The artwork announces this one with almost comically blunt economy: notebook paper, thick black marker and enormous hand-painted letters. “I GOT NO JOB! I MIX TAPE” fills the page like something made because there was time available and absolutely no reason to make it look respectable. The track list is written directly across another photocopied image, the handwriting fighting with the photograph underneath it, while the cassette itself is a clear TDK-style DX1/90 with more marker dragged directly across the shell. Nothing about the object tries to disguise how it was made. Both sides run close to forty-seven minutes, so the C90 is packed hard from end to end.
Side A belongs very specifically to the electronic underground of the early 2010s. It begins with M83’s “Midnight City,” probably the most immediately recognizable song anywhere on the tape, but instead of establishing a comfortable synth-pop direction it opens a trapdoor. Games’ “Polyrhythm” follows, then Fatima Al Qadiri’s “How Can I Resist U,” the Phonat remix of Skrillex’s “Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites,” Jesse Ruins’ “A Bookshelf Sinks Into the Sand,” James Ferraro’s “Booty Call,” Gatekeeper’s “EXO,” Triad God’s “Rise of the Triad God” and Physical Therapy’s “Mind You.” That sequence catches a period when electronic music was splintering beautifully in every direction at once: polished synth pop, digital R&B mutations, rave revival, internet-era experimental music, vaporous electronics, huge programmed drums and deliberately artificial surfaces all existing beside each other without needing a common genre name.
The selection of James Ferraro is especially useful in the middle of that run because his music makes the synthetic world itself feel like subject matter. By the time Gatekeeper, Triad God and Physical Therapy arrive, the side no longer resembles the relatively clean invitation of “Midnight City.” The sound has become stranger, heavier and less predictable. “Mind You” is followed by a substantial Malvoeaux section rather than another quick one-song sample. “Broken Anthem” appears in two parts on the handwritten list and is followed by “Run for Cover,” “Sunsets” and “Fatal Games,” allowing one artist to occupy a large continuous piece of the cassette instead of maintaining a one-track-per-artist rule. That decision changes the pacing completely. For a while the mixtape stops browsing and settles inside one particular electronic environment.
The final stretch of Side A continues outward through Delicious Demon’s “Are You Transhuman?,” Teams’ “Seven Daze A Weed,” Water Borders’ “Even in the Dark,” Nguzunguzu’s “Warm Pulse” and Lust for Youth’s “Dreams.” Those names are practically a little archaeological layer of the period by themselves. Water Borders brings a darker, murkier electronic presence; Nguzunguzu turns percussion and low-end into something simultaneously physical and strangely suspended; Lust for Youth closes the side in a very different emotional register. What initially looked like a collection of contemporary electronic tracks ends up moving through pop brightness, club music, digital abrasion, goth atmosphere and dreamy synth melancholy. Side A feels unusually tied to the exact moment in which the tape was made.
Then Side B behaves as though somebody changed decades while turning the cassette over.
The Riptides’ “77 Sunset Strip” starts the second side before Visage’s “Fade to Grey,” Real Life’s “Send Me an Angel,” Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” Mike + the Mechanics’ “The Living Years” and Vangelis’ “Chariots of Fire.” Suddenly the sound is flooded with remembered radio, television and 1980s synthesizers. These are not obscure references hiding in the margins. Several are gigantic cultural objects, songs and themes that can trigger recognition within seconds. What makes the sequence funny is that it keeps pushing beyond respectable nostalgia and into television debris.
Perfect Strangers, ALF, Punky Brewster and Small Wonder arrive one after another. Instead of pretending childhood television exists in some separate, embarrassing category from “real music,” the tape simply gives it space. A sitcom opening, a puppet alien, a foster kid and a robot girl are allowed onto the same cassette as Vangelis, Visage and Tears for Fears. The result is much more revealing of how memory actually works. A person does not remember a decade according to record-store bins. Songs, television openings, commercials, voices and fragments of whatever happened to be coming through the speaker all occupy the same mental shelf.
That section keeps getting stranger with Teddy Ruxpin and the cluster of brief television/commercial fragments that follow. The side starts functioning almost like someone rapidly turning through old channels, except the material has been deliberately preserved and sequenced rather than accidentally encountered. Then A$AP Rocky’s “Purple Swag” suddenly breaks the period illusion. The cassette has spent several minutes making the listener comfortable inside an older television-and-radio world and then drops a contemporary rap track into it. That jump is exactly the sort of thing that prevents this from becoming an exercise in nostalgia.
Public Image Ltd.’s “Poptones” pushes it somewhere else again before the final run turns heavily toward punk and power pop: The Scientists’ “Frantic Romantic,” The Speedies’ “No Substitute,” The Shivvers’ “Life Without You,” The Letters’ “Nobody Loves Me,” The Rubinoos’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” Warm Gun’s “Crappy Hands” and The Keys’ “I Don’t Wanna Cry.” The emotional vocabulary suddenly becomes wonderfully basic: romance, rejection, wanting somebody, losing somebody, not wanting to cry. After all the electronics, television themes, synthetic textures and cultural fragments, the tape closes with guitars and direct little pop songs.
That makes the two sides almost opposites. Side A is largely a document of what sounded new, strange and exciting around 2011–2013, music being discovered while the culture around it was still forming. Side B rummages backward through remembered pop culture and then comes out the other end through older punk and power pop. One side looks outward at a contemporary electronic underground; the other digs through television, radio, adolescence and record collections. The title says there was no job. Apparently there was plenty of work to do.
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