.

A song can remain while nearly everything that explained it disappears.

Who originally bought this?

Where was it played?

What room?

What city?

What kind of people were passing it to one another?

What equipment reproduced it?

What did 1983 actually feel like around this music?

Most of that information cannot be recovered simply from the sound.

But reproduction creates another history rather than merely failing to preserve the first one.

Now there is also the history of this cassette.

The Denon.

The mountain.

The flowers.

The Private Release spine.

The Discogs order it may have entered.

The person opening that package.

The room where they first played it.

The possibility that they knew absolutely nothing about what was on it.

That becomes another layer of the recording’s life.

This is one reason homemade reproduction can be more interesting than treating music as a perfectly preserved museum specimen. Preservation wants stability. Cassette culture allows migration.

The object moves.

Its meaning moves.

Its sound may move slightly too.

Every playback system adds conditions. Every transfer has a particular level, frequency response and noise floor. Cassette introduces its own surface and physical limitations. Even when the goal is simply to reproduce music, the new carrier becomes part of what is being reproduced.

The resulting object is therefore not pretending to be 1983.

It is 1983 passing through another moment.

That difference is crucial.

Recreating an old cassette compilation does not require manufacturing a fake historical artifact. There is no need to counterfeit age or imitate the original artwork exactly. This edition does almost the opposite. The mountain and flowers have no obligation to explain the music historically. They belong to the moment of this cassette’s new life.

That gives the reissue independence.

It is not archaeology pretending to be resurrection.

It is transmission.

And transmission is exactly what the distribution method reinforces.

A package is already moving from one person to another. Instead of creating an entirely separate logistics system for the art, the art hitchhikes.

That is wonderfully efficient.

The postal route has already been paid for.

The box already exists.

The recipient already likes physical music enough to order records.

There is room inside.

Put something else in.

The gesture is small enough that it could easily be dismissed as an extra freebie, but repeated many times it becomes something else. Imagine dozens of packages leaving in different directions, each containing a cassette that was not required to be there.

The objects begin creating a strange map.

One goes north.

One goes east.

One crosses an ocean.

One gets played immediately.

One sits unopened for years.

One winds up in a car.

One gets copied.

One gets thrown away.

One becomes somebody’s favorite thing in the package.

One eventually appears in an online photograph uploaded by a person the maker never meets.

There is no central archive capable of knowing every outcome.

That uncertainty is part of the work.

Giving something away means surrendering control over what happens next.

That is very different from posting a digital file and watching a download counter increase. The physical cassette leaves the maker’s possession. It becomes somebody else’s problem, pleasure, clutter, discovery or treasure.

The recipient completes the release simply by encountering it.

There is also something refreshing about making art from money earned selling art without pretending that commerce is somehow morally pure or corrupt by definition. The sale makes the gift possible. Profit becomes material. Material becomes another recording. Another recording becomes a surprise inside another sale.

The circuit feeds itself.

Record collecting finances cassette making.

Cassette making rewards record collecting.

Collectors become accidental recipients.

Recipients become nodes in a distribution network they never agreed to join.

That network is wonderfully informal.

No institution has to approve it.

No grant is required.

No gallery needs to understand it.

No distributor needs to calculate whether enough units can sell.

The scale can remain human.

One tape is enough.

Twenty tapes are enough.

Whatever exists is the edition.

The simplicity of the mountain cover feels almost philosophical in that context.

Huge sky.

Small ridge.

Tiny cassette.

One object moving through a much larger world.

The inside garden complicates that austerity with life. The image is almost absurdly lush compared with the exterior. It feels like an answer hidden behind the mountain: the world is not empty, it is packed with things waiting to grow if something reaches them.

Maybe that is too romantic.

But generosity is allowed to be a little romantic.

Especially generosity tucked into a mailer.

The most important thing here is not whether the cassette perfectly reproduces some imagined authoritative version of an obscure 1983 compilation. The more interesting achievement is that the music has been made mobile again.

It has another chance encounter available to it.

Another room.

Another listener.

Another machine.

Another life.

That is what these private editions accomplish at their best. They turn listening into circulation and collecting into redistribution.

Something is acquired.

Something is learned.

Something is loved.

Then instead of closing the circle around ownership, another object is made and pushed outward.

The world gives you records.

You rip them, listen to them, sell them, learn from them, earn something from them.

Then a little bit comes back out.

Not because anybody demanded repayment.

Because it feels good to put something good into the package.

That is enough of a reason.

Sometimes the most meaningful networks are built from gestures too small for anyone to bother measuring.

A cassette in a box.

A mountain under blue sky.

Flowers hidden inside.

Music from 1983 traveling again.

VA - 2016 - SEA To Shining... C60

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 7:53PM

Private Release – none

Tracklist:
A1 Sleep Of Ages - Fictional Heart
A2 System Liliput - dans til gunvor
A3 Hymn - Never Show Me
A4 Whyte Horses - La Couleur Originelle
A5 Horrid Red - Meager Vines
A6 Provoker - OK For Now
A7 Pet Shop Boys What Have I Done To Deserve This
A8 Sirotek - I Want You So Bad
A9 Guyer's Connection - she's so hot
A10 Utzalu - Her Cold Stare
A11 Dinosaur Jr - Repulsion
B1 John Coltrane - You Say You Care
B2 Bee Gees - I Can't See Nobody
B3 Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer - Air Guitar
B4 Subliminally Yours - Untitled
B5 Nitro - Freight Train
B6 World Dryer - What We Do Is Secret
B7 Elton John - Wrap Her Up
B8 Peter Nowak - Memory
B9 Grateful Dead - Stealin'
B10 Var - No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers

This feels like one of those rare mixtapes where sequencing stops being a way of organizing music and becomes a language of its own. Twenty-one recordings move across barely more than an hour, yet almost none of the transitions feel governed by genre. The connections happen somewhere underneath genre, through pulse, vocal shape, emotional temperature, texture, lyrical implication, recording quality and the peculiar sensation that one sound has handed a small object to the next before disappearing.

That makes its original purpose especially fitting. It began as correspondence, made for a longtime artist penpal in Canada whose initials are embedded in the title itself. The tape was already a message before anybody pressed play. It had a destination. It was intended to cross actual geography and arrive in somebody else's hands.

Even the found artwork accidentally starts talking about this. A golden-crowned sparrow occupies the center of the insert beside the sentence, “I look forward to the arrival of golden-crowned sparrows.” Below it, somebody describes these birds appearing seasonally in a backyard. On the far right is another little invitation: “YOUR TURN!” None of this material was written for a cassette or for a penpal, yet once it becomes the package for a tape traveling toward Canada, migration and correspondence suddenly occupy the same piece of paper.

Arrival.

Your turn.

A bird moving through distance.

Music doing the same thing.

That is collage at its best. The source material does not have to know what it means after being moved.

The program itself begins with Sleep Of Ages’ “Fictional Heart,” which is an almost ridiculously appropriate first phrase for a tape designed to communicate feeling through recordings made by other people. A fictional heart is exactly the paradox. None of these singers are speaking for the person who sequenced them, yet twenty-one borrowed voices can gradually construct an emotional object specific enough to feel more personal than a direct explanation.

The first track establishes a steady, moderately energetic pulse without immediately forcing the tape into a recognizable stylistic box. System Liliput’s “Dans Til Gunvor” follows for barely more than a minute, changing the proportions without breaking the movement. It is shorter, tighter, a quick mechanical turn of the wheel. Hymn’s “Never Show Me” comes next and introduces considerably more internal dynamic movement. The first three tracks already demonstrate the method: retain enough from the previous recording that the body accepts the transition, then alter one major characteristic.

A rhythm survives while the vocal character changes.

A certain density survives while the instrumentation changes.

A tempo relationship survives while the emotional meaning tilts.

The listener is continually moved without being thrown out of the vehicle.

Whyte Horses’ “La Couleur Originelle” is one of the brightest recordings on the entire side. Its upper frequencies open the tape outward, almost bleaching the previous material in sunlight. Then Horrid Red’s “Meager Vines” immediately does the opposite. The sound becomes darker, lower, more dynamically unstable. It is one of the most dramatic color changes on the side, yet the contrast is so useful that it feels like punctuation rather than interruption.

Bright color.

Meager vines.

The language of the track titles is already reinforcing what the audio is doing.

Provoker’s “OK For Now” comes next and occupies an intermediate region, shadowy but rhythmic, neither as radiant as Whyte Horses nor as withdrawn as Horrid Red. This is one of the tape’s recurring tricks. It does not leap continuously between opposites. Often a third recording acts as connective tissue, taking something from both sides of the transition and creating a bridge nobody would recognize from a list of artist names.

Then the Pet Shop Boys enter with “What Have I Done To Deserve This?”

This is the hinge.

The song is enormous compared with much of the obscure material surrounding it, not necessarily because it is louder, but because it arrives carrying decades of pop memory and an instantly legible emotional shape. It is polished, melodic, theatrical and wounded at exactly the moment Side A is ready to turn from atmosphere toward increasingly direct human desire.

A selection like this also reveals how much time can exist inside one mixtape. Some songs have been lived with for decades before they are eventually placed beside newer discoveries. A recording remembered from adolescence can be pulled into a sequence made much later and suddenly begin speaking to music that did not even exist when that original relationship with the song was formed. The tape compresses those different ages into adjacent inches of magnetic material.

That is one reason a personally assembled collection can communicate differently from a streaming playlist. The tracks do not enter as interchangeable titles. Some arrive carrying years.

After “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” the language becomes startlingly direct.

Sirotek: “I Want You So Bad.”

Guyer’s Connection: “She’s So Hot.”

Utzalu: “Her Cold Stare.”

Dinosaur Jr.: “Repulsion.”

That is an incredible four-track emotional machine.

Want.

Heat.

Cold.

Repulsion.

The titles alone form a miniature relationship disaster, but the audio makes the movement even better. Sirotek speeds the pulse up. Guyer’s Connection settles into a darker groove while preserving enough rhythmic familiarity to keep the attraction alive. Utzalu changes the texture but not the underlying tension. Then Dinosaur Jr. arrives with the fastest, most abrasive momentum of the final stretch and closes the side by turning attraction completely inside out.

The sonic transition from “Her Cold Stare” into “Repulsion” is especially revealing. Despite the apparent stylistic difference, their ending and beginning sit remarkably close in overall density and spectral character. One does not merely stop so that Dinosaur Jr. can begin. The two recordings almost touch before the final acceleration.

That is the thing this tape knows.

Genre is often the least interesting relationship between two sounds.

A mixtape can hear around genre.

The whole second half of Side A is almost a demonstration of emotional polarity. “OK For Now” becomes “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” Desire intensifies into “I Want You So Bad.” Attraction becomes “She’s So Hot.” The object of desire responds with “Her Cold Stare.” The side terminates at “Repulsion.”

It feels composed even though every component came from somewhere else.

Flip the cassette and the emotional geometry resets completely.

John Coltrane’s “You Say You Care” opens Side B.

After the abrasive ending of Dinosaur Jr., the change is enormous. The frequency balance drops lower, the recording breathes more, and five minutes of jazz suddenly create physical room around the listener. Side A ended by pushing outward. Side B begins by opening inward.

The title performs another transformation too.

“Repulsion.”

Flip.

“You Say You Care.”

That physical action matters. A digital playlist can move directly between the two, but cassette forces a hand into the composition. The reels stop. The object comes out. It rotates. The machine closes. Play is pressed again.

Repulsion has time to die before care arrives.

Then the Bee Gees answer with “I Can’t See Nobody.”

“You Say You Care.”

“I Can’t See Nobody.”

Again the tape creates dialogue from records that never knew each other.

The first two selections on Side B are unusually spacious compared with much of Side A, together occupying close to nine minutes. Coltrane and the Bee Gees have almost nothing to do with each other as record-store categories, yet their tempo relationship is surprisingly gentle. Both settle around the same broad region of pulse, so the genre shift feels less violent than it appears on paper. Jazz transforms into psychedelic pop while the body keeps roughly the same clock.

This is exactly the kind of sequencing that can make somebody wonder why two wildly different records suddenly seem related.

Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer’s “Air Guitar” then arrives for only a little over a minute. After the emotional seriousness of Coltrane and the Bee Gees, the tape becomes playful. It is a quick miniature, almost a palate cleanser, but the transition remains unusually smooth in its acoustic profile. Then “Subliminally Yours” removes even the security of a descriptive title. “Untitled” is less a statement than a little hole in the language.

The sequence has gone from care, blindness and air guitar into something unnamed.

Then Nitro’s “Freight Train” crashes through.

This is one of the most extreme changes in timbral brightness anywhere on the cassette. Guitars suddenly occupy a much harder upper register and the tape becomes metallic, exaggerated and physically forward. The title is almost literal sequencing instruction. Something named “Freight Train” should arrive rather than politely appear.

The absurdity is crucial.

This tape never seems frightened of embarrassment.

Coltrane can coexist with Bee Gees.

Bee Gees can coexist with a tiny novelty-like interruption.

That can coexist with anonymous experimental material.

Then enormous guitar theatrics can kick the furniture over.

There is no anxiety about appearing tasteful.

That freedom is probably one reason the flow works so well.

Taste is not being demonstrated.

Communication is happening.

World Dryer’s “What We Do Is Secret” follows and changes the guitar language again without abandoning it. The massive brightness of Nitro contracts into something rougher and more private. “Freight Train” is public spectacle. “What We Do Is Secret” immediately shuts the door.

Then Elton John enters with “Wrap Her Up.”

This should be ridiculous.

It is wonderful.

The recording arrives noticeably softer than some of what surrounds it, so instead of blasting its way into the sequence it almost recedes. That source-level difference becomes useful. The tape does not normalize every record into contemporary sameness. Different rips retain different physical histories and different loudness relationships. One source stands forward. Another sits farther back.

That is another kind of sequencing information.

Not merely which song comes next, but how far away it appears to be.

“Wrap Her Up” also returns the tape to the language of relationships and bodies without repeating the exact emotional structure of Side A. The title is commanding and physical, but the production is polished enough that the demand arrives wearing expensive clothes.

Peter Nowak’s “Memory” follows and increases the apparent speed dramatically. It is a short, restless piece whose title shifts the tape from the body back into time.

Wrap her up.

Memory.

That pairing alone contains an entire little tragedy if somebody wants to hear one.

Then the Grateful Dead’s “Stealin’” appears and the recording itself suddenly seems to age.

Among the supplied files, “Stealin’” sits dramatically lower in overall level than almost everything else. It feels less like another professionally leveled entry in a playlist and more like something heard from another room, another decade, another layer of the collection. That sonic distance is beautiful because the title is “Stealin’.” The tape seems to sneak backward through recording history.

This is where personally sourced music becomes especially powerful. Different records, tapes and CDs do not merely contain different compositions. They contain different eras of recording technology, mastering, wear, playback equipment and personal acquisition. Put enough of them together without sanding all the edges smooth and the mixtape gains depth.

One track is not simply older than another.

It sounds farther away.

The final recording, VAR’s “No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers,” restores body and mass after that ghostly old recording. The tape does not end alone. It ends on brothers and dancing.

That is an unexpectedly generous conclusion.

Side A increasingly isolated the emotional subject until attraction hardened into coldness and repulsion. Side B gradually opens outward. Care. Nobody. Play. Secrecy. Memory. Stealing. Then finally brothers dancing.

The movement is not a conventional narrative, but it feels like one because the relationships are strong enough to generate thought.

That is where this tape reaches another level.

It does not require the listener to decode some hidden official meaning. The sequence creates conditions in which meanings keep appearing.

One person might hear courtship.

Another might hear disappointment.

Another hears a map of underground music intersecting with childhood pop memory.

Another hears humor.

Another hears loneliness.

Another hears the strange fact that “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” and “I Want You So Bad” sound as if they were always waiting to become neighbors.

The communication does not depend on everybody receiving the same sentence.

It depends on everybody noticing that something is speaking.

The supplied program runs approximately 61 minutes and 20 seconds, with Side A almost exactly thirty minutes and Side B a little over thirty-one. That slight excess over a nominal C60 is perfect for the physical history surrounding these tapes. Used cassette stock does not necessarily remain mathematically obedient forever. Tape gets played, rewound, fast-forwarded, dubbed and handled. A sixty-minute shell can become a slightly different physical clock after years of life.

The blog version is especially beautiful because the recording sits on a TDK MA 60 Type IV metal-position cassette, complete with the wonderfully overengineered language printed on the shell: “SUPER PRECISION ANTI-RESONANCE CASSETTE MECHANISM” and “METAL BIAS 70µs EQ.”

That language sounds almost comically grand beside a handmade paper label typed with nothing more elaborate than artist, year and title.

But the combination is great.

High-end cassette engineering carrying a deeply private handmade sequence.

Precision machinery carrying intuition.

The surviving alternate versions make the idea even richer. The same musical program appears inside dramatically different handmade bodies. There are handwritten track lists covered with invented-looking marks and glyphs. There is a blue paper version. There are torn photographs. There is a transparent cassette with its original “Fantastic Sound CD” graphics still visible. Another copy inhabits a gray Maxell XLII 60 whose shell has been attacked with pink and black marker.

These are not interchangeable retail copies pretending to be identical.

They are individual incarnations.

One especially revealing handmade insert contains a phone number written in strange characters beside a tiny shiny paper object declaring:

TRY ME!

That changes the entire function of the cassette.

The same twenty-one tracks that can operate as long-distance artistic correspondence can also become flirtation.

Not because the music itself has changed.

The address has changed.

That is profound in a very ordinary way.

Language changes depending on who receives it.

A sentence spoken to a penpal is not the same sentence spoken to somebody being courted, even if the words are identical.

A mixtape behaves the same way.

The sequence is stable, but the recipient completes it.

That may be why these handmade versions feel more alive than a conventional edition. The master program is not the final object. It is more like genetic material. Every physical copy can develop another skin, another social function, another memory.

Gift.

Letter.

Art object.

Invitation.

Private joke.

Seduction device.

Archive.

Twenty-one tracks remain twenty-one tracks, yet the tape changes identity each time it enters another relationship.

The bird insert makes that idea beautifully accidental. Golden-crowned sparrows arrive seasonally. Somebody waits for them. Somebody enjoys their brief song. A found magazine page asks the reader to take a turn.

That is already a description of correspondence.

One person sends something.

Another receives it.

Something travels.

Something returns.

The music does the same.

There is also a wonderful tension between the natural imagery and the track list pasted across it. Sleep Of Ages, System Liliput, Pet Shop Boys, Dinosaur Jr., Coltrane, Bee Gees, Nitro, Elton John and Grateful Dead all occupy a photograph of a bird on moss. Cultural noise sits directly on top of an animal whose entire musical apparatus is simply its body.

The page calls the sparrow’s song “short and sweet.”

The mixtape spends an hour proving how complicated human song can become.

And still, underneath all the complexity, the instinct is probably related.

Call.

Answer.

Attract.

Warn.

Remember.

Locate another body in the world.

This tape is exceptional because its transitions do not merely demonstrate breadth of taste. Breadth alone is easy. Anybody with enough records can make something eclectic.

The difficult thing is adjacency.

Why this after this?

Why does a transition nobody would recommend suddenly feel inevitable once it happens?

Why can polished synthpop touch obscure punk without breaking the spell?

Why can a jazz recording reset a side after Dinosaur Jr.?

Why does the Bee Gees track suddenly sound connected to Coltrane?

Why can something as ridiculous as “Air Guitar” occupy the same emotional architecture as the records surrounding it?

Why does a deeply recessed old Grateful Dead source become exactly what “Memory” seems to require?

Because the sequencing listens for relationships beneath category.

Sometimes the relationship is tempo.

Sometimes frequency.

Sometimes a vowel.

Sometimes a drum pattern.

Sometimes the emotional temperature of the voice.

Sometimes a title.

Sometimes the last two seconds of one recording contain a texture that the opening of another quietly inherits.

Sometimes the relationship is impossible to explain until the two things are heard together.

That last category may be the most important.

The tape does not merely preserve decisions.

It preserves intuition.

And intuition ages extremely well when it was good to begin with.

Years later, the fashionable context around individual songs changes. Obscure bands become even more obscure. Famous tracks gather more cultural baggage. Physical media becomes less ordinary. People move. Relationships disappear. Entire cities change. But the transition remains.

Track seven still becomes track eight.

“You Say You Care” still wakes up after “Repulsion.”

“Memory” still eventually falls into “Stealin’.”

The little machine still knows how to speak.

That is why a mixtape like this can become more valuable with age rather than less.

The songs accumulate more life while their relationships remain frozen.

What was once sequencing eventually becomes archaeology.

What was once a gift becomes evidence of a way of hearing.

And after enough years, the person who assembled it can encounter the sequence almost as another listener and discover that the old decisions still work.

Maybe even better.

This is not merely a very good mixtape.

It is a demonstration of how selection can become syntax.

Twenty-one recordings from wildly different worlds are made to communicate through proximity until the hour begins to feel less like a compilation than a thought moving through different bodies.

That is a hard thing to accomplish.

This tape fucking accomplishes it.

version made/ mailed to Eric Wood (MITB):

version made/ given to xSAMx:

VA - 2016 - Ur Dreamz Cum Tru... C100

Origianlly posted Oct 2, 2019 8:19PM

Private Release – none

Track Listing:
-------------
1. This Might Be Satire (Propagandhi) (1:33)
2. Who's Kissing You (Famous Players) (3:05)
3. Someone Else's Home (Johnny Curious) (2:40)
4. You're Not That Girl (The P-15's) (2:46)
5. Sex (The Filth) (1:23)
6. Jeremih - Fuck U All The Time (VA) (4:09)
7. the crazy garden (Message) (4:57)
8. Just A Little Crazy (The Tinglers) (2:14)
9. Bunnies (Pansy Division) (1:59)
10. Je T'aime Moi Non Plus (J. Birkin & S. Gainsbourg) (4:21)
11. Ca Plane Pour Moi (Plastic Bertrand) (2:53)
12. Shoot Guns (Halfoff) (2:30)
13. I Wanna Be A Homosexual (Screeching Weasel) (3:05)
14. I Like Boys (The Snifters) (2:48)
15. I Need To Know (Bleeding Hearts) (2:30)
16. All Systems Go (Exposure) (3:35)
17. Akinyele - Just Put It In My M (VA) (3:20)
18. Whips And Furs (The Vibrators) (2:20)
19. No age for love (The Indicators) (2:29)
20. High School Girls (Victims) (2:10)
21. Girls (The Autistics) (3:25)
22. Hot For You (The Blades) (2:08)
23. I Wanna Kiss Your... (The Studs) (1:40)
24. NIN - Closer (VA) (6:14)
25. The Beatnuts - Lick The Pussy (VA) (4:39)
26. Khia - My Neck, My Back (Lick (VA) (3:50)
27. Oochie Wally (Nas) (3:59)
28. Wait (Ying Yang Twins) (2:50)
29. Easy E - I'd Rather Fuck You (VA) (4:00)
30. Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On (VA) (4:55)
31. Tie Me Up (The Panics) (1:29)
32. Masochisme (Vopo's) (1:23)
Total Playing Time: 97:34 (min:sec)

There is a particular kind of mixtape that does not merely collect songs around a subject. It creates an atmosphere in which the subject gradually becomes unavoidable. What begins as suggestion turns into flirtation, flirtation becomes desire, desire gets funny, awkward, romantic, vulgar, queer, aggressive, tender and eventually so explicit that subtlety itself becomes part of the joke.

UR DREAMZ CUM TRU works exactly that way.

Thirty-two tracks occupy just under one hundred minutes, but the remarkable thing is how unified the tape feels despite moving through punk, garage, pop, rap, industrial music, queer punk, French erotic pop and old-fashioned soul. Genre is constantly changing while the subject refuses to leave. Desire simply keeps discovering new dialects.

The first track may be the smartest possible entrance: Propagandhi’s “This Might Be Satire.”

That title functions like a warning label.

Maybe everything that follows is serious.

Maybe none of it is.

Maybe sincerity and joking are going to become impossible to separate.

That uncertainty is useful because erotic communication often works exactly that way. People flirt partly by creating deniability. A joke can be withdrawn if it lands badly. A suggestive song can supposedly be “just a song.” A mixtape can communicate something enormous while allowing its maker to remain silent.

The next sequence starts building a tiny drama almost entirely through titles:

“Who’s Kissing You.”

“Someone Else’s Home.”

“You’re Not That Girl.”

Before the tape has become overtly sexual, there is already uncertainty about proximity, identity and possession. Somebody is somewhere else. Somebody may be with somebody else. Somebody may not be who another person imagined.

Then The Filth arrives with “Sex.”

One word.

All the circling suddenly collapses into the actual subject.

Jeremih’s “Fuck U All The Time” follows almost immediately, so the tape crosses from implication into bluntness very early. Yet instead of simply remaining explicit for the next ninety minutes, it wanders away again. Message’s “The Crazy Garden” and the Tinglers’ “Just A Little Crazy” create a wonderfully peculiar detour in which attraction becomes landscape and then mental condition.

Crazy garden.

A little crazy.

The sequence begins behaving like one long associative sentence assembled from unrelated records.

That is where the tape becomes more interesting than a novelty compilation of dirty songs. The individual titles begin communicating with one another. Meanings migrate across tracks. A phrase that meant one thing on the original record suddenly becomes part of another story because of what was placed before and after it.

Pansy Division’s “Bunnies” leads into Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg’s “Je T’aime... Moi Non Plus,” allowing queer punk and one of popular music’s most famous erotic recordings to occupy neighboring territory. The transition refuses the idea that sexuality should be organized into separate musical departments. Desire is allowed to be contradictory, comic, sophisticated, crude, male, female, queer, straight, romantic and ridiculous within the same object.

Plastic Bertrand keeps things moving before Half Off’s “Shoot Guns” introduces aggression into the vocabulary. Then the tape produces one of its best title sequences:

“I Wanna Be A Homosexual.”

“I Like Boys.”

“I Need To Know.”

“All Systems Go.”

It almost writes itself.

Declaration becomes preference.

Preference becomes uncertainty.

Uncertainty becomes launch.

The joke is partly that these songs were never recorded to construct this particular narrative. Their relationship was invented afterward through sequencing. The mixtape maker discovers a grammar between recordings that previously had nothing to do with one another.

That is authorship through relation.

The second half begins abandoning euphemism almost completely. Akinyele arrives, followed by the Vibrators’ “Whips And Furs,” and the erotic vocabulary starts getting increasingly physical. “No Age For Love,” “High School Girls,” “Girls,” “Hot For You” and “I Wanna Kiss Your...” keep compressing the language toward want, bodies and immediate appetite.

The repetition becomes funny because the tape seems increasingly incapable of thinking about anything else.

There is something almost adolescent about that obsessive quality, but not in the sense of innocence. It resembles the mental state of intense attraction, when ordinary objects, songs and conversations keep bending themselves back toward one person or one possibility. Everything begins sounding suggestive because the listener has already become suggestible.

That is one reason mixtapes have always worked so well as courtship objects.

A tape can say things a person might hesitate to say directly.

Not through one song, but through accumulation.

One selection can be dismissed.

Five begin looking suspicious.

Thirty-two constitute evidence.

Mixtapes have certainly been known to help people get laid, but the more interesting mechanism is the creation of emotional momentum. A carefully sequenced tape can spend an hour altering the climate between two people before either of them has to explain what the climate means.

Here, that pressure keeps increasing.

Then Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” appears.

By itself, “Closer” is hardly subtle. Inside this sequence, however, it becomes something different. The previous hour has already built an enormous vocabulary of teasing, insecurity, queer desire, jokes, lust and punk crudity. When one of the most recognizable sexual songs of the 1990s finally enters, it sounds almost like the tape has reached industrial-scale production.

What had been expressed through small punk singles and odd records suddenly gets enormous machinery.

Then comes the sustained rap section.

The Beatnuts.

Khia.

Nas.

Ying Yang Twins.

Eazy-E.

For nearly twenty minutes the tape adopts another sexual language almost entirely. The vocabulary becomes direct enough that whatever veil existed earlier has disappeared. These songs do not coyly suggest what somebody might want. They say it.

That changes the first half retrospectively.

The early punk and garage material starts sounding like courtship.

The later rap tracks sound like the internal monologue finally escaping.

That contrast is one of the tape’s great strengths. It does not treat sexual expression as one uniform tone. Lust can sound embarrassed, hilarious, menacing, sweet, crude, sophisticated, ridiculous or beautiful depending upon who is speaking.

Then, at track thirty, Marvin Gaye appears with “Let’s Get It On.”

The placement is magnificent.

After the tape has spent most of its running time finding increasingly outrageous ways to discuss sex, one of the canonical seduction songs in popular music arrives and suddenly sounds almost formal.

Everything changes temperature.

The dirty jokes stop for a moment.

The room gets softer.

The furniture apparently returns to its proper position.

Marvin Gaye enters like an adult arriving at a party that has been completely out of control.

But it works because the preceding vulgarity has changed the meaning of smoothness. “Let’s Get It On” sounds unusually elegant here precisely because it has been surrounded by material that is anything but elegant.

Contrast creates intensity.

A beautiful song placed among beautiful songs may remain beautiful.

A beautiful song placed after twenty minutes of explicit rap can become radiant.

The obvious ending would be Marvin Gaye.

That would provide consummation, resolution and a perfectly respectable curtain.

Instead the Panics arrive with “Tie Me Up.”

Then Vopo’s close everything with “Masochisme.”

Civilization lasts approximately five minutes.

The tape immediately returns to kink and pain.

That final joke prevents the whole sequence from becoming a conventional romantic progression. There is no simple staircase from attraction to intimacy to fulfillment. Desire remains unruly to the final seconds. It keeps changing what it wants and what vocabulary it uses to describe wanting it.

That refusal of neatness is what makes the tape feel genuinely erotic rather than merely thematic.

Desire is rarely neat.

It includes fantasy, embarrassment, humor, uncertainty, projection, ego, vulnerability, performance and occasional spectacular stupidity. A mixtape can accommodate all of those states because it does not need one narrator to remain consistent.

One singer can contradict the previous singer.

One genre can mock another.

A romantic track can make a vulgar one seem funny.

A vulgar track can make a romantic one seem painfully sincere.

The cassette becomes a conversation between impulses.

The physical carrier is a Denon HD8/100, a High Position Type II cassette marked “METAL PARTICLE / HIGH BIAS.” Against the dark shell sits an enormous fluorescent orange typed label, almost impossible to ignore. The color has the visual volume of a warning sticker, industrial marker or piece of emergency equipment.

It suits the contents perfectly.

Nothing about the tape wants to whisper.

The program runs 97:34, filling almost the entire usable territory of a C100. That duration matters because the seduction is cumulative. This would be a very different object at forty minutes. Nearly one hundred minutes allows the joke to become obsession. By the time Marvin Gaye arrives, the listener has lived inside the subject long enough that his appearance feels earned.

The original cover artwork is no longer present with the post, which leaves the cassette itself and track list carrying most of the surviving visual identity. Strangely, that absence creates another appropriate layer. Something once explicit has disappeared, while the musical evidence remains.

The tape is still talking.

And what it says is not simply “sex.”

It starts with plausible deniability.

Maybe this is satire.

Then somebody is kissing somebody.

Somebody is in somebody else’s home.

Somebody is not that girl.

Sex appears.

Crazy enters.

Queerness enters.

Romance enters.

Violence enters.

Questions appear.

Everything launches.

The language gets filthy.

Bodies become increasingly unavoidable.

Industrial lust arrives.

Rap removes most remaining euphemism.

Marvin Gaye briefly restores elegance.

Then bondage and masochism close the door.

That is a remarkably complete emotional arc for a pile of records that were never originally intended to communicate with one another.

The tape turns them into one long proposition.

Not exactly a love letter.

Certainly not a conventional romance.

More like a hundred-minute analog dare that keeps getting less hypothetical every time the reels turn.

VA - 2018 - HNW C93

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 8:28PM

Private Release – none

HNW begins in almost the exact opposite way a sensible mixtape is supposed to begin.

There is no immediate hook, no recognizable pop entrance, no quick declaration of genre and hardly even the ordinary sensation that a “song” has started. The first entry on the handwritten and typed track lists is simply “Dedicated To Conrad Roy III,” without an artist credit. For nearly five minutes the recording establishes itself through an extraordinarily low mechanical resonance. Deep in the audio is a powerful frequency around 27 Hz with successive harmonics appearing above it, producing something closer to machinery, vibration or an electrical organism than a conventional musical introduction. The sound changes internally, accumulates abrasion and finally begins breaking apart before the next section takes over.

It is an outrageous way to start a cassette.

Most mixtapes spend their opening minutes trying to convince somebody to continue listening. HNW seems almost hostile to that idea. It asks whether the listener is willing to enter first.

That distinction becomes even stranger when considering how this tape was originally heard. A substantial part of its life was spent being played through a small portable cassette recorder with a built-in speaker. The deepest part of that opening would never have arrived through such a speaker with anything resembling the authority it possesses through a larger contemporary system. What remained were the harmonics, buzz, pressure and upper portions of the vibration. The same cassette can therefore reveal a different object decades later without anything on the tape having changed. Better playback does not simply make the old recording “clearer.” It exposes regions of the old recording that had been waiting there the entire time.

At approximately 4:44 the first enormous sonic room gives way to Dobhar Cho’s III, IV and V, but HNW still refuses anything approaching normal mixtape hospitality. The first ten minutes are essentially a sustained entrance into obscurity. Only around the eleven-minute mark does Rites Of Spring’s “Patience” suddenly create the recognizable physical attack of a band.

That placement makes “Patience” sound different.

Taken from its normal context, hardcore becomes relief.

Guitars, drums, voice and human velocity suddenly seem almost comforting after the strange low-frequency environment preceding them. It is an excellent example of something HNW repeatedly accomplishes: extremity is not confined to the obviously extreme music. Context can make familiar music become the strange event.

Cardinal follows, then Life’s Blood with “Catch Our Breath.” The movement through punk and hardcore briefly suggests that the cassette has finally revealed its territory.

It has not.

Loke Rahbek and Frederik Valentin’s “Somersault” pulls everything into another atmosphere, after which Basil Poledouris’ “Anvil Of Crom” arrives with enormous cinematic weight. This transition alone would be enough to derail an ordinary genre-based compilation. Here it feels completely natural because the tape has already established that scale itself is one of its instruments.

Small sound.

Large sound.

Private sound.

Monumental sound.

Abrasion.

Melody.

Room.

Landscape.

A mixtape can control those dimensions without altering a single recording. Placement does the work.

“Anvil Of Crom” is particularly ridiculous and wonderful in this environment because film music is designed to make invisible physical scale appear in the mind. Put it inside a tape surrounded by obscure electronics, punk, noise and tiny privately circulated recordings and suddenly the orchestra feels gigantic. It does not merely sound louder. It seems to occupy more land.

Then David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s “Love Theme (Solo Rhodes)” does nearly the reverse.

After the heroic physical mass of Poledouris, the Rhodes becomes interior architecture. Space contracts. Something tender and dreamlike enters the cassette just before HNW commits one of its nastiest structural decisions.

A9 through A16 are not even individually identified on the finished track list.

They are simply:

Bong Rips Of Brutality Comp.

Eight selections become one block.

That is important.

The cassette temporarily stops treating songs as individual compositions and starts treating an entire compilation as raw sonic matter. Eight separate pieces are swallowed by one notation on the J-card. Instead of artist-title-artist-title-artist-title, the listener gets a concentrated region of noisegrind and goregrind operating almost like weather.

This is a mixtape inside a mixtape, except its internal identities have deliberately become less important than the effect of the mass.

After the tenderness of the solo Rhodes, the effect is vicious.

Beauty is not used to calm the cassette permanently. Beauty is used to make the next assault hurt differently.

That is sophisticated sequencing.

HNW repeatedly recognizes something that genre purism misses: a beautiful recording and a hideous recording can increase one another’s power. Put fifty abrasive tracks together and the nervous system eventually adapts. Put something extraordinarily delicate immediately before the abrasion and suddenly the edge returns.

The ear needs contrast in order to understand extremity.

Surplus Killing’s “Are You Somebody?” and Sadio’s “Sophisticated Methods Of Torture” finish Side A, carrying the tape out through increasingly hostile territory. By the end of the first 46 minutes, the opening mechanical vibration has expanded into something much larger: hardcore, ambient space, cinema, dream music, grind, noise and power electronics have all occupied the same strip of magnetic material.

Then Side B performs a completely different trick.

Acetate Zero’s “Contemplating The Existence Of The Leaves” begins the second side and lasts a little over four minutes. Even the title is almost comically gentle after the end of Side A. The cassette has moved from sophisticated methods of torture to contemplating leaves.

That is HNW in one transition.

No apology.

No explanation.

Leaves.

Steve Miller Band’s “Something To Believe In” follows for nearly five minutes, introducing an even stranger sort of normality. A piece of recognizable classic-rock vocabulary appearing here does not make HNW conventional. HNW makes Steve Miller weird.

This is one of the pleasures of mixtapes assembled by somebody whose listening habits have no interest in maintaining cultural borders. A famous recording can become considerably stranger than an obscure one simply because of where it has been placed.

H.C.O.D.’s “Bloodsoiled” tears another opening in the sequence. Then, at roughly fifteen minutes into Side B, ABC appears with “Be Near Me.”

ABC.

On this tape.

Perfect.

It is difficult to imagine a more useful piece of sequencing.

“Be Near Me” is polished, immediate and almost extravagantly melodic compared with much of HNW. Its surface is smooth enough to make everything around it feel damaged. It arrives after noise and heaviness without embarrassment, occupies a few minutes completely, and then unknowingly stands in front of the largest abyss on the entire cassette.

At approximately 18:33, Neto’s “Enumeration De Zamvoli” begins.

It does not relinquish the tape until roughly 40:56.

More than twenty-two minutes.

That is the structural secret of Side B.

The first eighteen minutes have trained the listener to expect movement: four distinctly different recordings, each providing another room. Acetate Zero, Steve Miller, H.C.O.D., ABC. Then the doors stop opening.

The listener enters one enormous chamber.

For almost half of Side B, HNW ceases behaving like a mixtape in the usual sense. The Neto piece occupies enough duration that it begins rewriting the listener’s memory of everything that preceded it. Instead of another clever transition arriving after three or four minutes, the tape demands residence.

This is where the title HNW begins to feel less like a genre description than an architectural condition.

Wall.

Duration.

Density.

Persistence.

Something happens to perception when a sound continues considerably longer than the mind initially expects. The first minute is an event. Several minutes become an environment. Twenty minutes becomes a place.

That transformation is particularly effective on cassette because there is no visual progress bar announcing exactly how much suffering remains. On a portable player, the object simply continues turning. The reels themselves are the clock.

Then, with only about five minutes remaining, Apostate & Death Dedication’s “Bursting Blood” becomes the exit.

There is no return to Steve Miller.

No ABC reprise.

No reward for surviving the long center.

The cassette simply finishes inside another extreme recording.

Side B therefore has an almost cruelly elegant shape:

fragile beauty,

familiar song,

abrasion,

perfect pop,

twenty-two-minute abyss,

blood.

That is not random eclecticism.

It is composition using other people’s recordings.

The physical tape quietly confirms another wonderful detail. HNW is housed on a Sony UX90, a Type II high-bias cassette marked for ninety minutes. Yet the surviving digital transfer runs approximately 46:17 on Side A and 46:19 on Side B, totaling roughly 92 minutes and 36 seconds. HNW C93 is therefore almost absurdly literal. The music consumes practically every usable moment the cassette can surrender beyond its nominal ninety-minute identity.

The tape is full.

The artwork understands fullness differently.

The front cover contains a dark grinning figure dressed in formal white clothing against near-total blackness. The face almost disappears before the teeth do. Open the J-card and the opposite panel presents a hand holding mallets over what appears to be a vibraphone or similar percussion instrument. The pairing is strange enough without needing explanation: grotesque face, immaculate clothes, hand, mallets, golden bars, darkness.

Tone and impact.

The inside insert creates another accidental correspondence. The typed HNW track list has been pasted over a page discussing Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. The surrounding prose describes something being assembled piece by piece, almost as a puzzle or detective story.

That language now belongs accidentally to the cassette.

A mixtape is precisely that kind of construction.

One recording creates a clue for another.

Something selected years earlier suddenly explains a later transition.

A track that appears ridiculous on paper becomes necessary when heard after the correct sound.

The maker may not even consciously know every relationship while constructing it. Sequence discovers relationships after the fact.

The original handwritten track list makes this even better. Numbered songs move downward through ruled notebook paper while large scribbled forms hover above them. They look halfway between absent-minded drawing, private notation and a seismograph trying to record a thought. The typed version later cleans the information enough to function as packaging, but the notebook pages preserve something closer to the construction site.

HNW is especially good home-listening material because it can completely alter the perceived dimensions of a room. It is not “background music” in any useful sense. Leave it running and eventually the room has to negotiate with it.

But the cassette has another imaginable environment: nighttime movement.

A bicycle.

An almost empty street.

Too much alcohol, too much weed, impaired depth perception, darkness at the edge of the block and the ordinary urban suspicion that something unpleasant may be waiting around a corner.

Played from a little portable cassette recorder, music this strange does not simply soundtrack that environment. It interferes with it.

The street becomes part of the composition.

Passing cars become accidental overdubs.

A distant argument enters the mix.

Wind destroys quiet sections.

Streetlights begin functioning like visual rhythm.

Someone approaching on the sidewalk hears whatever impossible recording is currently pouring from the speaker and has to incorporate that information into their own understanding of the situation.

There is something deeply funny about using extremely hostile experimental music as a form of portable personal atmosphere. The person carrying the tape may be frightened by the city while simultaneously sounding far stranger than whatever the city might contain.

HNW has improved with time because it was never especially dependent upon the musical present. It already sounded temporally confused in 2018. Rites Of Spring, Life’s Blood, Steve Miller, ABC, film music, contemporary experimental electronics, underground noise and tiny bursts from an extreme compilation coexist without being asked to represent their decades correctly.

The cassette therefore does not preserve 2018 as a musical fashion.

It preserves one nervous system moving through music in 2018.

That is much more valuable.

And now the physical transfer adds another layer. The Type II tape, the source recordings, the deck, the later digital capture and the years between plays have turned HNW into something slightly different from the collection of recordings originally used to construct it. Rebuilding the track list on a streaming service would reproduce the titles but not the object.

The particular transitions would be cleaner.

The levels would change.

The noise floor would disappear.

The strange continuity of Side A and Side B would be broken into selectable units.

Most importantly, the listener could escape.

On the cassette, Neto gets twenty-two minutes because Neto gets twenty-two minutes.

That authority is one of the forgotten beauties of mixtapes.

HNW is not really a tape devoted to extreme music.

It is a tape devoted to extremity as a way of hearing.

A whisper becomes extreme after noise.

ABC becomes extreme in the middle of power electronics.

A soundtrack becomes extreme beside hardcore.

Twenty-two minutes becomes extreme because four shorter songs taught the listener to expect another door.

And a nearly subsonic mechanical vibration becomes an absolutely insane way to begin a mixtape because almost nobody would choose it when trying to make a good first impression.

HNW does not care about making a good first impression.

It makes a world.

Then it closes the door.

original cover: