Unrest - 1988 - Twister C65

Private Release – none

Twister is the sound of Unrest opening every drawer at once. Recorded across several years, locations and shifting lineups, it collects twenty-four pieces from 1983 through 1988 without pretending that the material belongs to one stable version of the band. The cassette moves through rehearsal fragments, studio experiments, half-developed songs, covers in disguise, private references and early forms of music that would later appear with greater force on Malcolm X Park. It is not a clean bridge between eras. It is the floor beneath the bridge, scattered with tools, scraps and ideas that were never asked to behave.

Released by Teen-Beat on September 9, 1988, Twister runs a little over sixty-three minutes and occupies catalog number 23. The original edition consisted of 344 hand-numbered cassettes, with photocopied inserts printed on yellow, red, blue or orange paper. The colors changed across the run, and the earliest hundred copies lacked the circular Unrest target logo used on later covers. Even before playback, the object resisted complete uniformity. The same recording entered the world wearing several related faces.

The front image came from a Wakefield High School yearbook dating from around 1968. The cover stars Neal Haygood, pulled from an institutional archive of school portraits and placed into a cassette released by people connected to the same Arlington educational landscape years later. Teen-Beat repeatedly treated schools, neighborhoods, friends and local artifacts as materials worthy of formal preservation. A yearbook photograph did not need to remain trapped inside its original social purpose. It could cross decades and become the face of a private music history.

Twister was recorded in a remarkable collection of spaces: Abingdon Observatory, Gustave’s, Zoodio Studio, 5102 Ellicott, Noise New York, Inner Ear, Andrew’s Backyard and a location called The Miracle on 34th Street. The list reads less like professional session documentation than a map assembled from rooms that briefly became recording environments. A studio sits beside a backyard. An address sits beside a phrase that could be a home, an event or a joke. The geography of the album is practical and mythological at the same time.

Mark Robinson, Phil Krauth, Tim Moran, Dave Park and Chris Thomson appear across the recordings, with guest contributions from Tajinder Chadha and Andrew Riley Beaujon. The shifting cast helps explain why Twister feels less like one group captured in one room than a single name passing through different bodies. Unrest is present throughout, but its identity remains elastic. Instruments, roles and methods change while the name continues collecting evidence.

“Disco Majick” begins with a title that immediately opens several doors. Disco promises bodily repetition, while magic promises transformation through hidden procedure. Early Unrest could be rhythmic without becoming dance music and experimental without turning solemn. A groove might begin sincerely, then lose its footing. A joke could become structurally important. Nothing had to decide whether it was clever, stupid or beautiful before entering the tape.

“Woody Allen” and “Green” continue the rapid movement through ordinary names and blunt concepts. Unrest titles often seem lifted from whatever the band happened to be noticing: people, colors, places, political terms, private jokes or cultural debris. The titles do not always function as summaries. They become parallel objects placed beside the sound, creating associations that may remain deliberately incomplete.

“Communist Tart” joins political language to insult, reducing ideology and desire to a phrase that feels both ridiculous and strangely memorable. Early Unrest repeatedly compressed large subjects into compact verbal collisions. The song title does not develop an argument. It throws two charged words together and lets the impact produce its own little weather system.

“Velvet Spit” works similarly. Softness and expulsion meet in two words. Velvet belongs to touch, luxury and theatrical darkness. Spit belongs to the body leaving itself. Together they suggest something elegant made hostile, or something hostile acquiring texture. Twister is full of these tiny contradictions, moments where naming becomes a second form of composition.

“Give Me Yr Eyes” is one of the cassette’s slyest transformations. Beneath its odd, Latin-tinged surface is a disguised version of the Cure’s “A Strange Day.” The source has not been covered in a manner designed to reward quick recognition. It has been bent until the borrowed song begins functioning as Unrest material. Influence is not announced respectfully. It is dressed incorrectly and sent back into public.

“Dago Rising” performs an even stranger act of layering. The piece combines the lyrics associated with “Dago Red” and a vocal connected to “Lucifer Rising,” allowing two different compositions to occupy the same taped space. The result is less a medley than a collision between separate Unrest fragments. One recording does not politely follow the other. They are forced into simultaneity, creating a homemade density that anticipates the group’s later fascination with edits, overlays and unstable archival forms.

Several pieces on Twister exist as earlier or alternate states of songs that would appear on Malcolm X Park. “Oily” is the most obvious example, a rougher and noisier relative of “Oils,” the explosive track that opens the later album. Heard here, the song has not yet been tightened into its definitive architecture. Its energy is already present, but it moves through a less controlled body.

This is one of Twister’s central pleasures. It allows development to be heard without presenting development as improvement in every case. An early version may be less polished but more volatile. A later version may gain force by losing disorder. Both states reveal something the other cannot contain.

“Ragged (nkd t)” announces itself as an alternate condition before the music begins. The abbreviation suggests a stripped or exposed version, another stage in a song’s movement through the Teen-Beat archive. Unrest’s recordings often appear in families rather than isolated final forms. Titles return, mutate and acquire parenthetical distinctions. The catalog behaves like a living filing system where no version completely erases another.

“I Hate Ms. Toivanen/Wshingtn” brings school and location directly into the title. A teacher’s name and a city are joined with a slash, creating a compressed piece of resentment and geography. The phrase feels adolescent, but the cassette does not treat adolescence as material to be corrected later. Irritation, boredom, private enemies and local place names all deserve preservation because they belong to the actual conditions from which the music emerged.

“Sweet Wakefield” turns the band’s high-school environment into something tender, ironic or both. Wakefield is not merely background information attached by future historians. It is part of the imaginative territory. Teen-Beat’s early authority came from recognizing that local life did not need to become famous before it could become culture.

The school, yearbook, houses, studios, backyards and friendships surrounding Unrest formed a complete world because the participants treated them as one. Catalog numbers were assigned. Covers were designed. Cassettes were duplicated. A private history began accumulating before anyone could know which parts might later appear important.

“Twist 66” gives the album its nearest echo of the title, joining a dance instruction to a number that might suggest route, year or arbitrary code. Twisting is rotation around a center, movement that changes orientation without necessarily changing location. The cassette performs that motion constantly. Old songs turn into new versions. Covers become distortions. A school portrait turns into album art. Private history rotates until it faces outward.

“Headringer” carries a heavier physical sensation. The title suggests impact strong enough to leave the skull resonating afterward. It also resembles a homemade compound word, something understood immediately despite not arriving through ordinary usage. Unrest’s language often works this way. Familiar parts are joined until a new object appears between them.

“Neal We Love You” addresses the yearbook figure directly. The cover star is no longer only an image borrowed from 1968. He becomes the recipient of affection from a cassette made twenty years later. The statement is funny, sincere and impossible to verify against any conventional relationship. That ambiguity gives it power. An anonymous school photograph has generated devotion across time.

“Fuck You G.I.” and “Scorpio Rising” pull military and cinematic associations into the final portion of the tape. “Scorpio Rising” invokes Kenneth Anger’s 1963 film, with its motorcycles, occult charge, pop music and eroticized machinery. The reference fits a cassette already fascinated by recombination. Anger treated existing songs, symbols and subcultures as material for a new visual ritual. Unrest approached recorded culture with a related willingness to cut across ownership and intended meaning.

The cassette ends with “Teen Bt,” an abbreviated self-reference that makes the label itself part of the program. Teen-Beat was never merely the company name printed below the track list. It was the organizing intelligence around the music, the graphic system, archive, social network and ongoing claim that these objects deserved continuity.

Twister is sometimes described as a compilation, but that word can make it sound more orderly than it is. The tape does not gather polished highlights from a completed period. It collects unstable states. Some tracks resemble songs on their way somewhere. Others seem complete precisely because they refused to travel farther.

The album’s sixty-three minutes are crowded without becoming exhausting because the material changes shape so frequently. A brief experiment may be followed by a recognizable composition, then a damaged cover, an alternate version or a piece whose private logic remains inaccessible. The cassette behaves less like a single statement than a desk covered in active projects.

That quality places Twister at an important point in Unrest’s history. Tink of S.E. had already demonstrated the band’s refusal of stylistic stability. Malcolm X Park, released later in 1988, would bring greater force and definition. Twister sits between them while also reaching backward to 1983, refusing the convenience of a straight chronology.

It shows that Unrest did not travel neatly from primitive noise toward refined pop. The band accumulated methods. Crudeness remained available after precision arrived. Humor survived seriousness. Private references continued living inside increasingly accomplished songs. The later elegance was not built by erasing disorder. It learned how to frame disorder without killing it.

The title is perfect because a twister does not preserve the arrangement of anything it touches. It lifts objects, changes their positions and deposits them elsewhere with their identities intact but their relationships altered. This cassette does the same with five years of Unrest.

Songs, rooms, friends, teachers, films, political fragments and yearbook faces are pulled into one rotating column. By the time they reach the ground again, they belong to Teen-Beat history.