Stream Kurt Cobain’s Experimental Mixtape From Nirvana’s Early Days

Well, here’s an interesting find: A strange mixtape supposedly put together by Kurt Cobain a year before Nirvana released their debut album has recently come to light. According to Dangerous Minds, Cobain composed Montage of Heck around 1988 using a 4-track cassette recorded. The mixtape is a sound collage, and travels to unexpected places using clips culled from obscure sources. Though the 36-minute-long track starts of pleasantly enough, it gets very weird very fast — there’s a lengthy segment about three minutes in that’s mostly a repeated retching sound.

Still, it’s a worthwhile listen just to gain some insight as to how Cobain thought about sound, and to admire the then-21-year-old’s impressive music catalog. Dangerous Minds points out that he must’ve had actual physical copies of everything he samples, as he didn’t have access to any sort of streaming site in 1988. The reported full list of components used in the making of Montage of Heck is below, according to the blog United Mutations.