HNW begins in almost the exact opposite way a sensible mixtape is supposed to begin.
There is no immediate hook, no recognizable pop entrance, no quick declaration of genre and hardly even the ordinary sensation that a “song” has started. The first entry on the handwritten and typed track lists is simply “Dedicated To Conrad Roy III,” without an artist credit. For nearly five minutes the recording establishes itself through an extraordinarily low mechanical resonance. Deep in the audio is a powerful frequency around 27 Hz with successive harmonics appearing above it, producing something closer to machinery, vibration or an electrical organism than a conventional musical introduction. The sound changes internally, accumulates abrasion and finally begins breaking apart before the next section takes over.
It is an outrageous way to start a cassette.
Most mixtapes spend their opening minutes trying to convince somebody to continue listening. HNW seems almost hostile to that idea. It asks whether the listener is willing to enter first.
That distinction becomes even stranger when considering how this tape was originally heard. A substantial part of its life was spent being played through a small portable cassette recorder with a built-in speaker. The deepest part of that opening would never have arrived through such a speaker with anything resembling the authority it possesses through a larger contemporary system. What remained were the harmonics, buzz, pressure and upper portions of the vibration. The same cassette can therefore reveal a different object decades later without anything on the tape having changed. Better playback does not simply make the old recording “clearer.” It exposes regions of the old recording that had been waiting there the entire time.
At approximately 4:44 the first enormous sonic room gives way to Dobhar Cho’s III, IV and V, but HNW still refuses anything approaching normal mixtape hospitality. The first ten minutes are essentially a sustained entrance into obscurity. Only around the eleven-minute mark does Rites Of Spring’s “Patience” suddenly create the recognizable physical attack of a band.
That placement makes “Patience” sound different.
Taken from its normal context, hardcore becomes relief.
Guitars, drums, voice and human velocity suddenly seem almost comforting after the strange low-frequency environment preceding them. It is an excellent example of something HNW repeatedly accomplishes: extremity is not confined to the obviously extreme music. Context can make familiar music become the strange event.
Cardinal follows, then Life’s Blood with “Catch Our Breath.” The movement through punk and hardcore briefly suggests that the cassette has finally revealed its territory.
It has not.
Loke Rahbek and Frederik Valentin’s “Somersault” pulls everything into another atmosphere, after which Basil Poledouris’ “Anvil Of Crom” arrives with enormous cinematic weight. This transition alone would be enough to derail an ordinary genre-based compilation. Here it feels completely natural because the tape has already established that scale itself is one of its instruments.
Small sound.
Large sound.
Private sound.
Monumental sound.
Abrasion.
Melody.
Room.
Landscape.
A mixtape can control those dimensions without altering a single recording. Placement does the work.
“Anvil Of Crom” is particularly ridiculous and wonderful in this environment because film music is designed to make invisible physical scale appear in the mind. Put it inside a tape surrounded by obscure electronics, punk, noise and tiny privately circulated recordings and suddenly the orchestra feels gigantic. It does not merely sound louder. It seems to occupy more land.
Then David Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti’s “Love Theme (Solo Rhodes)” does nearly the reverse.
After the heroic physical mass of Poledouris, the Rhodes becomes interior architecture. Space contracts. Something tender and dreamlike enters the cassette just before HNW commits one of its nastiest structural decisions.
A9 through A16 are not even individually identified on the finished track list.
They are simply:
Bong Rips Of Brutality Comp.
Eight selections become one block.
That is important.
The cassette temporarily stops treating songs as individual compositions and starts treating an entire compilation as raw sonic matter. Eight separate pieces are swallowed by one notation on the J-card. Instead of artist-title-artist-title-artist-title, the listener gets a concentrated region of noisegrind and goregrind operating almost like weather.
This is a mixtape inside a mixtape, except its internal identities have deliberately become less important than the effect of the mass.
After the tenderness of the solo Rhodes, the effect is vicious.
Beauty is not used to calm the cassette permanently. Beauty is used to make the next assault hurt differently.
That is sophisticated sequencing.
HNW repeatedly recognizes something that genre purism misses: a beautiful recording and a hideous recording can increase one another’s power. Put fifty abrasive tracks together and the nervous system eventually adapts. Put something extraordinarily delicate immediately before the abrasion and suddenly the edge returns.
The ear needs contrast in order to understand extremity.
Surplus Killing’s “Are You Somebody?” and Sadio’s “Sophisticated Methods Of Torture” finish Side A, carrying the tape out through increasingly hostile territory. By the end of the first 46 minutes, the opening mechanical vibration has expanded into something much larger: hardcore, ambient space, cinema, dream music, grind, noise and power electronics have all occupied the same strip of magnetic material.
Then Side B performs a completely different trick.
Acetate Zero’s “Contemplating The Existence Of The Leaves” begins the second side and lasts a little over four minutes. Even the title is almost comically gentle after the end of Side A. The cassette has moved from sophisticated methods of torture to contemplating leaves.
That is HNW in one transition.
No apology.
No explanation.
Leaves.
Steve Miller Band’s “Something To Believe In” follows for nearly five minutes, introducing an even stranger sort of normality. A piece of recognizable classic-rock vocabulary appearing here does not make HNW conventional. HNW makes Steve Miller weird.
This is one of the pleasures of mixtapes assembled by somebody whose listening habits have no interest in maintaining cultural borders. A famous recording can become considerably stranger than an obscure one simply because of where it has been placed.
H.C.O.D.’s “Bloodsoiled” tears another opening in the sequence. Then, at roughly fifteen minutes into Side B, ABC appears with “Be Near Me.”
ABC.
On this tape.
Perfect.
It is difficult to imagine a more useful piece of sequencing.
“Be Near Me” is polished, immediate and almost extravagantly melodic compared with much of HNW. Its surface is smooth enough to make everything around it feel damaged. It arrives after noise and heaviness without embarrassment, occupies a few minutes completely, and then unknowingly stands in front of the largest abyss on the entire cassette.
At approximately 18:33, Neto’s “Enumeration De Zamvoli” begins.
It does not relinquish the tape until roughly 40:56.
More than twenty-two minutes.
That is the structural secret of Side B.
The first eighteen minutes have trained the listener to expect movement: four distinctly different recordings, each providing another room. Acetate Zero, Steve Miller, H.C.O.D., ABC. Then the doors stop opening.
The listener enters one enormous chamber.
For almost half of Side B, HNW ceases behaving like a mixtape in the usual sense. The Neto piece occupies enough duration that it begins rewriting the listener’s memory of everything that preceded it. Instead of another clever transition arriving after three or four minutes, the tape demands residence.
This is where the title HNW begins to feel less like a genre description than an architectural condition.
Wall.
Duration.
Density.
Persistence.
Something happens to perception when a sound continues considerably longer than the mind initially expects. The first minute is an event. Several minutes become an environment. Twenty minutes becomes a place.
That transformation is particularly effective on cassette because there is no visual progress bar announcing exactly how much suffering remains. On a portable player, the object simply continues turning. The reels themselves are the clock.
Then, with only about five minutes remaining, Apostate & Death Dedication’s “Bursting Blood” becomes the exit.
There is no return to Steve Miller.
No ABC reprise.
No reward for surviving the long center.
The cassette simply finishes inside another extreme recording.
Side B therefore has an almost cruelly elegant shape:
fragile beauty,
familiar song,
abrasion,
perfect pop,
twenty-two-minute abyss,
blood.
That is not random eclecticism.
It is composition using other people’s recordings.
The physical tape quietly confirms another wonderful detail. HNW is housed on a Sony UX90, a Type II high-bias cassette marked for ninety minutes. Yet the surviving digital transfer runs approximately 46:17 on Side A and 46:19 on Side B, totaling roughly 92 minutes and 36 seconds. HNW C93 is therefore almost absurdly literal. The music consumes practically every usable moment the cassette can surrender beyond its nominal ninety-minute identity.
The tape is full.
The artwork understands fullness differently.
The front cover contains a dark grinning figure dressed in formal white clothing against near-total blackness. The face almost disappears before the teeth do. Open the J-card and the opposite panel presents a hand holding mallets over what appears to be a vibraphone or similar percussion instrument. The pairing is strange enough without needing explanation: grotesque face, immaculate clothes, hand, mallets, golden bars, darkness.
Tone and impact.
The inside insert creates another accidental correspondence. The typed HNW track list has been pasted over a page discussing Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. The surrounding prose describes something being assembled piece by piece, almost as a puzzle or detective story.
That language now belongs accidentally to the cassette.
A mixtape is precisely that kind of construction.
One recording creates a clue for another.
Something selected years earlier suddenly explains a later transition.
A track that appears ridiculous on paper becomes necessary when heard after the correct sound.
The maker may not even consciously know every relationship while constructing it. Sequence discovers relationships after the fact.
The original handwritten track list makes this even better. Numbered songs move downward through ruled notebook paper while large scribbled forms hover above them. They look halfway between absent-minded drawing, private notation and a seismograph trying to record a thought. The typed version later cleans the information enough to function as packaging, but the notebook pages preserve something closer to the construction site.
HNW is especially good home-listening material because it can completely alter the perceived dimensions of a room. It is not “background music” in any useful sense. Leave it running and eventually the room has to negotiate with it.
But the cassette has another imaginable environment: nighttime movement.
A bicycle.
An almost empty street.
Too much alcohol, too much weed, impaired depth perception, darkness at the edge of the block and the ordinary urban suspicion that something unpleasant may be waiting around a corner.
Played from a little portable cassette recorder, music this strange does not simply soundtrack that environment. It interferes with it.
The street becomes part of the composition.
Passing cars become accidental overdubs.
A distant argument enters the mix.
Wind destroys quiet sections.
Streetlights begin functioning like visual rhythm.
Someone approaching on the sidewalk hears whatever impossible recording is currently pouring from the speaker and has to incorporate that information into their own understanding of the situation.
There is something deeply funny about using extremely hostile experimental music as a form of portable personal atmosphere. The person carrying the tape may be frightened by the city while simultaneously sounding far stranger than whatever the city might contain.
HNW has improved with time because it was never especially dependent upon the musical present. It already sounded temporally confused in 2018. Rites Of Spring, Life’s Blood, Steve Miller, ABC, film music, contemporary experimental electronics, underground noise and tiny bursts from an extreme compilation coexist without being asked to represent their decades correctly.
The cassette therefore does not preserve 2018 as a musical fashion.
It preserves one nervous system moving through music in 2018.
That is much more valuable.
And now the physical transfer adds another layer. The Type II tape, the source recordings, the deck, the later digital capture and the years between plays have turned HNW into something slightly different from the collection of recordings originally used to construct it. Rebuilding the track list on a streaming service would reproduce the titles but not the object.
The particular transitions would be cleaner.
The levels would change.
The noise floor would disappear.
The strange continuity of Side A and Side B would be broken into selectable units.
Most importantly, the listener could escape.
On the cassette, Neto gets twenty-two minutes because Neto gets twenty-two minutes.
That authority is one of the forgotten beauties of mixtapes.
HNW is not really a tape devoted to extreme music.
It is a tape devoted to extremity as a way of hearing.
A whisper becomes extreme after noise.
ABC becomes extreme in the middle of power electronics.
A soundtrack becomes extreme beside hardcore.
Twenty-two minutes becomes extreme because four shorter songs taught the listener to expect another door.
And a nearly subsonic mechanical vibration becomes an absolutely insane way to begin a mixtape because almost nobody would choose it when trying to make a good first impression.
HNW does not care about making a good first impression.
It makes a world.
Then it closes the door.
original cover:
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