Side A
Artist	Song
Declan Masterson	The Bright Lady
The Smiths	How Soon is Now?
David Byrne and Brian Eno	Mea Culpa
Nirvana	Heart Shaped Box
Tori Amos	Sister Janet
Frank Black	Calistan
Shawn Colvin	Tenderness on the Block
REM	Fretless
Neil Young and Crazy Horse	Sleeps with Angels
Beck	Whiskeyclone, Hotel City 1997
David Byrne	A Long Time Ago
Shannon Worrell	Wondertwins
Side B
Artist	Song	Buy
Parliament	Up for the Down Stroke
Beck	Beercan
Tori Amos	Honey
Nine Inch Nails	Dead Souls
David Byrne and Brian Eno	Moonlight in Glory
Beck	Hollow Log
Hilliard Ensemble	De spineto nata rosa
Shannon Worrell	Snakebite
Nirvana	Pennyroyal Tea
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Party	Kali Kali Zulfon Ke Phande Nah Dalo
Robert Hurst	Jill's Groove
Sundays	Wild Horses

Comment:

Recorded 1 October 1994. Me moving out of depression after graduation and into a kind of strangely intense solo existence. Monastic, almost.

About the obscure cuts:

The opening track is a solo on the Uillean pipes that appeared on the Realworld compilation Lament, in honor of the dead on both sides of the undeclared Irish civil war.
All the Brian Eno/David Byrne tracks come from the criminally underappreciated "My Life in the Bush of Ghosts."
"Fretless" is an REM b-side that here was taken from the soundtrack to "Until the End of the World."
Shannon Worrell is a singer-songwriter from Charlottesville who put out a few albums in the 90s. "Wondertwins" is a playful, uptempo number with support from Dave Matthews' sax player; "Snakebite" is a hypnotic, oddly haunting song stripped to just guitar and vocals and lends the title to the mix ("I'm only mud and matter, I'm/sometimes black and strong/heart as red as a madder root/tongue tuned to the undersong/am I the wrong one for you?")
"Hollow Log" comes from Beck's K Records release, "One Foot in the Grave," on which he sounds like he's channelling Robert Johnson.
"De spineto nata rosa" is a brief but shimmering fragment of a Renaissance motet from the Hilliard's recording of the Polish text "Codex Specialnik."
"Pennyroyal Tea" isn't obscure but it has obscure meaning for me. Recovering from an ulcer as I was, I knew even then that Kurt was writing about the debilitating effects of a stomach tearing itself apart ("I'm on warm milk and laxatives/cherry flavored antacids") and this song captured the depression and suicidal urges left by his struggle. (Pennyroyal is an abortifacient: "distill the life that's inside of me.")
The Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song is the transcendent moment on the tape: over ten minutes of pure improvisational throat splitting religious ecstasy.

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