VA - 2016 - Shy Boy #2 C90

These photographs document several different physical stages of the project. The first two images show the master cassette made for dubbing. The following four show the copy prepared for Mixtape Club. The material later continued into another form as the Private Release cassette VA - 2016 - Shy Boy 2 C90.
Seeing the objects together makes the sequence clearer. The music was not attached to one permanent cassette or one finished design. A master could be used to create another copy for a particular setting, while selections and ideas could later reappear inside a different Private Release object. The newly added photographs preserve that physical trail alongside the track information already documented in the post.
—ChatGPT

Originally posted Sep 30, 2019 10:45PM

 Private Release – none

This mixtape is a beautiful example of what happens when sequencing becomes its own creative act instead of merely assembling favorite songs. The selections do not stay inside one genre, one decade, one level of fidelity or even one basic idea of what a song is supposed to do. The tape keeps changing its mind. Crooning, noise, indie pop, black metal, punk, experimental electronics, hardcore, guitar music and little untitled interruptions all occupy the same physical strip of tape. What holds it together is not stylistic consistency. It is the ear choosing what should happen next.

Side A announces that immediately. An untitled piece gives way to Slim Whitman singing “I Remember You,” which is already an enormous stylistic opening. Whitman’s high, old-fashioned country-pop voice carries an entirely different cultural atmosphere from almost everything that follows, but that difference is exactly what makes him useful here. Instead of using the first recognizable track to announce a genre, the tape establishes that genre itself is not going to be the organizing principle. From there another untitled fragment leads into Breathing Problem’s “Washing Her Feet,” and suddenly the listener has crossed a huge distance without physically going anywhere.

That movement continues through the entire first side. Best Coast’s “The Only Place” appears in the same sequence as Burzum’s “Dunkelheit,” which is the kind of pairing that looks ridiculous if reduced to a genre list and feels completely plausible when heard as part of somebody’s actual listening life. One is bright, melodic California guitar pop, the other an extended black-metal piece built around repetition, atmosphere and isolation. The contrast is not a problem to solve. The contrast is information. The tape records the fact that both sounds can exist inside one listener without requiring separate identities for each one.

The untitled tracks between many of the named selections are particularly important because they prevent the tape from becoming a straightforward compilation. They act like hinges, interruptions, little rooms between larger rooms. Sometimes a radical stylistic jump can be made even stranger by putting something brief and unidentified between the two pieces. Instead of song A simply ending and song B beginning, there is a moment where the listener loses the map. Then the next recognizable world arrives.

Bossy’s “Walk Around,” Personal & the Pizzas’ “I Don’t Feel So Happy Now No More,” Ottawa’s “Holy of Holies,” H100s’ “Destroy Cleveland,” Heavenly’s “Three Star Compartment” and Crimpshrine’s “Trying Too Hard” continue that first-side zigzag. Punk appears in several forms, but even there the tape refuses to treat punk as one stable sound. Personal & the Pizzas can be crude, funny and deliberately dumb in a completely different manner from Ottawa’s hardcore attack. H100s bring another regional hardcore vocabulary, Heavenly brings melodic indie pop, and Crimpshrine brings the rough emotional intelligence of East Bay punk. The result is not “here is the punk section.” It is more like punk repeatedly appearing in different disguises inside a much larger conversation.

The side therefore becomes a kind of argument against sorting music too efficiently. Record stores, databases and streaming services want categories because categories make enormous libraries navigable. A handmade mixtape can behave differently. It can say that Slim Whitman and Burzum belong together because they belonged together during one particular act of listening. That relationship does not need to exist anywhere else in the world. Once the cassette is recorded, however, the relationship becomes physical. One song literally follows the other on magnetic tape.

Side B pushes that freedom even harder. Again an untitled piece opens the side before Internationale’s “And For All She Never Forgave,” followed by Croatian Amor’s “Song of the Mermaids,” Fixation’s “Crawl,” Kites’ “Cry for the Death of a Crazy Man,” and John Fahey’s “Requiem for Molly, Pt. 3.” Even within those few selections the tape moves through completely different ideas of atmosphere, noise, composition and recording technique. Fahey’s guitar language arrives inside a sequence containing music that can be far more electronic, abrasive or obscure, yet the shift does not feel like the tape suddenly becoming respectable. Fahey becomes another texture inside the larger object.

Then the second side accelerates into a particularly dense stretch of punk and hardcore mutations. Cal and the Calories’ “Pain in My Ass,” Born Against’s “B A Are Fucking Dead,” Big Zit’s “Skoolyard,” Crossed Out, The Vindictives’ “Wonderful World,” Screeching Weasel’s “I Wanna Be a Homosexual,” Sneaky Pinks, Schlong’s “Goodbye to Romance” and the other pieces around them turn the latter portion into something much faster, funnier and more physically agitated. But because the listener has already traveled through Whitman, Burzum, Heavenly, experimental material and Fahey, even the hardcore tracks arrive with different ears attached to them.

Born Against into Big Zit into Crossed Out is not simply a pile of aggression. Each band treats aggression differently. Born Against can feel argumentative and intellectually hostile, Crossed Out reduces hardcore toward astonishing density and physical compression, while other selections around them use humor, amateurism, melody or absurdity as part of their attack. Putting them next to one another makes those distinctions easier to hear. Variety can sharpen difference rather than blur it.

The Vindictives and Screeching Weasel introduce another angle because melody becomes almost obnoxiously catchy without abandoning punk’s ability to irritate. “I Wanna Be a Homosexual” is deliberately provocative and comic in a completely different manner from the severity encountered elsewhere on the cassette. By this point the tape has established enough freedom that humor does not feel like relief from the “serious” music. Humor is simply another legitimate sound.

Schlong’s “Goodbye to Romance” is a particularly fitting late-tape selection because cover versions, mutations and cultural collisions are already part of the logic of the whole mixtape. A familiar piece of musical culture can be taken apart, dirtied up, sped sideways or otherwise made to belong to somebody else. That is basically what the cassette itself does with every song on it. Nothing is altered inside the recording, but context changes everything.

The physical cassette makes this curatorial chaos visible. The shell is smoky transparent plastic, allowing the black tape and pale reels to remain visible, while the front label is an almost radioactive green. The typewritten identification sits directly on that luminous field. Flip the cassette over and the label becomes metallic orange with a second bright-green PRIVATE RELEASE strip placed on top. The two sides look related but not identical, which suits a tape whose two musical halves continually mirror and disrupt each other.

The orange and green are fantastic together because they look inexpensive, handmade and extremely deliberate at the same time. There is no attempt to simulate commercial record-company packaging. The labels look like materials that existed in the room and were selected because their interaction felt right. Once attached to the cassette, however, those ordinary pieces of paper become inseparable from the music stored underneath them.

The foldout artwork is even more aggressively associative. The front uses torn black-and-white cartoon material centered around the wonderful phrase “PUBIC ADDRESS SYSTEM,” followed underneath by “PORN?.... OR IS IT ART?” A man appears to be addressing a woman’s crotch with a tiny “HELLO!” while her legs rise above him. On the facing panel another cartoon figure answers “HELLO!” while a little chorus of heads replies “HI! HI!” The humor is juvenile, sexual, absurd and conceptual all at once.

That phrase “PORN?.... OR IS IT ART?” becomes especially funny attached to a handmade mixtape because it accidentally raises a legitimate question about the object itself. Not whether the cartoon is pornography, but where ordinary cultural material becomes art. None of the songs were created for this cassette. The cartoon was not drawn for it. The lingerie advertisements were not photographed for it. The typewriter, paper, tape shell and printed scraps all existed for other purposes. The creative act is selection, sequencing, cutting, placement and the decision that these things belong together.

The question on the cover therefore becomes larger than its original joke. Is it porn or art? Is it a compilation or an artwork? Is a mixtape merely copied music or is the relationship between the copied pieces itself expressive? The cassette does not need to answer any of those questions. It physically demonstrates the problem.

The reverse side of the foldout moves from cartoon sex to commercialized femininity. Large pieces of a lingerie catalog surround the typed track list. Faces, bras, torsos and advertising fragments overlap one another, with “Shell Pink” surviving as one of the catalog color names. The bodies have been chopped by the collage process so that the original advertisement’s clean commercial organization is broken apart. A shoulder belongs to one fragment, a face occupies another, a tiny model appears over a larger body, and the track list sits over everything like a technical inventory.

That track list is itself visually wonderful because it is so dense. Twenty-one entries on Side A and eighteen on Side B turn the small typewritten sheet into a wall of information. “Untitled” keeps returning between named artists, so the list develops a rhythm even before it is read closely. Untitled. Artist. Untitled. Artist. Untitled. Artist. It resembles a score for the listening experience.

The list also exposes the enormous conceptual distance being covered. SLIM WHITMAN appears near BREATHING PROBLEM. BEST COAST eventually gives way to BURZUM. PERSONAL & THE PIZZAS occupies the same sheet as HEAVENLY and CRIMPSHRINE. On the reverse journey JOHN FAHEY exists only a few lines away from BORN AGAINST, CROSSED OUT, THE VINDICTIVES and SCREECHING WEASEL. That is not randomness. Randomness would be easier. This is a person repeatedly deciding, “Yes, after this, that.”

That is the heart of the mixtape for me. Every transition contains a tiny act of confidence. There is no algorithm smoothing the edges. No genre radio station is trying to maintain a mood. No listener-retention system is quietly steering the next selection toward something statistically similar. The tape can make an outrageous turn because the person making it wants the outrageous turn.

The C90-length scale makes that even more significant. Across roughly ninety minutes, those decisions accumulate into a portrait of listening rather than a playlist. The tape records not only which songs mattered but how one piece of sound suggested another at that particular moment. Those suggestions can be melodic, emotional, textual, comic, historical, antagonistic or completely private. A connection does not have to be obvious to anyone else in order to have been real while the tape was being assembled.

That is why the untitled pieces may be among the most revealing selections even though they provide the least information on the track list. Their anonymity makes them pure connective tissue. They interrupt the prestige hierarchy that can form when recognizable artists appear. Slim Whitman has a name and history. Burzum has a huge cultural burden attached to the name. John Fahey has an established place in guitar history. An untitled scrap arrives with none of that. On the cassette they all receive the same fundamental treatment: sound placed after other sound.

The pornography-versus-art cartoon on the cover therefore feels increasingly appropriate the longer I look at the whole thing. The cassette is interested in categories but unwilling to respect their borders. High and low culture, noise and melody, beautiful and ugly, sincere and ridiculous, famous and obscure, commercial imagery and handmade collage, pornographic joke and art question all continually leak into one another.

Even the cassette’s bright labels participate in that refusal. Fluorescent green and metallic orange would normally be attention devices, colors designed to shout from packaging or pricing stickers. Here they identify a homemade cassette full of music moving from decades-old crooning to black metal to hardcore to indie pop to experimental sound. Commercial visual language has been detached from commerce and pressed into service as part of a private object.

The word PRIVATE becomes especially important in that context. A mixtape is private in a peculiar way even when another person eventually hears it. The music itself may be publicly available, but the sequence initially exists inside one person’s head. Making the cassette externalizes that hidden sequence. The private association becomes reproducible.

That means this object preserves something more fragile than the songs. Most of the individual recordings can probably be found elsewhere. What is difficult to reconstruct is the exact path through them. Why that untitled fragment followed that song. Why Burzum appeared at that moment. Why Heavenly belonged later. Why Fahey arrived where he did. Why the hardcore cluster needed to accelerate in that particular order. Those decisions belong to a moment.

The cassette freezes the moment without explaining it.

Years later, even the person who made it may not remember every connection.

But the connections themselves remain there.

They are encoded spatially along the tape.

That is one reason an old mixtape can become more interesting with age rather than less. Initially it is a vehicle for listening. Later it becomes evidence of listening. It shows how a mind moved through music at a particular point in time.

The artwork does the same thing with printed matter. A cartoon was available. A lingerie catalog was available. Fluorescent paper was available. A typewriter was available. Those materials entered the object because they were physically present in the world around its construction. The tape therefore records a room and a moment indirectly, even though there is no photograph of the room.

That combination is what makes this one so sweet. It is exuberant without needing to announce exuberance. The music leaps everywhere. The colors are loud. The cover is horny and funny. The back is crowded with women, typography and thirty-nine track entries. The shell lets the reels show through. Everything feels packed with appetite.

It is not trying to prove that the person who made it knows obscure music.

It simply behaves like somebody who enjoys music enough to refuse to keep it in separate boxes.

Slim Whitman gets to live with Burzum.

John Fahey gets to live with Crossed Out.

Heavenly gets to live with H100s.

A lingerie catalog gets to live with a dirty cartoon.

Green gets to live with orange.

Porn gets to ask whether it is art.

And the cassette gets to answer by spinning.

— ChatGPT