Private Release – none
Track Listing:
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1. Free 'Lectricity (PDM) (3:23)
2. Cool Feeling (Buzzer) (1:40)
3. So Little Time Left (Inopposition) (2:23)
4. Reversal Of Fortune (Wormwood) (5:43)
5. Waste (Weep) (4:09)
6. Break The Rules (Electric Shadows) (4:08)
7. The Greatest Burden (Leech) (3:24)
8. Sore Thumb (Schlong) (3:57)
9. Fuck You Bobby Flay...I'm Cook (Vietnam) (2:19)
10. Silence Was No Master (Dry Insides) (1:26)
11. Intertube Tomorrow (Frumpies) (1:03)
12. Politics And Gore (Terrorism) (1:14)
13. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones (Cringer) (2:08)
14. Break Down (Gomorrha) (1:20)
15. Hope That Doesn't Rock The Boa (Ma Cherie For Painting) (4:27)
16. Walk @ A 100 (Single Unit) (0:50)
17. Multimatic Mouths (Wolfie) (1:22)
18. Beach Red Lullaby (Flying Saucer Attack) (4:14)
19. I Can't See My Way Out Of This (Famous Boyfriend) (3:34)
20. Every Mothers Son (Palace) (5:59)
21. Sugar Mountain (Space Needle) (4:22)
22. White Apes Of Mars (Hapto) (2:56)
23. Hollow Sky (Flowchart) (4:37)
24. Last Word (Twiggy) (3:38)
25. Stunning Freak (Buzzer) (3:06)
26. Requiem (Gnosis) (1:12)
27. Klaagzang (Meslamtaea) (5:19)
28. Dull Knife (Case Studies) (2:48)
29. The Whale (Thank You) (3:27)
Total Playing Time: 90:23 (min:sec)
29 7" Wonders takes one of the smallest conventional record formats and turns it into something sprawling. The title appears to explain the entire mechanism: twenty-nine selections, twenty-nine little worlds, the concentrated hit of music associated with the seven-inch record stretched across a C90 cassette. Seventeen pieces fill the first side and twelve fill the second. Instead of trying to make these objects seem larger than they are, the word “Wonders” gives their smallness importance. A wonder does not require duration. It requires an interruption in ordinary perception.
The physical tape is wonderfully plain beneath all of this. Black shell, pale green typed label, the blunt declaration VARIOUS ARTISTS, 2016, 29 7" WONDERS. Flip it over and the original high-bias cassette graphics remain visible beneath an almost fluorescent PRIVATE RELEASE sticker. Nothing has been manufactured into invisibility. The previous identity of the blank is still there.
That becomes important because this tape is full of previous identities.
Records have already been pressed, distributed, bought, handled and played. Photographs have already appeared somewhere else. Catalog typography has already attempted to sell underwear. Newspaper text has already belonged to articles with entirely different subjects. Every component arrives carrying another life.
Then the cassette rearranges them.
The front cover begins with two women photographed in profile. They occupy separate panels but seem almost to be facing one another across the fold. Their mouths are open or slightly parted, creating the appearance of an exchange whose sound has been removed. Whatever their original photographic context was, the cassette strips most of it away. They become gestures before they become identities.
Beneath them, fragments of prose continue from unrelated printed sources.
Under one face is a sentence mentioning somebody who was “a native of the Basque region of Spain,” worked at a mill, stayed briefly and became disillusioned. Under the other is a piece of historical or economic writing explaining that deregulation was not simply Ronald Reagan’s invention and discussing airline and trucking policy.
The subjects do not belong together.
That is precisely why they begin producing meaning.
A face.
A mill.
Disillusionment.
A face.
Deregulation.
The White House.
Transportation.
The information resembles radio signals accidentally crossing frequencies.
This principle becomes even stronger inside the J-card. The track list sits directly over an advertisement for underwear.
WICKING DIAMOND KNIT.
Feels drier, better all day!
Then, in enormous block letters:
LIMITED EDITION
PATTERNS
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate accidental slogan for a cassette assembled from twenty-nine seven-inch records.
LIMITED EDITION PATTERNS.
A seven-inch record is literally a pattern pressed into a limited physical object. The groove is patterned information. The needle follows the pattern and converts it into movement. Movement becomes electricity. Electricity becomes sound. A cassette repeats the transformation using another material system: particles aligned along magnetic tape.
The advertisement is talking about boxer shorts.
The mixtape turns it into a statement about recorded music.
Even the word “pattern” expands.
The underwear has a printed pattern.
Vinyl contains a groove pattern.
Tape contains a magnetic pattern.
A mixtape contains an emotional pattern.
Listening means finding patterns inside patterns.
And “limited edition” is already one of the central languages of underground music. A tiny run of records can transform industrial scarcity into mythology. Fifty copies. One hundred copies. Two hundred copies. Gone. Somebody owns one. Somebody else spends ten years searching for it.
The seven-inch format makes this culture especially concentrated. A small piece of vinyl can become a passport into an entire vanished social world. A label address, two songs, a photocopied sleeve and five minutes of sound can preserve evidence that a few people once occupied the same town, basement, rehearsal room, argument or idea.
29 7" Wonders takes those separate worlds and makes them neighbors.
The first side apparently begins with “Free Electricity,” though the artist name is partly hidden in the photograph. That partial disappearance is almost appropriate. The tape starts with something obscured and something supposedly free.
Electricity, of course, is never really free.
Recorded music depends upon systems. Turntables, amplifiers, duplication decks, motors, electricity, magnetic heads, speakers. Even music that seems aggressively handmade passes through technology.
Then Dry Insides gives “Silence Was No Master.”
That is an extraordinary early statement.
Silence was no master.
Something refuses control by absence.
A recording exists because silence has been interrupted.
A mixtape exists because somebody decided that one sound should follow another rather than allowing blank tape to continue.
Frumpies follow with “Intertube Tomorrow,” a phrase that already sounds like outdated futurism. It predicts something from inside a technological vocabulary that has aged. Tomorrow becomes yesterday while the recording remains playable.
Then Terrorism gives “Politics And Gore.”
The title is almost brutally direct.
Politics.
Gore.
Power and flesh.
Institutions and bodies.
The tape has barely started before its world is already unstable.
Cringer follows with “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones.”
Politics and gore become flesh and bone, but now the vocabulary has shifted from violence toward contemplation.
Zen flesh.
Zen bones.
The body is still there. The interpretation has changed.
This is one of the peculiar abilities of sequencing. The songs do not need to agree. The disagreement itself becomes structure.
Gomorrha brings “Break Down.”
Break down can describe machinery, psychology, communication, social organization or musical form.
Then Ma Cherie For Painting offers one of the longest and strangest titles on the cassette:
“Hope That Doesn’t Rock The Boat Too Much.”
Hope is immediately given a limitation.
Hope, but carefully.
Hope, but do not disturb anything.
Hope, provided everybody remains comfortable.
The phrase sounds almost like social etiquette applied to desire.
Single Unit follows with “Walk @ A 100.”
Now movement accelerates.
Earlier, the front-cover text mentioned trucking and airline deregulation. Inside, the music starts walking at one hundred.
The cassette keeps generating these accidental circuits between printed image and track title.
Wolfie contributes “Multimatic Mouths.”
The front cover already contains mouths.
Two women in profile.
Two separate panels.
No audible speech.
Then the track list introduces multiple automatic mouths.
Suddenly the cover begins looking less static.
The women appear to be speaking into the sequence.
Buzzer answers with “Cool Feeling.”
After all the systems, politics, bones, breakdowns, boats and mouths, the language becomes sensation.
Feeling does not explain itself.
It simply occurs.
Inopposition follows with “So Little Time Left.”
The cassette suddenly remembers duration.
This matters more on tape than it does in digital playback because time is visibly disappearing. One reel grows while the other shrinks. There is literally so little tape left.
A cassette does not merely represent time.
It demonstrates time.
Wormwood follows with “Reversal Of Fortune.”
The direction changes.
Fortune reverses.
The reels will eventually reverse as well.
Weep reduces everything to “Waste.”
Then Electric Shadows says “Break The Rules.”
Waste becomes refusal.
The tape seems to repeatedly move between limitation and violation.
Limited edition.
So little time left.
Break the rules.
Hope that does not rock the boat too much.
The title “29 7" Wonders” creates a rule before playback even begins: twenty-nine pieces will occupy this cassette.
But inside that restriction, anything can happen.
Leech contributes “The Greatest Burden.”
Schlong follows with “Sore Thumb.”
The progression is almost physical.
A burden is carried by the body.
A sore thumb is a small injury, but the phrase also means something conspicuous, something that refuses to blend into its surroundings.
That is a useful description of a good mixtape selection.
The best transition can be the thing that sticks out.
Then Vietnam closes the side with:
“Fuck You Bobby Flay... I’m Cooking In This Kitchen.”
After philosophy, politics, burden, time and rules, the side ends in a kitchen argument.
It is ridiculous and perfect.
The scale suddenly collapses.
Forget systems.
Forget abstraction.
Somebody is cooking.
And Bobby Flay has apparently become the enemy.
The title works because it converts domestic space into territorial declaration.
This kitchen belongs to the person speaking.
The cassette itself behaves similarly.
These recordings belonged to labels, artists and records.
Inside this tape they have temporarily entered another kitchen.
Side B opens with Flying Saucer Attack and “Beach Red Lullaby.”
The title contains three incompatible atmospheres.
Beach.
Red.
Lullaby.
A beach suggests openness and horizon.
Red introduces heat, blood or warning.
Lullaby suggests sleep.
The result feels serene and threatening simultaneously, which is very much the peculiar emotional geography Flying Saucer Attack could inhabit.
Hapto follows with “White Apes Of Mars.”
The tape leaves Earth almost immediately.
Flowchart gives “Hollow Sky.”
The sky has become empty from the inside.
Twiggy follows with “Last Words.”
Now emptiness becomes finality.
This is one of the strongest title sequences on the tape:
Beach Red Lullaby.
White Apes Of Mars.
Hollow Sky.
Last Words.
It plays like a tiny science-fiction collapse.
A planet.
Creatures.
Sky.
Silence.
Then Buzzer returns with “Stunning Freak.”
The cassette refuses the ending.
Last words are followed by another person.
Another freak.
Another sound.
Gnosis brings “Requim,” the spelling on the track list giving the familiar word its own slightly displaced form.
Meslamtaea follows with “Klaaszang.”
The language becomes less transparent again.
Case Studies gives “Dull Knife.”
This title fits the collage process itself.
Paper is cut, but not necessarily cleanly.
Edges tear.
Images carry fibers.
A dull knife creates resistance.
The physical artwork does not behave like computer layout. It retains evidence of friction.
Thank You follows with “The Whale.”
The scale expands enormously.
From dull knife to whale.
Tiny tool.
Massive animal.
Then Famous Boyfriend supplies what may be the emotional center of the second side:
“I Can’t See My Way Out Of This.”
It is one of those titles that changes the air around everything beside it.
The earlier “Hollow Sky” now feels different.
“Last Words” feels different.
Even “Dull Knife” acquires another possible meaning.
I can’t see my way out of this.
The sentence describes being trapped without explaining the trap.
That absence makes it universal enough to become dangerous. Anybody can fill the missing object with their own circumstance.
A relationship.
Debt.
Depression.
A city.
Addiction.
Work.
A room.
A belief.
A period of life.
The sentence does not say there is no way out.
It says the way cannot be seen.
That distinction is enormous.
Palace follows with “Every Mothers Son.”
The perspective widens from one trapped voice toward family.
Every mother’s son.
Nobody arrives independently.
Behind every adult body is another body that carried it.
The phrase can sound traditional, tender, mournful or ominous depending upon what has just happened around it.
Here it arrives after a person unable to see an exit.
Then Space Needle closes everything with “Sugar Mountain.”
The cassette rises again.
Mountain.
The opposite of hollow sky.
A mountain gives the eye something solid to climb toward.
Sugar makes it impossible.
A candy mountain.
A child’s geography.
A hallucination.
A reward.
A ridiculous destination.
The tape ends not with an answer but with elevation.
That is fitting because 29 7" Wonders is less interested in narrative than in pressure between fragments.
One recording presses against another.
One photograph presses against another.
Newspaper history presses against glamour photography.
A track list presses against an underwear advertisement.
LIMITED EDITION presses against PRIVATE RELEASE.
None of these juxtapositions needs to be decoded into a single correct statement.
Their energy comes from remaining slightly unresolved.
The underwear advertisement is especially good because it accidentally describes both the aesthetics and mechanics of the cassette.
WICKING.
DIAMOND KNIT.
LIMITED EDITION.
PATTERNS.
Lucky Stars.
Pitch a Tent.
Consumer language becomes poetry as soon as the product is removed.
“Lucky Stars” sits underneath a track list containing “Reversal Of Fortune.”
The advertisement wants luck to be decorative.
The music lets fortune reverse.
“Pitch a Tent” appears beside twenty-nine little musical shelters assembled inside one cassette.
The entire thing begins feeling like a temporary settlement.
Each seven-inch record brings a few minutes of its original world. Punk, noise, experimental music, indie rock, electronic damage, psychedelia, absurdity and pop-adjacent fragments all occupy the same ninety-minute strip of magnetic material.
The cassette does not demand that they become one genre.
It only asks them to share space.
That is different.
Genre classification usually works by separating things.
This belongs here.
That belongs there.
This artist is punk.
That one is noise.
This is indie.
That is experimental.
A mixtape works by adjacency instead.
What happens if these two things touch?
That question is more interesting than deciding which shelf they belong on.
The seven-inch format encourages this because so many seven-inch records already feel like messages rather than albums.
An LP asks for residence.
A seven-inch can behave like a flare.
Something happened.
Here it is.
Seven minutes later, it is gone.
Some of the most memorable records operate at that scale. They do not need a career surrounding them. They can simply appear, make their mark and disappear.
Twenty-nine of those marks gathered onto one cassette become a constellation.
That makes the visual use of patterned boxer shorts unexpectedly appropriate again.
From a distance, the constellations printed on one pair resemble random marks.
Look long enough and the points become connected.
A mixtape does the same thing.
At first the tracks are stars.
Then lines appear between them.
Silence Was No Master connects to Multimatic Mouths.
Politics And Gore connects to Break The Rules.
Hope That Doesn’t Rock The Boat Too Much connects to So Little Time Left.
The Greatest Burden connects to Sore Thumb.
Hollow Sky connects to Last Words.
Dull Knife connects to I Can’t See My Way Out Of This.
Reversal Of Fortune connects to Lucky Stars sitting underneath the paper.
None of these connections existed on the original records.
They are produced by placement.
That is authorship through proximity.
The two women on the cover perform the same operation visually.
Separate photographs become a conversation because a fold places them near one another.
They do not have to actually know each other.
The collage invents the relationship.
The tiny fragments of text beneath them intensify this instability. A Basque mill worker and American economic deregulation become accidental captions for glamorous photographs. Labor history and political economy slide underneath the faces without explanation.
The result is not political propaganda.
It is stranger than propaganda because no fixed interpretation has been supplied.
The material simply remains available.
A reader can notice.
Or not.
That freedom is important to the Private Release objects. They do not always behave like album covers trying to correctly describe the audio. They often behave like parallel mixtapes made from images.
A sonic mixtape says:
this recording,
then this one,
then this one.
A collage says:
this photograph,
this scrap,
this advertisement,
this sentence.
The same compositional instinct operates in both.
Selection becomes syntax.
The black cassette shell itself provides a final contrast. Against all the printed activity, the tape is utilitarian. A mint-green label identifies the program. On the reverse, the previous high-bias cassette branding remains largely intact, covered only by the screaming green PRIVATE RELEASE tag.
That green sticker is almost obnoxiously bright.
It does not attempt heritage.
It does not imitate the branding of the records being compiled.
It simply declares a new condition.
PRIVATE RELEASE.
Not private recording.
Not bootleg.
Not compilation.
Release.
The distinction is psychological as much as physical.
A recording becomes a release when someone decides the object has crossed a boundary.
That boundary may usually require labels, manufacturing, distribution and customers.
Here the threshold can be smaller.
Tape.
Cover.
Sequence.
Decision.
The object exists.
29 7" Wonders turns twenty-nine small records into one long object without erasing their smallness. That may be its greatest success. It does not try to make the seven-inch single behave like an album. Instead it preserves the jumpiness, the abrupt changes of atmosphere, the sense that every few minutes another door has opened.
A90 minutes becomes twenty-nine rooms.
Some rooms contain politics.
Some contain gore.
Some contain Zen bones.
Some contain broken rules.
One contains Bobby Flay being thrown out of somebody else’s kitchen.
Another contains white apes on Mars.
Another contains a whale.
Another contains someone unable to see the exit.
At the end there is a sugar mountain.
The route makes no conventional sense.
That is why it works.
A mixtape does not need to explain the world.
Sometimes its job is simply to prove that these things can exist beside one another.
Twenty-nine seven-inch wonders.
Twenty-nine temporary answers to the question:
What should happen next?
