Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 9:23AM
This 1983 various-artists cassette is the kind of compilation that rewards associative listening because it never stays inside one narrow musical identity for very long. The Angels Are Coming moves through post-punk, goth, experimental electronics, industrial textures and dark independent music with a deliberately unsettled character. Instead of presenting one scene from one angle, it feels more like a cross-section of early-1980s underground culture, with bands and artists pushing in different directions while still sharing a general atmosphere of tension, alienation, theatricality and experimentation.
The original double-cassette compilation was released through Pleasantly Surprised and pulls together a broad range of acts including The March Violets, The Alarm, Bone Orchard, Cultural Amnesia, Bauhaus, Death in June, Gene Loves Jezebel, Pink Industry, Blue Orchids, Nico, Test Department and others. That breadth is part of the appeal. It does not behave like a genre sampler with every track neatly reinforcing the last one. It behaves more like a network.
One track can be stark and skeletal.
The next can be dramatic.
Another can lean toward noise.
Another toward synths.
Another toward something almost pop-shaped.
The cassette keeps moving through different emotional temperatures without losing the sense that all of it belongs to the same broad underground weather system.
That makes the compilation especially good material for a handmade cassette because the visual object does not need to reduce the music into one image. It can wander too.
The shell here is pink, with a bright orange paper label typed “VARIOUS ARTISTS 1983 / The Angels Are Coming.” The color combination is almost aggressively vivid. Pink plastic and fluorescent orange paper immediately refuse the obvious visual language suggested by the title. “The Angels Are Coming” could easily invite pale religious imagery, white light, clouds, gold, heaven, purity or some kind of dramatic gothic symbolism. Instead the cassette looks artificial, commercial and almost toy-like.
That choice works because it makes the title stranger.
The angels are not arriving through clouds.
They are arriving in pink plastic.
The front foldout is much quieter. Large gray-green paper fragments dominate the two main panels, bordered by white and black lines. The material looks worn, industrial and anonymous. One side is almost empty except for texture, faint stains and a vertical line. The other contains another torn section with a similarly muted surface. There is very little conventional imagery to grab onto.
The spine carries the vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip and the familiar black glitter band. Against the almost blank gray panels, that black glitter becomes unusually prominent. It looks decorative and severe at the same time, a narrow sparkling barrier between the anonymous surface and the identifying text.
There is something almost architectural about the front.
Flat surfaces.
Borders.
Edges.
Torn paper.
Black strip.
White space.
It feels less like a cover image than a constructed wall.
Then the inside completely changes the visual language.
The reverse collage uses a mail-order lingerie advertisement centered on a woman wearing a purple bra. To the left, four numbered selling points explain the garment in technical language: “Innovative Magic Lift Sling,” “Wireless,” “Lightly Padded Straps” and “Full Coverage.” Beneath those headings are phrases about lifting, separating, staying in place, providing support, preventing shoulder strain and ensuring all-day comfort.
Removed from the catalog and attached to this cassette, that language starts doing something else.
“Lifts and separates.”
“Stays in place.”
“Support.”
“Prevents strain.”
“Full coverage.”
Those are ordinary product claims, but once detached from their original sales function they begin sounding almost psychological or institutional. They describe containment, protection, structure, control and endurance.
That is where the package starts generating the kind of far-out correlation this compilation invites.
The title says angels are coming.
The catalog talks about support.
The front looks blank and severe.
The cassette is pink.
The label is orange.
The music moves through darkness, electronics, post-punk, industrial pressure and theatrical voices.
None of these elements explains the others, but they keep rubbing against one another.
The compilation itself makes that possible because its track titles and artists already create a dense field of associations. Titles such as “Dark Entries,” “Black Radio,” “Unsafe Building,” “Nightmare,” “Where I Belong” and “Kingdom Come” carry their own images before the music even begins. When those phrases are placed beside words like “support,” “coverage,” “stays in place” and “lifts and separates,” the connections become strange very quickly.
That is not illustration.
It is cross-wiring.
The music produces one set of ideas.
The catalog produces another.
The title produces another.
The colors produce another.
The physical tape produces another.
The object works because all of them remain active at once.
The lingerie advertisement also introduces a body into a package whose front is almost entirely abstract. The outer panels are surfaces, edges and paper texture. The inside suddenly presents flesh, fabric, engineering and sales language. The movement from blankness to body gives the foldout a strong physical rhythm.
Closed, it is nearly mute.
Opened, it becomes specific.
That change feels appropriate for a compilation containing so many different kinds of sound. The package does not reveal everything at once. It shifts identity depending on how it is handled.
The pink shell adds another layer because it is so visually clean compared with the old, shadowy underground music inside. There is no distressed black cassette, no photocopied skull, no gloomy band photograph. The plastic is bright and almost cheerful, which makes the darker material feel even more displaced.
That displacement is useful.
It stops the music from being trapped inside its expected visual history.
The music remains 1983.
The cassette becomes something else.
The title remains ominous.
The object becomes bright.
The inner advertisement remains commercial.
The association network becomes personal.
That is where this Private Release version feels especially alive. The source compilation already gathers unrelated artists into one temporary structure, and the handmade cassette repeats that operation visually by gathering unrelated paper fragments, color systems and commercial imagery into another temporary structure.
Compilation becomes collage.
Collage becomes another form of compilation.
The original tape collects sound.
This version collects associations.
The pleasure comes from noticing how far those associations can travel before they snap.
A dark song title can connect to an orange label.
A phrase about angels can collide with bra engineering.
A post-punk track can suddenly make a blank gray paper surface feel correct.
A sales phrase can become existential when removed from the catalog.
That is the fun of this object.
It does not solve the music.
It keeps opening more routes through it.
— ChatGPT
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Now that the actual audio is back in front of me, the first thing that changes is scale. This is not just an obscure 1983 compilation represented by a handmade cassette. The uploaded sequence has its own compact architecture: a short intro, four tracks on the first side, three substantial tracks on the second, then a brief outro. The titles and durations alone already create a miniature world. “Intro” runs just under fifty seconds, The March Violets’ “Radiant Boys” stretches close to four minutes, The Alarm’s “Unsafe Building” runs more than four, Bone Orchard’s “Shall I Carry The Budgie Woman?” just under three, and Sugar Bullet Mission’s “Beware The...” pushes past five. Side B continues with Peter Becker’s “Transatlantic Flight,” Cultural Amnesia’s “Kingdom Come,” Dance Chapter’s “Carve An Arc,” then the forty-second outro. The sequence feels curated rather than accidental, with short framing pieces surrounding a group of songs that keep changing emotional and sonic posture.
The intro is important because it makes the cassette feel entered rather than simply started. Instead of dropping immediately into a recognizable band, there is a brief threshold. Then “Radiant Boys” arrives and the tape opens into the sharp, dark energy associated with early-1980s post-punk and goth-adjacent underground music. The March Violets bring that mixture of rhythm, tension and theatrical cool where the music can feel danceable without ever becoming carefree. It establishes a world of movement under pressure, which becomes one of the threads running through the rest of the side.
“Unsafe Building” shifts the emotional register while keeping the sense of urgency. The Alarm have a more anthemic impulse, with the song pushing outward rather than curling inward. Even the title creates a strong image before the sound has fully settled: an unstable structure, somewhere you should perhaps not remain. Coming after “Radiant Boys,” it makes the tape feel larger. The first track feels bodily and nocturnal, while this one carries something closer to public declaration. The compilation begins expanding from private atmosphere into architecture, danger and social space.
Bone Orchard’s “Shall I Carry The Budgie Woman?” breaks that seriousness in exactly the right way because the title itself introduces absurdity before the track begins. That kind of sudden weirdness is one of the things that makes old underground compilations so enjoyable. A scene can be dark, dramatic and stylistically severe, yet somebody still names a song something ridiculous. The shift keeps the tape from becoming one-dimensional. The music may live in a shadowy early-1980s world, but the people making it were still funny, strange, bored, playful and capable of making choices that resist tidy historical packaging.
Sugar Bullet Mission’s “Beware The...” closes the first side with enough duration to feel like a destination rather than another quick entry. The unfinished title is particularly effective in sequence because it leaves the warning unresolved. Beware the what? The missing object becomes part of the atmosphere. After “Unsafe Building” and “Shall I Carry The Budgie Woman?,” the tape has already moved between danger and absurdity, so “Beware The...” sits perfectly between them. It sounds like a warning whose meaning has been partly erased.
Side B begins with Peter Becker’s “Transatlantic Flight,” and even the title changes the physical scale of the compilation. Buildings and bodies suddenly give way to travel and distance. A transatlantic flight means leaving one place, crossing enormous empty space and arriving somewhere culturally different. On a cassette made from artists scattered across an underground network, that title almost becomes a metaphor for the compilation itself. These records and tapes were physical objects moving between cities, countries, labels, shops, mail-order catalogs and bedrooms long before an online link could flatten the distance.
Cultural Amnesia’s “Kingdom Come” is the longest piece in the uploaded group, running well over five minutes, and its placement gives the second side a heavier center of gravity. The title carries religious and apocalyptic associations, but Cultural Amnesia’s electronic language makes those ideas feel mediated through machinery rather than church ritual. The phrase “Kingdom Come” suggests arrival, judgment, completion or destruction, yet the sound world is human-made, synthetic and technological. That contradiction is a good fit for the compilation’s title too. Angels may be coming, but they are arriving through tape hiss, electronics, post-punk rhythm and small-label cassette culture rather than through stained glass.
Dance Chapter’s “Carve An Arc” follows with another strong spatial phrase. Carving an arc implies movement through space, making a curve by force. Coming after “Transatlantic Flight” and “Kingdom Come,” the side begins to feel full of directional language: crossing, arriving, carving, moving. Whether that was consciously intended by the original compiler or not, the sequence produces it. That is exactly the kind of correlation a compilation can generate once songs are placed beside one another. Their titles start communicating outside the songs themselves.
Then the outro appears and closes the tape the same way the intro opened it, with a short frame rather than simply allowing the last full track to stop everything. That small structural decision makes the sequence feel enclosed. Intro and outro become bookends, and everything between them feels temporarily contained inside one cassette-sized environment. It reinforces the sense that this is not merely a handful of unrelated tracks copied together. Somebody wanted the listener to enter and leave.
The Private Release version intensifies that sense of entering another world because the object is so visually disconnected from the expected aesthetics of the music. The cassette shell is pink, with a fluorescent orange label typed “VARIOUS ARTISTS 1983 / The Angels Are Coming.” The colors are almost radioactive together. There is nothing gloomy, sepulchral or traditionally gothic about them. The cassette could contain aerobics music, children’s songs or some aggressively cheerful homemade mix. Then this peculiar early-1980s underground material starts coming out of it.
That mismatch becomes much more interesting once the title is taken seriously. “The Angels Are Coming” sounds huge. It implies arrival from somewhere beyond ordinary life, whether religious, supernatural or metaphorical. Yet the physical cassette is small, plastic and brightly colored. Something potentially cosmic has been miniaturized into a pink rectangle with orange paper stuck to it. I love that scale difference. The divine, ominous or unknowable gets carried by two reels and a narrow strip of magnetic tape.
The outer artwork moves in the opposite direction from the cassette’s brightness. The front is almost empty, built from torn gray-green paper, faint stains, texture, seams and white space. It looks anonymous and worn, almost architectural. There is no obvious central image. The surface itself becomes the image. Against the pink and orange cassette, the cover feels subdued, aged and strangely quiet.
The vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip and the narrow black glitter section become unusually strong because there is so little competing imagery around them. The glitter catches light while the rest of the surface absorbs it. The whole thing has a restrained exterior that gives almost no clue about the bright shell inside. Opening the case therefore produces another little visual transition, almost equivalent to the intro on the tape.
Then the inside explodes into the lingerie advertisement.
The large photograph of the woman in the purple bra is surrounded by numbered product claims: “Innovative Magic Lift Sling,” “Wireless,” “Lightly Padded Straps,” “Full Coverage.” The copy explains how the garment lifts, separates, stays securely in place, provides support, prevents strain and offers comfort. In its original catalog context, every word is practical and commercial. Once attached to The Angels Are Coming, those same phrases become strangely charged.
And now there is the connection you pointed out earlier that I would not have known without you: breasts themselves register as heavenly to you. That changes the image-title relationship completely. The bra photograph is not merely ironic consumer imagery colliding with a dark underground compilation. There is an actual personal association between the female body and the idea of heavenliness. “The Angels Are Coming” and the breast-centered advertisement are therefore connected inside your own visual language, even though nobody looking at the object from outside could confidently reconstruct that connection without being told.
That is exactly why these tapes are more interesting than straightforward graphic design. Some of the logic is visible. Some of it is cultural. Some is funny. Some is sexual. Some is musical. Some exists only because of what was happening inside the person assembling the tape at that moment. The object can preserve all of those layers without labeling them.
The language in the advertisement then creates another set of associations independently of that personal one. Angels offer protection. The bra advertisement promises support. Angels are often imagined as lifting upward. The advertisement literally says “lifts.” Angels may provide comfort. The product promises all-day comfort. None of those parallels needs to be treated as intentional symbolism, but once the images and words are physically adjacent, the possible connections multiply.
That is the pleasure of collage at its best. It does not operate like a crossword puzzle where every answer has one correct solution. It behaves more like a field of electrical contacts. Touch two things together and sometimes nothing happens. Touch two others and suddenly there is voltage.
The bright pink cassette with its orange label produces another kind of voltage against the austere outer cover. The exterior looks old, blank and almost institutional. The inside is fleshy, commercial and intimate. The cassette is loud with color. The music moves through goth, post-punk, electronics and experimental underground sounds. Each layer refuses to behave the way the neighboring layer suggests it should.
That refusal matters because the original compilation itself works in a similar fashion. The March Violets are not The Alarm. The Alarm are not Bone Orchard. Bone Orchard are not Cultural Amnesia. Cultural Amnesia are not Dance Chapter. Their differences are the reason the collection has energy. The compilation does not create unity by making every artist sound alike. It creates unity by putting unlike things into sequence.
The Private Release artwork repeats that process visually. Gray torn paper. Black glitter. Pink plastic. Orange label. Breasts. Technical lingerie copy. White borders. Typewriter text. None of those elements needs to collapse into one style. Their coexistence becomes the style.
The uploaded audio makes that clearer because the transitions are now audible again rather than theoretical. The sequence moves from intro into post-punk tension, into anthem, into oddness, into unresolved warning, then across the ocean, into electronic apocalypse, into another spatial gesture, and finally out. That is already collage before any paper is cut.
The paper collage therefore feels less like decoration around the music and more like a second performance of the same basic act.
Select.
Place.
Interrupt.
Continue.
A cassette compilation is montage in time.
A paper collage is montage in space.
This Private Release version puts both together.
There is also something beautiful about rediscovering the actual files now, years after the tape was made. The audio restores details that memory had reduced to a general feeling. The names come back. The lengths come back. The transitions come back. The sequence stops being an old object photographed for a blog and becomes playable again.
That makes the cassette function almost like a sealed memory container. The physical art survived even when the audio files temporarily disappeared into a hard drive somewhere. Then the files reappear and the object reconnects with its sound. What had become mostly visual suddenly becomes temporal again.
And because these tapes were made out of whatever music, paper, magazines, feelings, jokes and associations were available around you at the time, recovering the audio also means recovering part of the mental environment in which the object was made. Not a perfect autobiographical transcript, but little sparks of orientation.
You hear a transition and something returns.
You look at an image and another association returns.
The tape does not tell you what you felt.
It gives you enough material to remember.
That is a much stranger and richer archive than simply keeping the original commercial releases intact.
— ChatGPT
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