VA - 2016 - Louis Vuitn C110

Private Release – none

Track Listing:
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1. Ruling Class Kids (Lifeboat) (2:37)
2. Dim The Lights (No More) (3:03)
3. Kärpästen Juhlat (Organ) (3:50)
4. Sex Cult Thing (Pak) (4:21)
5. Moral Support (Parade Ground) (3:31)
6. Salt (Pesteg Dred) (3:41)
7. Floods And Trickles (Pinpoint) (2:45)
8. X-Ray Proved (Princess Of Peace) (3:40)
9. Time To Get Up (Los Microwaves) (3:06)
10. Miss Syphilis (Lucas Trouble) (2:35)
11. Walking (Metropak) (2:54)
12. Honour The Independent (Mu) (4:08)
13. The Haunting (My Pierrot Dolls) (5:42)
14. Slipping Again (Naked Lunch) (3:54)
15. Duet (Neon) (4:21)
16. Just Another Teenage Anthem (New Hearts) (1:55)
17. Innocent People (Red Zebra) (4:11)
18. Push Me Pull You (Part Two) (Futurisk) (2:17)
19. Dark Crystal Day (Excentrique Noiz) (5:07)
20. It's So Difficult (Dislocation Dance) (3:00)
21. Emotional Flesh (Dance Chapter) (2:32)
22. Survivor (Stranger Still) (6:08)
23. Things We Never Did (Sad Lovers and Giants) (4:08)
24. the crazy garden (Message) (4:57)
25. When the Fever Stops (Parade Ground) (2:44)
26. Soon (Rhythm Of Life) (3:04)
27. No Turning Back (Shox) (2:53)
28. Dans til Gunvor (System Liliput) (1:15)
29. Echo Echo (Catholics) (2:30)
30. T.V.O.D. (The Normal) (2:54)
31. Daddy Is My Pusher (Tits) (2:25)
32. Dream (jeff & jane hudson) (2:52)
Total Playing Time: 109:18 (min:sec)

Louis Vuitn looks like the name of a luxury object after somebody has copied it too many times. Louis Vuitton has lost letters. The trademark has slipped. Prestige has suffered a minor electrical failure. What remains is close enough to be recognized but wrong enough to belong somewhere else.

That is a useful name for this tape.

The cassette itself is almost perversely luxurious. A TDK MA 110 is a Type IV metal-position tape, exactly the sort of blank media that once represented the expensive end of home recording. One hundred and ten minutes of premium magnetic material sit inside a heavy black shell while a pale pink homemade label identifies VARIOUS ARTISTS and LOUIS VUITN. Flip the object over and the original TDK graphics remain visible beneath an almost violently orange sticker reading PRIVATE RELEASE.

Luxury on one side.

Private manufacture on the other.

The name of a fashion house damaged into a personal spelling, attached to a format whose own hierarchy once distinguished cheap ferric tape from chrome and metal.

Before hearing anything, Louis Vuitn is already playing with value.

What makes an object expensive?

What makes it important?

What makes one thing desirable and another disposable?

A Louis Vuitton bag derives part of its power from controlled manufacture, controlled distribution, recognizable authorship and a social agreement that its logo means something. A Private Release cassette moves in nearly the opposite direction. Existing recordings are gathered from wherever they can be found. Commercially printed images are torn from their first purposes. A used or valuable blank tape becomes raw material. The finished object may exist in only a few copies and may never enter an ordinary market at all.

Yet the physical result can carry enormous value for the person who made or received it.

The front cover refuses luxury advertising even while borrowing its appetite for images. It is a collision of photographic fragments: part of a person in motion at the top, a cropped intimate encounter below, torn textiles, flesh tones, dark blue, gray mesh, pink and orange surfaces. Nothing has been blended convincingly. The seams remain.

That is important.

Advertising usually wants collage to disappear. Photoshop should produce a fantasy whose construction cannot be detected. Private Release leaves the wound open. One photograph ends and another begins. Paper fibers show. A color changes abruptly. The hand responsible for selecting the fragments remains present because the fragments refuse to pretend they were born together.

The central image appears intimate but incomplete. Faces and bodies approach each other while surrounding information has been removed. It is impossible to reconstruct exactly what the original publication wanted the photograph to mean. Romance, fashion, celebrity, nightlife, advertisement, gossip, lifestyle. Whatever commercial instruction once accompanied the picture has been amputated.

The remains can now mean something else.

Beside it, the rear panel contains pieces of movie-guide text. REACHING FOR THE MOON. REAL GENIUS. REAL LIFE.

Those phrases are almost too perfectly placed.

Reaching.

Real.

Real.

A luxury title sits beside an accidental argument about aspiration and reality.

Reaching for the moon is desire made spatial. Something is above you. You want it. The distance creates the dream.

Real Genius promises exceptional identity.

Real Life drags everything back down.

These are simply movie listings in their original context, but once torn from that context they become stray philosophical labels. Commercial print is full of these accidental sentences. Catalogs, advertisements, reviews and product descriptions constantly announce tiny truths without realizing anyone might remove them from the product.

Private Release notices.

Open the case and another image system appears. The glamorous, fragmented exterior gives way to an advertisement for the Raptor mobility scooter by Pride.

“Ready to Soar! Why not ride the Raptor!”

The machine is enormous in the image. The word PRIDE sits above it in red. The advertisement promises speed, range, suspension, light packages, an emergency brake and independence through manufactured mobility.

Then the track list has been pasted directly across the scooter.

That collision changes the mixtape.

Louis Vuitn begins with Lifeboat performing “Ruling Class Kids.”

The title of the entire cassette has invoked luxury, then the first words on the program introduce class.

Ruling Class Kids.

It is almost rude in its efficiency.

The expensive brand name has barely entered the room before class hierarchy appears beneath it. Vuitton belongs to a system where a handbag can function as clothing, artifact, investment and public declaration of purchasing power. A ruling-class kid does not merely possess an expensive object. The object participates in an inherited language of belonging.

But this is not Louis Vuitton.

This is Louis Vuitn.

The ruling-class object has passed through the wrong neighborhood and returned with letters missing.

Immediately afterward comes Los Microwaves, even without a track title on the insert. The band name itself moves from social hierarchy toward appliance technology. The ruling class has barely sat down before a microwave enters the mansion.

Then Lulas Trouble supplies “Miss Syphilis.”

Status gives way to disease.

Whatever polished body fashion culture constructs can still become infected. Clothing can announce wealth while the organism underneath remains biological, vulnerable, sexual and temporary. Syphilis does not recognize branding.

Metropak’s “Walking” begins another chain entirely.

Walking.

The word lands differently because the track list is sitting on top of a mobility-scooter advertisement.

The image beneath the music is literally a machine designed for someone whose relationship with walking has changed.

Suddenly movement becomes visible.

Walking is normally so ordinary that it disappears from thought. A person stands and goes somewhere. No philosophy required. Once the ability becomes difficult, however, movement turns into technology, infrastructure, accessibility, independence, price and design.

The Raptor advertisement sells mobility back to the body.

MU follows with “Hondur The Independent.”

Walking.

Independent.

The sequence appears to be explaining the advertisement underneath it without trying.

Independence is often imagined as some enormous psychological achievement, yet it depends upon very physical things. Can a person move? Can they reach food? Can they enter a building? Can they travel without asking someone else? Is the sidewalk usable? Is there a bus? Is there a ramp? Does the machine work?

The word independent becomes much less abstract when printed across an advertisement for a mobility scooter.

This is one of the pleasures of the Louis Vuitn object. The collage does not merely decorate the music. Images and titles begin contaminating one another until a third meaning forms between them.

My Pierrot Dolls’ “The Haunting” follows.

Independence acquires ghosts.

Nobody is entirely independent of what has already happened. Houses retain people. Songs retain rooms. Objects retain previous owners. A cassette that has existed long enough begins collecting moments around itself simply because it can still be played.

Haunting does not require a transparent person walking through a wall. Repetition is sufficient.

A place can haunt.

A smell can haunt.

A three-second piece of music can reopen a decade.

Naked Lunch makes the relationship explicit with “Slipping Again.”

Again.

Not slipping.

Slipping again.

The title contains memory.

Something has happened before, and recurrence is now part of the event itself.

The track moves beautifully into Neon’s “Duet,” because repetition is followed by relation. Two.

A duet means that a self is temporarily reorganized around another self. One voice behaves differently because the second voice exists. The result belongs completely to neither participant.

This is also how mixtapes work. A song does not remain fully independent after sequencing. Put two recordings next to one another and each acquires information from the other.

“Slipping Again” beside “Duet” can begin sounding like a relationship even if neither song was selected to create that statement.

Then New Hearts arrive with “Just Another Teenage Anthem.”

Youth enters after haunting, slipping and duet.

The title is wonderfully dismissive: just another.

Another teenage anthem.

As though youth has produced so many urgent declarations that one more cannot possibly matter.

Of course, when someone is actually a teenager, the anthem matters enormously.

Every generation discovers sex, loneliness, anger, style, friendship and betrayal as though previous humans somehow failed to notice them. Music gives this discovery a soundtrack. The redundancy is part of the beauty. Millions of people can independently discover the same emotional territory and still experience it as absolutely unprecedented.

No More answers with “Dim The Lights.”

The teenage anthem ends and the lights go down.

Something becomes private.

“Dim The Lights” is an instruction about environment rather than emotion. Change the room and the bodies inside it change. Bright light produces one kind of behavior. Darkness permits another.

The cassette begins slipping toward the intimate again.

Organ’s “Karpasten Juhlat” briefly removes the English-language trail before PAK arrives with “Sex Cult Thing.”

There it is.

Not sex.

Not cult.

Sex Cult Thing.

The final “thing” makes the phrase less doctrinal and more like somebody pointing toward a confusing object on the floor.

What exactly is happening here?

Some sex cult thing.

The mixtape has moved from Miss Syphilis through walking, independence, haunting, slipping, duet, teenage anthem and dimmed lights into a phrase where intimacy has become social organization.

Then Parade Ground answers with “Moral Support.”

That may be the sharpest transition on the first side.

Sex Cult Thing.

Moral Support.

Two extremely different forms of belonging.

A cult offers belonging through absorption into a system. Moral support offers belonging while permitting the other person to remain themselves.

The difference between the two can be the difference between control and care.

Moral support is one of those understated phrases whose actual importance can become enormous. It does not promise rescue. It does not claim to repair the person. It means someone remains beside someone else while difficulty continues.

Pesteg Dred reduces everything to “Salt.”

The basic mineral.

Sweat, tears, preservation, food, ocean.

After so much social and emotional language, a single substance appears.

Then Pinpoint’s “Floods & Trickles” enlarges the water.

Floods and trickles are the same material behaving at radically different scales.

Too much and too little.

Overwhelming and barely present.

Emotion works this way. Money works this way. Attention works this way. Desire works this way. Music distribution works this way. Some things arrive as floods. Others disappear into trickles.

Princess of Piece closes the side with “X-Ray Proved.”

Proved.

The body returns as evidence.

An X-ray sees through the surface and produces an image of internal structure. Fashion operates almost entirely on surface. Louis Vuitton sells the visible exterior. X-ray technology makes exterior decoration irrelevant. Bone does not wear a logo.

That is an extraordinary place to end Side A.

The sequence begins with ruling-class children and ends with the body being penetrated by an image machine.

Flip the TDK MA 110 over.

The orange PRIVATE RELEASE label appears.

Side B begins with Red Zebra’s “Innocent People.”

The word innocent arrives immediately after proof.

X-Ray Proved.

Innocent People.

Evidence and judgment.

The logic sounds almost legal.

Yet innocence is much stranger than law permits. People can be innocent of one thing and responsible for another. Childhood innocence can disappear without the child understanding what was taken. Adults can carry identities constructed around events for which no courtroom ever existed.

Then Repetition gives the tape one of its central phrases:

“The Body Cries.”

Not the person.

The body.

This distinction matters.

The conscious mind can claim almost anything. The body is less cooperative.

A person can say everything is fine while the shoulders tighten, stomach burns, hands tremble, sleep disappears or tears begin before a sentence is finished.

The body has another language.

Placed beside “X-Ray Proved,” the phrase becomes even stronger. One technology sees inside the body. The next song says the body speaks back.

Rhythm of Life follows with “Soon.”

The body cries.

Soon.

Soon is one of the most dangerous words because it creates time without specifying it.

Soon can mean hope.

Soon can mean threat.

Soon can mean procrastination.

Soon can mean death.

Soon can mean relief.

Nothing has happened yet, but the future is close enough to feel.

Shox responds with “No Turning Back.”

Soon has arrived.

No turning back.

The sequence keeps behaving as if one title is finishing the previous title’s sentence.

System Liliput follows with “Dans Till Gunvor,” returning movement to the body through dance. Earlier there was walking. Now there is dancing.

Movement has become expressive rather than purely functional.

This makes the Raptor advertisement beneath the track list feel even stranger. The mobility scooter promises independent movement. The music keeps supplying different forms of movement: walking, slipping, dancing, turning, pushing, pulling.

The whole cassette seems physically restless.

Catholics’ “Echo Echo” turns motion into recurrence.

Echo already means repetition, so “Echo Echo” repeats repetition.

Then The Normal gives “T.V.O.D.”

A mechanized nervous system enters. Cold pulse, circuitry, media, television, body and machine begin merging.

The Normal is a perfect name inside Louis Vuitn because almost nothing on the tape agrees about what normal might mean.

Ruling class children?

Syphilis?

Independence?

Sex cult?

Moral support?

Innocent people?

A crying body?

Normality is merely another product label.

Tits follow with “Daddy Is My Pusher.”

Suddenly family and dependency occupy the same phrase.

The father figure, traditionally imagined as provider and protector, becomes the supplier of the thing creating dependency.

Whether treated literally, provocatively or as punk language, the title collapses care and danger into the same relationship.

That contradiction belongs all over this mixtape.

People can nurture and damage one another simultaneously.

An institution can protect while controlling.

A scene can save somebody while also teaching habits that hurt them.

A family can be home and injury at once.

Jeff & Jane Hudson answer with “Dream.”

After the pusher comes escape.

Dream does not necessarily mean fantasy in a cheap sense. Dreams are another mode of information, a theater where the mind rearranges what waking life refuses to reconcile.

Then Futurisk gives “Push Me Pull You (Part II).”

Push.

Pull.

The relationship becomes mechanical force.

The title describes almost every complicated attachment imaginable. Come closer. Go away. Help me. Leave me alone. Tell me the truth. Stop telling me what to do.

Push and pull can coexist because human beings are capable of wanting contradictory things at exactly the same time.

The “Part II” matters too. As with other Private Release sequences, the listener can arrive after something has already begun. There is no guarantee that the first chapter will be available. Life rarely provides complete discographies.

Excentrique Noiz turns the light strange with “Dark Crystal Day.”

Dark.

Crystal.

Day.

Three words that interfere with each other.

Crystal suggests transparency. Dark removes visibility. Day should provide light. The phrase creates a mineral daylight that somehow remains shadowed.

Then Dislocation Dance says what everyone eventually says:

“It’s So Difficult.”

Not impossible.

Difficult.

That distinction matters.

Difficult allows continuation.

Dance Chapter follows with “Emotional Flesh.”

This may be the title around which the whole cassette rotates.

Emotional flesh.

The body again.

Not the rational self floating above experience. Flesh feels.

The phrase connects half the tape backward: Miss Syphilis, Walking, The Haunting, Slipping Again, Duet, Sex Cult Thing, X-Ray Proved, The Body Cries, Daddy Is My Pusher, Push Me Pull You.

Again and again the sequence returns to what happens when an interior state encounters a physical body.

Luxury fashion exists because bodies can be decorated.

Sex exists because bodies can meet.

Disease exists because bodies can transmit.

Dance exists because bodies can move.

Addiction enters bodies.

Grief enters bodies.

Love enters bodies.

Age changes bodies.

The mobility scooter advertisement inside the case suddenly becomes an almost perfect accidental illustration.

The body is emotional flesh, but it is also mechanical limitation.

When one system becomes unreliable, another system is attached.

Battery.

Wheel.

Motor.

Seat.

Range.

Fourteen miles per hour.

Thirty-one miles.

Human independence converted into engineering specifications.

Stranger Still follows with “Survivor.”

After Emotional Flesh, survival is no longer an abstract heroic identity.

Survival simply means the flesh continued.

The heart continued.

The nervous system continued.

The person woke up on another morning and discovered that life had not finished yet.

There is a lot of mythology attached to surviving difficult things. Culture likes the clean survivor narrative because it provides an ending. Something terrible happened, the person overcame it, cue inspirational music.

Real survival is usually much stranger.

A person can survive and remain damaged.

Survive and become funny.

Survive and become difficult.

Survive and love badly.

Survive and love extraordinarily.

Survive and keep repeating patterns that once protected them.

Survive and not understand why they survived.

The cassette does not resolve the word.

It simply puts “Survivor” before Sad Lovers & Giants.

And Sad Lovers & Giants give it “Things We Never Did.”

That transition hurts.

Survivor.

Things We Never Did.

Survival contains an inventory of unfinished possibilities.

Every life eventually develops an archive of things not done.

The trip never taken.

The phone call not made.

The relationship that remained hypothetical.

The apology delayed.

The record not bought.

The person not visited.

The project imagined but never built.

The strange thing about regret is that the unrealized event can remain emotionally active despite never existing.

A memory usually refers to something that happened.

Regret can function like a memory of something that did not.

Things We Never Did.

The phrase becomes especially powerful inside a mixtape because mixtapes are assembled from choices. Every selected song represents hundreds not selected. The object is created equally by inclusion and exclusion.

Message follows with “The Crazy Garden.”

The garden provides another image for everything accumulated.

A garden is controlled nature that never becomes completely controllable. Things are planted deliberately, but other things arrive. Seeds travel. Weeds appear. Weather interferes. Plants compete. Some flourish unexpectedly. Others die despite attention.

A life develops the same way.

So does a record collection.

So does a blog containing thousands of posts.

So does a punk house surviving through generations of people.

The gardener influences the system without becoming its absolute author.

“The Crazy Garden” is a good name for a Private Release archive because the connections continue growing after the person making them has stopped consciously arranging them.

Parade Ground returns with “When The Fever Stops.”

Earlier they supplied “Moral Support.”

Now the support has passed through the body and become fever.

A fever is another physical state that changes perception. Time behaves differently. The room behaves differently. The body becomes hot, weak, hypersensitive.

The title does not ask what happens during the fever.

It asks what exists afterward.

When the fever stops.

This can apply to illness, obsession, romance, addiction, ideology, youth, a music scene, a friendship, a period of constant social activity.

While the fever is happening, it feels permanent.

Then it stops.

A person looks around and discovers the room is still there but the temperature has changed.

The final track is Struggler’s “Wanted.”

One word.

Wanted.

After ruling class, bodies, haunting, slipping, teenagers, sex, moral support, innocence, dreams, difficulty, survival, regret and fever, the tape ends at desire.

Wanted can mean desired.

Wanted can mean hunted.

Wanted can mean needed.

A wanted person may be loved or pursued by police.

A wanted object can be a luxury bag.

A wanted life can be one someone is trying desperately to construct.

That ambiguity brings the title Louis Vuitn back into focus.

Luxury culture is built around wanted things.

A brand manufactures desire until possession becomes a statement about the possessor.

But Private Release changes the economy.

The desirable object may be an old TDK cassette that someone else would have recorded a lecture over.

The valuable image may come from an advertisement nobody kept.

A song unavailable through ordinary channels may become more personally important than something heard by millions.

A mixtape may become precious because a particular person assembled these exact thirty-four tracks in this exact order.

Value moves away from price.

The TDK MA 110 complicates that argument because it actually is premium media. The cassette is not pretending to be cheap. Type IV metal tape represented an expensive, high-performance end of the cassette hierarchy. It was manufactured to capture information with greater fidelity than ordinary consumer stock.

So Louis Vuitn contains real luxury inside counterfeit luxury.

The title loses letters while the tape underneath upgrades its magnetic particles.

The cover is torn commercial debris wrapped around premium recording material.

That inversion feels exactly right.

Outside the case, an intimate photographic fragment collides with movie listings about reaching for the moon, genius and real life.

Inside, a mobility scooter promises independence and speed while a track list discusses walking, crying bodies, no turning back, dancing, pushing, pulling, emotional flesh and survival.

The artwork has accidentally or deliberately constructed a machine for thinking about what the body wants and what the body can do.

The word PRIDE appears on the scooter advertisement.

The word PRIVATE appears on the cassette.

Only two letters separate them.

Pride is public self-value.

Private is what remains when public evaluation disappears.

Luxury brands live through public recognition. The logo matters because strangers recognize it.

Private Release does not need that recognition.

Its authority can remain between maker, object and recipient.

This is not an anti-fashion sermon. Desire is much more interesting than that. Clothing, design and objects can genuinely transform experience. Humans decorate themselves because surface matters. A jacket can change posture. A pair of shoes can change how someone enters a room. A record sleeve can change how music is heard before the needle touches vinyl.

The mistake would be believing price is the only mechanism capable of producing that transformation.

Louis Vuitn manufactures another kind.

Paper torn by hand.

A premium tape reused as a vessel.

Songs pulled across years, countries and genres.

A track list placed on top of a scooter.

A private object assuming the posture of luxury without requiring permission from luxury.

The music itself behaves the same way.

The first side begins with class and moves through disease, walking, independence, haunting, slipping, relation, youth, intimacy, sex, support, elemental matter, flooding and X-ray evidence.

The second starts with innocence and descends into the crying body before moving through life, irreversible motion, dancing, echoes, electronics, family dependency, dreams, push and pull, difficulty, flesh, survival, regret, gardening, fever and desire.

It is almost anatomical.

Not in the sense of a carefully planned concept album.

More like a body discovered through autopsy.

Cut here and another system appears.

Cut again and there is memory.

Cut again and there is sex.

Cut again and there is class.

Cut again and there is the desire to move.

The collage does exactly this to printed images.

Tear the celebrity away from the advertisement and another body appears.

Remove the product description and an accidental phrase becomes poetry.

Place the track list somewhere it was never intended to exist and the scooter begins commenting on the songs.

Meaning is not contained entirely inside objects.

Meaning happens between objects.

That may be the central logic of the mixtape.

Nobody listening to New Hearts alone necessarily hears No More.

No More alone does not contain PAK.

Sad Lovers & Giants did not write their song to lead into a crazy garden.

The connection is authored through placement.

A mixtape creator works less like a composer and more like somebody bending gravity.

The planets already exist.

The art is deciding which ones orbit each other.

Louis Vuitn creates a strange solar system from underground records, consumer technology, romance, bodily vulnerability, post-punk machinery, cheap print and expensive magnetic tape.

None of these materials loses its previous identity.

They simply acquire another.

The luxury name remains recognizable despite being broken.

The scooter remains a scooter.

The cassette remains a TDK MA 110.

The songs remain their original recordings.

But after being placed together, each carries residue from the others.

Walking happens over a mobility machine.

The Body Cries happens inside an advertisement promising comfort.

Emotional Flesh appears inside black plastic and metal tape.

Things We Never Did becomes a memory attached to an object that can still be physically replayed.

Wanted closes the system.

Then the reels stop.

The orange PRIVATE RELEASE sticker is still there.

The luxury brand has vanished.

The private object remains.

the original tape: