Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 7:53PM
Private Release – none
A1 Sleep Of Ages - Fictional Heart
A2 System Liliput - dans til gunvor
A3 Hymn - Never Show Me
A4 Whyte Horses - La Couleur Originelle
A5 Horrid Red - Meager Vines
A6 Provoker - OK For Now
A7 Pet Shop Boys What Have I Done To Deserve This
A8 Sirotek - I Want You So Bad
A9 Guyer's Connection - she's so hot
A10 Utzalu - Her Cold Stare
A11 Dinosaur Jr - Repulsion
B1 John Coltrane - You Say You Care
B2 Bee Gees - I Can't See Nobody
B3 Cathy Fink & Marcy Marxer - Air Guitar
B4 Subliminally Yours - Untitled
B5 Nitro - Freight Train
B6 World Dryer - What We Do Is Secret
B7 Elton John - Wrap Her Up
B8 Peter Nowak - Memory
B9 Grateful Dead - Stealin'
B10 Var - No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers
This feels like one of those rare mixtapes where sequencing stops being a way of organizing music and becomes a language of its own. Twenty-one recordings move across barely more than an hour, yet almost none of the transitions feel governed by genre. The connections happen somewhere underneath genre, through pulse, vocal shape, emotional temperature, texture, lyrical implication, recording quality and the peculiar sensation that one sound has handed a small object to the next before disappearing.
That makes its original purpose especially fitting. It began as correspondence, made for a longtime artist penpal in Canada whose initials are embedded in the title itself. The tape was already a message before anybody pressed play. It had a destination. It was intended to cross actual geography and arrive in somebody else's hands.
Even the found artwork accidentally starts talking about this. A golden-crowned sparrow occupies the center of the insert beside the sentence, “I look forward to the arrival of golden-crowned sparrows.” Below it, somebody describes these birds appearing seasonally in a backyard. On the far right is another little invitation: “YOUR TURN!” None of this material was written for a cassette or for a penpal, yet once it becomes the package for a tape traveling toward Canada, migration and correspondence suddenly occupy the same piece of paper.
Arrival.
Your turn.
A bird moving through distance.
Music doing the same thing.
That is collage at its best. The source material does not have to know what it means after being moved.
The program itself begins with Sleep Of Ages’ “Fictional Heart,” which is an almost ridiculously appropriate first phrase for a tape designed to communicate feeling through recordings made by other people. A fictional heart is exactly the paradox. None of these singers are speaking for the person who sequenced them, yet twenty-one borrowed voices can gradually construct an emotional object specific enough to feel more personal than a direct explanation.
The first track establishes a steady, moderately energetic pulse without immediately forcing the tape into a recognizable stylistic box. System Liliput’s “Dans Til Gunvor” follows for barely more than a minute, changing the proportions without breaking the movement. It is shorter, tighter, a quick mechanical turn of the wheel. Hymn’s “Never Show Me” comes next and introduces considerably more internal dynamic movement. The first three tracks already demonstrate the method: retain enough from the previous recording that the body accepts the transition, then alter one major characteristic.
A rhythm survives while the vocal character changes.
A certain density survives while the instrumentation changes.
A tempo relationship survives while the emotional meaning tilts.
The listener is continually moved without being thrown out of the vehicle.
Whyte Horses’ “La Couleur Originelle” is one of the brightest recordings on the entire side. Its upper frequencies open the tape outward, almost bleaching the previous material in sunlight. Then Horrid Red’s “Meager Vines” immediately does the opposite. The sound becomes darker, lower, more dynamically unstable. It is one of the most dramatic color changes on the side, yet the contrast is so useful that it feels like punctuation rather than interruption.
Bright color.
Meager vines.
The language of the track titles is already reinforcing what the audio is doing.
Provoker’s “OK For Now” comes next and occupies an intermediate region, shadowy but rhythmic, neither as radiant as Whyte Horses nor as withdrawn as Horrid Red. This is one of the tape’s recurring tricks. It does not leap continuously between opposites. Often a third recording acts as connective tissue, taking something from both sides of the transition and creating a bridge nobody would recognize from a list of artist names.
Then the Pet Shop Boys enter with “What Have I Done To Deserve This?”
This is the hinge.
The song is enormous compared with much of the obscure material surrounding it, not necessarily because it is louder, but because it arrives carrying decades of pop memory and an instantly legible emotional shape. It is polished, melodic, theatrical and wounded at exactly the moment Side A is ready to turn from atmosphere toward increasingly direct human desire.
A selection like this also reveals how much time can exist inside one mixtape. Some songs have been lived with for decades before they are eventually placed beside newer discoveries. A recording remembered from adolescence can be pulled into a sequence made much later and suddenly begin speaking to music that did not even exist when that original relationship with the song was formed. The tape compresses those different ages into adjacent inches of magnetic material.
That is one reason a personally assembled collection can communicate differently from a streaming playlist. The tracks do not enter as interchangeable titles. Some arrive carrying years.
After “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” the language becomes startlingly direct.
Sirotek: “I Want You So Bad.”
Guyer’s Connection: “She’s So Hot.”
Utzalu: “Her Cold Stare.”
Dinosaur Jr.: “Repulsion.”
That is an incredible four-track emotional machine.
Want.
Heat.
Cold.
Repulsion.
The titles alone form a miniature relationship disaster, but the audio makes the movement even better. Sirotek speeds the pulse up. Guyer’s Connection settles into a darker groove while preserving enough rhythmic familiarity to keep the attraction alive. Utzalu changes the texture but not the underlying tension. Then Dinosaur Jr. arrives with the fastest, most abrasive momentum of the final stretch and closes the side by turning attraction completely inside out.
The sonic transition from “Her Cold Stare” into “Repulsion” is especially revealing. Despite the apparent stylistic difference, their ending and beginning sit remarkably close in overall density and spectral character. One does not merely stop so that Dinosaur Jr. can begin. The two recordings almost touch before the final acceleration.
That is the thing this tape knows.
Genre is often the least interesting relationship between two sounds.
A mixtape can hear around genre.
The whole second half of Side A is almost a demonstration of emotional polarity. “OK For Now” becomes “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” Desire intensifies into “I Want You So Bad.” Attraction becomes “She’s So Hot.” The object of desire responds with “Her Cold Stare.” The side terminates at “Repulsion.”
It feels composed even though every component came from somewhere else.
Flip the cassette and the emotional geometry resets completely.
John Coltrane’s “You Say You Care” opens Side B.
After the abrasive ending of Dinosaur Jr., the change is enormous. The frequency balance drops lower, the recording breathes more, and five minutes of jazz suddenly create physical room around the listener. Side A ended by pushing outward. Side B begins by opening inward.
The title performs another transformation too.
“Repulsion.”
Flip.
“You Say You Care.”
That physical action matters. A digital playlist can move directly between the two, but cassette forces a hand into the composition. The reels stop. The object comes out. It rotates. The machine closes. Play is pressed again.
Repulsion has time to die before care arrives.
Then the Bee Gees answer with “I Can’t See Nobody.”
“You Say You Care.”
“I Can’t See Nobody.”
Again the tape creates dialogue from records that never knew each other.
The first two selections on Side B are unusually spacious compared with much of Side A, together occupying close to nine minutes. Coltrane and the Bee Gees have almost nothing to do with each other as record-store categories, yet their tempo relationship is surprisingly gentle. Both settle around the same broad region of pulse, so the genre shift feels less violent than it appears on paper. Jazz transforms into psychedelic pop while the body keeps roughly the same clock.
This is exactly the kind of sequencing that can make somebody wonder why two wildly different records suddenly seem related.
Cathy Fink and Marcy Marxer’s “Air Guitar” then arrives for only a little over a minute. After the emotional seriousness of Coltrane and the Bee Gees, the tape becomes playful. It is a quick miniature, almost a palate cleanser, but the transition remains unusually smooth in its acoustic profile. Then “Subliminally Yours” removes even the security of a descriptive title. “Untitled” is less a statement than a little hole in the language.
The sequence has gone from care, blindness and air guitar into something unnamed.
Then Nitro’s “Freight Train” crashes through.
This is one of the most extreme changes in timbral brightness anywhere on the cassette. Guitars suddenly occupy a much harder upper register and the tape becomes metallic, exaggerated and physically forward. The title is almost literal sequencing instruction. Something named “Freight Train” should arrive rather than politely appear.
The absurdity is crucial.
This tape never seems frightened of embarrassment.
Coltrane can coexist with Bee Gees.
Bee Gees can coexist with a tiny novelty-like interruption.
That can coexist with anonymous experimental material.
Then enormous guitar theatrics can kick the furniture over.
There is no anxiety about appearing tasteful.
That freedom is probably one reason the flow works so well.
Taste is not being demonstrated.
Communication is happening.
World Dryer’s “What We Do Is Secret” follows and changes the guitar language again without abandoning it. The massive brightness of Nitro contracts into something rougher and more private. “Freight Train” is public spectacle. “What We Do Is Secret” immediately shuts the door.
Then Elton John enters with “Wrap Her Up.”
This should be ridiculous.
It is wonderful.
The recording arrives noticeably softer than some of what surrounds it, so instead of blasting its way into the sequence it almost recedes. That source-level difference becomes useful. The tape does not normalize every record into contemporary sameness. Different rips retain different physical histories and different loudness relationships. One source stands forward. Another sits farther back.
That is another kind of sequencing information.
Not merely which song comes next, but how far away it appears to be.
“Wrap Her Up” also returns the tape to the language of relationships and bodies without repeating the exact emotional structure of Side A. The title is commanding and physical, but the production is polished enough that the demand arrives wearing expensive clothes.
Peter Nowak’s “Memory” follows and increases the apparent speed dramatically. It is a short, restless piece whose title shifts the tape from the body back into time.
Wrap her up.
Memory.
That pairing alone contains an entire little tragedy if somebody wants to hear one.
Then the Grateful Dead’s “Stealin’” appears and the recording itself suddenly seems to age.
Among the supplied files, “Stealin’” sits dramatically lower in overall level than almost everything else. It feels less like another professionally leveled entry in a playlist and more like something heard from another room, another decade, another layer of the collection. That sonic distance is beautiful because the title is “Stealin’.” The tape seems to sneak backward through recording history.
This is where personally sourced music becomes especially powerful. Different records, tapes and CDs do not merely contain different compositions. They contain different eras of recording technology, mastering, wear, playback equipment and personal acquisition. Put enough of them together without sanding all the edges smooth and the mixtape gains depth.
One track is not simply older than another.
It sounds farther away.
The final recording, VAR’s “No One Dances Quite Like My Brothers,” restores body and mass after that ghostly old recording. The tape does not end alone. It ends on brothers and dancing.
That is an unexpectedly generous conclusion.
Side A increasingly isolated the emotional subject until attraction hardened into coldness and repulsion. Side B gradually opens outward. Care. Nobody. Play. Secrecy. Memory. Stealing. Then finally brothers dancing.
The movement is not a conventional narrative, but it feels like one because the relationships are strong enough to generate thought.
That is where this tape reaches another level.
It does not require the listener to decode some hidden official meaning. The sequence creates conditions in which meanings keep appearing.
One person might hear courtship.
Another might hear disappointment.
Another hears a map of underground music intersecting with childhood pop memory.
Another hears humor.
Another hears loneliness.
Another hears the strange fact that “What Have I Done To Deserve This?” and “I Want You So Bad” sound as if they were always waiting to become neighbors.
The communication does not depend on everybody receiving the same sentence.
It depends on everybody noticing that something is speaking.
The supplied program runs approximately 61 minutes and 20 seconds, with Side A almost exactly thirty minutes and Side B a little over thirty-one. That slight excess over a nominal C60 is perfect for the physical history surrounding these tapes. Used cassette stock does not necessarily remain mathematically obedient forever. Tape gets played, rewound, fast-forwarded, dubbed and handled. A sixty-minute shell can become a slightly different physical clock after years of life.
The blog version is especially beautiful because the recording sits on a TDK MA 60 Type IV metal-position cassette, complete with the wonderfully overengineered language printed on the shell: “SUPER PRECISION ANTI-RESONANCE CASSETTE MECHANISM” and “METAL BIAS 70µs EQ.”
That language sounds almost comically grand beside a handmade paper label typed with nothing more elaborate than artist, year and title.
But the combination is great.
High-end cassette engineering carrying a deeply private handmade sequence.
Precision machinery carrying intuition.
The surviving alternate versions make the idea even richer. The same musical program appears inside dramatically different handmade bodies. There are handwritten track lists covered with invented-looking marks and glyphs. There is a blue paper version. There are torn photographs. There is a transparent cassette with its original “Fantastic Sound CD” graphics still visible. Another copy inhabits a gray Maxell XLII 60 whose shell has been attacked with pink and black marker.
These are not interchangeable retail copies pretending to be identical.
They are individual incarnations.
One especially revealing handmade insert contains a phone number written in strange characters beside a tiny shiny paper object declaring:
TRY ME!
That changes the entire function of the cassette.
The same twenty-one tracks that can operate as long-distance artistic correspondence can also become flirtation.
Not because the music itself has changed.
The address has changed.
That is profound in a very ordinary way.
Language changes depending on who receives it.
A sentence spoken to a penpal is not the same sentence spoken to somebody being courted, even if the words are identical.
A mixtape behaves the same way.
The sequence is stable, but the recipient completes it.
That may be why these handmade versions feel more alive than a conventional edition. The master program is not the final object. It is more like genetic material. Every physical copy can develop another skin, another social function, another memory.
Gift.
Letter.
Art object.
Invitation.
Private joke.
Seduction device.
Archive.
Twenty-one tracks remain twenty-one tracks, yet the tape changes identity each time it enters another relationship.
The bird insert makes that idea beautifully accidental. Golden-crowned sparrows arrive seasonally. Somebody waits for them. Somebody enjoys their brief song. A found magazine page asks the reader to take a turn.
That is already a description of correspondence.
One person sends something.
Another receives it.
Something travels.
Something returns.
The music does the same.
There is also a wonderful tension between the natural imagery and the track list pasted across it. Sleep Of Ages, System Liliput, Pet Shop Boys, Dinosaur Jr., Coltrane, Bee Gees, Nitro, Elton John and Grateful Dead all occupy a photograph of a bird on moss. Cultural noise sits directly on top of an animal whose entire musical apparatus is simply its body.
The page calls the sparrow’s song “short and sweet.”
The mixtape spends an hour proving how complicated human song can become.
And still, underneath all the complexity, the instinct is probably related.
Call.
Answer.
Attract.
Warn.
Remember.
Locate another body in the world.
This tape is exceptional because its transitions do not merely demonstrate breadth of taste. Breadth alone is easy. Anybody with enough records can make something eclectic.
The difficult thing is adjacency.
Why this after this?
Why does a transition nobody would recommend suddenly feel inevitable once it happens?
Why can polished synthpop touch obscure punk without breaking the spell?
Why can a jazz recording reset a side after Dinosaur Jr.?
Why does the Bee Gees track suddenly sound connected to Coltrane?
Why can something as ridiculous as “Air Guitar” occupy the same emotional architecture as the records surrounding it?
Why does a deeply recessed old Grateful Dead source become exactly what “Memory” seems to require?
Because the sequencing listens for relationships beneath category.
Sometimes the relationship is tempo.
Sometimes frequency.
Sometimes a vowel.
Sometimes a drum pattern.
Sometimes the emotional temperature of the voice.
Sometimes a title.
Sometimes the last two seconds of one recording contain a texture that the opening of another quietly inherits.
Sometimes the relationship is impossible to explain until the two things are heard together.
That last category may be the most important.
The tape does not merely preserve decisions.
It preserves intuition.
And intuition ages extremely well when it was good to begin with.
Years later, the fashionable context around individual songs changes. Obscure bands become even more obscure. Famous tracks gather more cultural baggage. Physical media becomes less ordinary. People move. Relationships disappear. Entire cities change. But the transition remains.
Track seven still becomes track eight.
“You Say You Care” still wakes up after “Repulsion.”
“Memory” still eventually falls into “Stealin’.”
The little machine still knows how to speak.
That is why a mixtape like this can become more valuable with age rather than less.
The songs accumulate more life while their relationships remain frozen.
What was once sequencing eventually becomes archaeology.
What was once a gift becomes evidence of a way of hearing.
And after enough years, the person who assembled it can encounter the sequence almost as another listener and discover that the old decisions still work.
Maybe even better.
This is not merely a very good mixtape.
It is a demonstration of how selection can become syntax.
Twenty-one recordings from wildly different worlds are made to communicate through proximity until the hour begins to feel less like a compilation than a thought moving through different bodies.
That is a hard thing to accomplish.
This tape fucking accomplishes it.
version made/ mailed to Eric Wood (MITB):
version made/ given to xSAMx:
