VA - 2016 - Dude Abides C100

Private Release – none

Dude Abides is an unusually accurate title for a mixtape that refuses to stay inside any one emotional or musical system. Thirty-four pieces pass through a C100: sentimental Christmas music, garage rock, ambient electronics, hardcore fragments lasting seconds, love songs, death metal, glam metal, punk, private-sounding experiments and tracks whose titles are nearly longer than some of the songs surrounding them. There is no attempt to make these things respectable by separating them. They have to live together.

That already feels connected to the world in which the tape was made. By 2016 the Purple House had spent years operating through unlikely coexistence. Children, punks, musicians, Food Not Bombs cooks, neighbors, girlfriends, old friends, temporary visitors, free vegetables, discarded objects, records, radio history and people trying to construct workable lives had all moved through the same building. Hellarity (squat house) existed around the corner as an even less stable version of the same principle. People appeared, disappeared, returned, slept somewhere else for a while and came back. The question of what properly belonged beside what had stopped being especially useful.

Dude Abides operates similarly. It does not argue that Elvis Presley and Monster X belong to the same genre. It simply places them inside the same life.

The tape begins with “Blue Christmas.”

Starting a compilation this unruly with Elvis is almost suspiciously normal. The recording arrives already carrying decades of public memory, but “Blue Christmas” is also an extremely simple emotional proposition: the world can be celebrating while one person experiences the season as absence.

In the history surrounding this tape, Christmas already had private weather. Years earlier, the Purple House could become nearly empty during the holidays as people left to see families and partners. It was a cold house with no central heat, and there had been a Christmas when James remained in Oakland missing his daughters and the life left in Chicago. None of that needs to have been consciously summoned when “Blue Christmas” was selected in 2016. Music does not require deliberate autobiography to find the correct drawer.

An old song can sit quietly for years before another piece of life develops around it.

Then Harlem’s “Beautiful & Very Smart” changes everything.

The enormous cultural object called Elvis is followed by scruffy garage-pop attraction. Sadness becomes flirtation. The singer is no longer mourning someone absent from a Christmas tableau. He is looking at someone in front of him and thinking: you are beautiful, you are smart, maybe something can happen here.

That movement from absence toward curiosity is tiny but important. Dude Abides repeatedly refuses to leave a feeling alone long enough for it to become a doctrine.

Gersemi’s “Harusame Ya” then stretches the room outward. English disappears from the title, the obvious emotional instructions loosen, and the tape begins moving toward sound as atmosphere rather than statement. This is one of the recurring methods across the compilation: a recognizable song establishes something human, another recording smears its edges, then some microscopic act of violence arrives and knocks the whole structure over.

Occult’s “Bloodthirsty (For Satan’s Drink)” lasts seventeen seconds.

The interruption is ridiculous and perfect. Four minutes of contemplation are suddenly attacked by a title containing blood, Satan and drinking, all compressed into less time than it takes to decide what the title means. The tape briefly becomes a trapdoor.

Then Truce’s “Surpass” immediately restores duration.

This alternation between long pieces and tiny hardcore eruptions becomes part of the physical language of the tape. It resembles thought more than conventional programming. A mood expands. Something violent or funny interrupts it. The mind resumes somewhere slightly different.

Monster X reduces the next interruption even further. “No Need” lasts twelve seconds.

There is an enormous philosophical efficiency to a twelve-second song called “No Need.” Whatever argument might have existed has already been refused. No need to elaborate. No need to become a five-minute composition. No need.

Then Internazionale’s “Banners of Sisterhood” opens another wide window.

Internazionale is particularly important inside this compilation because its slower, suspended electronic atmosphere functions almost like connective tissue between harder objects. The tape does not smooth the differences away, but pieces like this allow the nervous system to change speed.

The title also enters a life surrounded by invented families. Sisterhood, brotherhood, parenthood, housemates, bandmates and friends did not always follow official definitions around the Purple House. People could become important because they stayed, helped, cooked, listened, played music or somehow remained present during a terrible year. The relationship might have no clean noun. The relationship existed anyway.

Then Provoker arrives with “Sex With My Ex.”

The title is almost a diagram of another kind of recurrence: something has ended officially but continues physically. Past and present occupy the same room and make a mess of chronology.

That is immediately followed by Lace & Collar’s “Pursuit II.”

Not Pursuit I.

Pursuit II.

The first pursuit will not arrive until the other side of the cassette.

This is one of the tape’s best accidental or deliberate distortions. The sequel precedes the beginning. Cause follows effect. The listener enters a chase already underway and does not receive its supposed origin until much later.

That ordering feels oddly natural inside memory. Human beings rarely remember their lives from Track One forward. An event becomes important and only years later does an earlier event reveal itself as the beginning. Someone disappears and suddenly a conversation from five years before becomes evidence. A house becomes home and afterward the first afternoon inside it changes meaning. The chronology gets edited by significance.

Dude Abides allows Pursuit II to happen first.

Fruit Salad’s “Blood Power” destroys the spaciousness again. The title alone sounds like a slogan from some invented political organization whose platform lasts barely more than a minute. It is followed by Graphite’s “Does Alan Live Here?”

That title now lands with an almost eerie specificity.

There was, in fact, an Alan moving through the geography surrounding James’s life. Alan Dunn had driven from Cleveland with Tony Morabith and entered the Hellarity orbit. Whether the selection had anything whatsoever to do with that fact is less interesting than the collision it creates now.

“Does Alan Live Here?” is also an extremely punk-house question.

Does Alan live here?

Maybe.

Did he pay rent?

Ask somebody else.

Is his stuff in the room?

Probably.

Has anybody seen him this week?

No.

Will he be back tonight?

Possibly with four other people.

Collective houses create a strange ontology of residence. The legal tenant, actual occupant, temporary guest, ex-resident, person sleeping on a couch and person whose amplifiers have been sitting in the basement for nine months can all possess different legitimate claims to the word “here.”

The title turns the cassette into an address.

Jihad’s “Womb” follows.

The word moves violently backward, from housing to the first house. Before Purple House, Hellarity, Chicago, Oakland, girlfriends, bands, jobs and every other structure comes the body in which another body forms.

Then Dropdead answers with “The Dawning.”

Womb. Dawning.

Origin followed by first light.

Again, there is no need to claim this was consciously designed as a symbolic sequence. The more interesting possibility is that feeling can arrange things before language explains what the arrangement is doing.

Lace Curtains’ “Wilshire & Fairfax” moves from bodily origin to an intersection. Suddenly location becomes extremely specific. Streets replace abstractions.

This matters in a tape whose surrounding life is inseparable from addresses. Genoa Street is not merely where a building happened to stand. Certain addresses become containers for whole periods of consciousness. A few houses in North Oakland can eventually contain more personal history than entire cities.

A title consisting of two intersecting streets understands this. The coordinates themselves become enough.

Dirty B.S. follows with “15 Years.”

Time becomes an object.

Fifteen years is too long to picture as individual days, so the mind compresses it into a block. Long relationships, houses, scenes, parenthood, friendships and musical obsessions begin this way. Eventually nobody can remember every night. What remains are highly illuminated fragments surrounded by enormous dark areas.

A tape is one method of throwing a rope into those areas.

Then Andy Boay’s “Evil Masters” closes Side A.

The phrase sounds grandiose, but the music does not arrive as conventional heavy-metal villainy. It dissolves authority instead of building a throne for it. “Masters” can be people, systems, habits, addictions, employers, parents, landlords, scenes, money, memory or whatever else begins deciding the shape of a life while pretending not to.

Side A has traveled from Blue Christmas to Evil Masters without establishing a stable genre, moral system or emotional destination.

Flip the cassette.

Ratt explodes out of the other side with “Round & Round.”

There may be no better song title with which to begin the second side of a cassette.

The reels literally begin going round and round.

The phrase is simultaneously mechanical, romantic and existential. The tape rotates. Relationships repeat. People return to neighborhoods. Thoughts return to old injuries. Songs come back decades after being forgotten. A chorus from 1984 suddenly wakes up inside a 2016 mixtape surrounded by music that would never have been permitted onto the same commercial radio station.

And Ratt sounds enormous here precisely because of what surrounds it. After Side A’s fragmented private universe, “Round & Round” barges in carrying the polished confidence of a giant rock single.

Five seconds later, Monster X says “Worthless.”

That transition is comedy performed with a guillotine.

A huge glam-metal anthem spends four minutes constructing its shoulders, hair, hooks and guitar architecture. Monster X receives all of that achievement and destroys it in five seconds.

Worthless.

Next.

The tape understands that scale can be funny.

Then comes one of its strangest titles:

“It Is Impossible For Her To Know Whom She Will Discover When I Hold Her.”

The sentence is almost an essay hidden inside the track list.

It suggests that intimacy does not simply reveal a person who was already complete. Contact creates another version. Whoever somebody is alone is not exactly whoever appears while loving, fighting, parenting, drinking, performing, grieving, working or being touched by another person.

A self may be relational.

This idea fits strangely well inside a mixtape, because every recording is also becoming another version of itself through proximity. Ratt changes when Monster X follows it. Elvis changes when Harlem follows him. A song can have one meaning on its original album and another when trapped between two unrelated pieces chosen by someone in Oakland years later.

It is impossible for the song to know whom it will become when the mixtape holds it.

Marshal responds with “Okay.”

Thirty-seven seconds.

After one of the most elaborate titles imaginable, the answer is simply: okay.

White Noise’s “My Game of Loving” follows and makes intimacy sound less like confession than apparatus. Love becomes a system with switches, feedback, voices and rules that may or may not be understood by the people participating in it.

This is where Dude Abides becomes especially good at moving between romance and machinery. A cassette itself is intimate machinery. A voice is magnetized onto plastic ribbon, dragged across a head and reconstructed inside another room. Somebody can disappear completely while the machine continues reproducing the pressure of their breath.

Then Gersemi offers “Gül Dikiyorum Ellerimin Değdiği Yere,” a title carrying the image of planting roses wherever the hands touch.

That image could almost be written beneath the Private Release name.

The hand touches something ordinary and changes its status.

A catalog arrives in the mail as advertising. A page gets torn apart and becomes a cassette cover.

A commercial image becomes collage.

An empty tape becomes a particular tape.

A recording already available somewhere else becomes an object belonging to one friendship, one bicycle ride, one Discogs package or one room.

The transformation is not industrial. It occurs through contact.

Plant roses where the hands touch.

A Witness immediately answers with “Difficulty.”

Of course.

Making, loving, remaining alive, raising children, living collectively, building friendships, letting people go, keeping people close: difficulty.

Mortician then escalates the problem into “Brutally Mutilated.”

Thirty-eight seconds.

Difficulty has become carnage before the listener has time to prepare.

The brutality is immediately followed by Lace & Collar’s “Pursuit I.”

Only now does the first pursuit arrive.

Side A gave Pursuit II. Side B supplies Pursuit I.

The cassette has physically rotated and time has reversed. The beginning is discovered after the sequel.

This may be the most accurate possible arrangement for a personal archive. Private Release itself was not fully understood at the moment many of these objects were made. Years later, the earlier tapes become origins. A thing existed before its maker had language for what the thing was.

Pursuit II can genuinely precede Pursuit I if understanding travels backward.

Infernal Slave’s “Primal Litany of Domination” follows, pushing the tape toward ritual and hierarchy. “Primal” removes civilization. “Litany” introduces repetition. “Domination” introduces power.

Jules Cruise’s “Animal” strips another layer away.

Prurient’s “I Give Myself to Mary” then moves in the opposite direction: animal condition becomes surrender, offering, devotion.

Jihad answers with “Intellect.”

The sequence begins resembling a damaged diagram of the human creature:

domination,

animal,

devotion,

intellect.

None is enough by itself.

Then The Templars arrive with “The City.”

The solitary human becomes social architecture.

A city is what happens when millions of competing private realities occupy the same physical system. Every person carries an interior life invisible to the person walking past. Punk houses, transit drivers, parents, record clerks, musicians, landlords, disabled passengers, cops, children, dealers, artists, people cooking free food and people sleeping in vehicles can all inhabit a few miles while experiencing entirely different cities.

Plastic Surgery follows with “Rivolta.”

Revolt.

Once the city appears, rebellion cannot be far away.

Camera Silens contributes “ST,” a title nearly emptied of instruction, followed by Internazionale returning with “Seek Forever.”

That phrase feels like the actual philosophy beneath Dude Abides.

Not find forever.

Seek forever.

There is no final object waiting at the end of curiosity. The practice is continuation.

Keep listening.

Keep cutting.

Keep moving through decades of music.

Keep discovering that an obscure tape from somewhere else describes a feeling in Oakland better than the record theoretically belonging to the local scene.

Keep allowing one piece of art to lead into a completely unrelated one.

Keep making an archive large enough that the map begins behaving like another reality.

Then the last track is Fox News: “Y.”

The entire hundred-minute machine ends with one letter.

Y.

It can remain the twenty-fifth letter of the alphabet.

It can also sound like “why?”

After “Seek Forever,” the effect is almost too good.

Seek forever.

Why?

No answer.

The dude abides.

The title carries the famous relaxed fatalism of The Big Lebowski, but on this cassette “abiding” does not feel passive. It feels more like continuing to exist while contradictory things remain unresolved. Love and disgust can occupy neighboring tracks. Beauty can be followed by blood. Intellect can sit beside animal impulse. Domination can become devotion. A Christmas song can eventually lead to death metal.

Life does not maintain genre.

The artwork understands this before the cassette starts.

The closed case presents a glossy magazine world that has been physically interrupted. A male celebrity in sunglasses stands in front of giant HOT PICS lettering, but the photograph has been torn apart and invaded by unrelated fragments. The smooth machinery of publicity is damaged by scissors, ripping, paper texture and whatever happened to be available.

The right panel comes from another printed universe entirely: miniature movie descriptions for The Ratings Game, The Ravishing Idiot and Reaching for the Moon. A cropped head appears at the bottom as though somebody has begun entering the page from underneath.

The phrases accidentally become commentary on the collage.

Ratings.

Ravishing.

Idiot.

Reaching.

Hot pics.

Celebrity culture produces a hierarchy of visibility, constantly determining who is attractive, important, successful, desirable or worth looking at. Private Release takes those systems and cuts them into raw material.

The famous person is no longer important because he is famous. He is important because his striped jacket fits beside a torn piece of something else.

Authorship shifts from whoever produced the magazine to whoever made the cut.

Open the J-card and another consumer universe appears.

A rooster decorates an absurdly formal floor mat. Nearby, a can of Tundra fire-extinguishing spray promises to stop household fires fast. Between these advertisements sits the typed track list.

This may be the perfect visual field for Dude Abides.

The music contains Bloodthirsty, Blood Power, Evil Masters, Sex With My Ex, Brutally Mutilated and a Primal Litany of Domination.

The catalog calmly offers a fire extinguisher.

USE IN CASE OF FIRE.

One entire side of underground emotional extremity is pasted beside a product designed to make the emergency stop.

On the other side is a rooster rug.

There is no reason these things should belong together except that somebody noticed them.

That is collage.

That is also a mixtape.

The commercial world spends enormous resources trying to prevent accidental relationships between objects. Everything receives a category, demographic, shelf, price, genre and target customer.

Dude Abides destroys the shelving.

Ratt goes beside Monster X.

Elvis goes beside Harlem.

White Noise goes beside Gersemi.

Mortician survives for thirty-eight seconds before being replaced by an electronic pursuit.

A Turkish phrase about roses can sit in the same sequence as “Brutally Mutilated.”

The listener is responsible for surviving the transitions.

The cassette itself is a Sony CDit II 100, black-bodied and still carrying pieces of its original graphic design beneath the added labels. The front receives a pale green typed panel:

VARIOUS ARTISTS

(2016) DUDE ABIDES

The reverse gets a blazing orange PRIVATE RELEASE label.

The two labels perform different jobs.

One identifies.

The other declares.

Private Release is not pretending Sony did not manufacture the object. The cassette’s previous identity remains visible. The new object exists on top of the old one rather than replacing it completely.

That layered identity repeats everywhere in the project.

A person can have been a husband, father, roadie, punk, housemate, worker, boyfriend, collector, seller, artist and something temporarily impossible to name without any one of those identities canceling the others.

A house can be a residence, Food Not Bombs kitchen, radio site, neighborhood exchange, rehearsal space and sanctuary.

A tape can be Sony plastic, thirty-four existing recordings, a collage object and an autobiographical device without becoming only one of them.

Perhaps that is what the Dude is actually doing here.

Abiding does not mean remaining unchanged.

It means allowing all the previous versions to remain somewhere inside the current one.

By 2016, enough life had accumulated that a conventional narrative could no longer contain it cleanly. There were too many intersecting histories, too many people who had mattered for completely different reasons, too many musical languages and too many contradictory feelings. A mixtape could hold this better because it did not demand resolution.

It could begin blue.

Become beautiful and very smart.

Drink blood with Satan.

Surpass.

Declare no need.

Raise banners.

Sleep with an ex.

Begin a pursuit at Part II.

Ask whether Alan lives here.

Return to the womb.

Watch the dawning.

Find an intersection.

Count fifteen years.

Meet the evil masters.

Flip.

Go round and round.

Become worthless for five seconds.

Hold someone without knowing who will appear.

Say okay.

Play the game of loving.

Plant roses wherever the hands touch.

Encounter difficulty.

Become brutally mutilated.

Finally reach Pursuit I.

Dominate.

Become animal.

Give oneself away.

Recover intellect.

Enter the city.

Revolt.

Seek forever.

Y.

A hundred minutes later, nothing has been solved.

That is not failure.

The tape has done something more useful.

It has kept moving.