Gelsomina - 2007 - The Skulls Have Spoken C30

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 6:13PM

Private Release – none

The first image is immediately difficult. A person appears to be lying on pavement beside a large wheel and the side of a vehicle or piece of machinery, but the photograph has been pushed into such hard black-and-white contrast that certainty keeps slipping away. The wheel becomes a black circle. Clothing merges into shadow. Metal, pavement and body flatten into the same harsh field. An elongated object lies diagonally across the lower right, but there is not enough information here to confidently turn it into anything more specific. The image feels less like documentation than documentation being consumed by reproduction.
That matters because the audio behaves similarly. Information is present everywhere, but Gelsomina keeps forcing it toward the point where individual sources stop being easy to identify.
The cassette is a TDK Professional Master Series SM30, a Type II high-position tape. On one face a large white typewritten label covers most of the original shell information: GELSOMINA - (2007) / The Skulls Have Spoken. Flip it over and much more of the original TDK design remains visible around an oval PRIVATE RELEASE label. It is an unusually serious-looking little cassette, the kind of shell made to advertise recording quality and professional purpose, now carrying thirty minutes of sound that repeatedly attacks the usefulness of clarity.
The printed insert gives only two titles:
A1 The Skulls Have Spoken
B1 Severed Hand Dialing
But the supplied audio reveals something the paper does not. Side A contains a second piece, “Unnatural Things Alive or Dead,” almost ten minutes long. That omission is important because it changes the structure completely. What looks like a simple two-sided cassette is actually three pieces arranged almost perfectly across a C30: about fifteen minutes on Side A and a little over fifteen on Side B.
“The Skulls Have Spoken” opens quietly for only a few seconds before the recording hardens into a remarkably stable mass. It lasts a little over five minutes, and after the first minute there is very little conventional dynamic movement. Instead of getting louder and softer, the internal texture keeps changing while the overall pressure remains almost fixed.
The sound is concentrated heavily in the midrange. There is low-frequency weight underneath it, but much of the actual violence lives higher, in the area where distortion becomes abrasive rather than merely heavy. The extreme high frequencies are comparatively restrained, so this is not bright digital hiss spraying endlessly upward. It is a thick, coarse band of sound with enough edge to scrape but enough body to remain physical.
The stereo behavior is especially strange. The left and right channels are barely correlated at all. There is almost no stable central image holding the piece together. Instead the two sides behave like parallel versions of the same disturbance, occupying the same time without locking into one object.
That makes headphones particularly effective. The sound does not simply sit between the ears. It presses separately against both sides.
After the opening minute, the midrange becomes even more dominant. Roughly the same amount of acoustic pressure continues for several minutes while the internal balance shifts between lower grinding material and a harder upper-middle abrasion. Because the loudness remains so steady, small tonal changes become structural events. A slight increase in brightness can feel like movement even though nothing has actually become much louder.
This is where the title works without requiring anything literal. “The Skulls Have Spoken” suggests communication, but the track does not present speech in any ordinary sense. It presents pressure behaving as information. Something is being transmitted, but recognition has been removed.
Then “Unnatural Things Alive or Dead” begins.
This is the real monster on Side A.
At first it is dramatically different from the first piece. The opening minute is much darker, quieter and more centered. Nearly three quarters of the energy sits in the deep low end. Instead of the abrasive midrange sheet of “The Skulls Have Spoken,” there is a subterranean mass with only a small amount of higher-frequency material above it.
It feels less like noise being projected outward and more like something already occupying the room.
Over the next several minutes the piece transforms slowly but enormously. The low-frequency foundation remains, but additional bands begin accumulating above it. The recording gets louder. More middle frequencies enter. The stereo image gradually changes as well. During the first couple of minutes the channels remain strongly related, almost acting as one source. By roughly the fourth minute that relationship begins falling apart.
Then the piece opens.
The left and right channels become increasingly independent until the sound is almost completely decorrelated. What started as a centered low-frequency object turns into a wide field.
That transformation is one of the strongest things on the cassette because it happens without an obvious theatrical announcement. There is no single moment where the track says NOW WE ARE SOMEWHERE ELSE. The listener simply realizes several minutes later that the thing originally sitting in front of them has spread outward and occupied both sides.
By the middle of “Unnatural Things Alive or Dead,” the bass has become overwhelming again. More than half of the track’s energy can sit below roughly 250 Hz for long stretches. The upper range remains extremely limited. This gives the sound a blunt physical character. It does not sparkle, hiss or radiate. It pushes.
The title introduces the perfect uncertainty.
Alive or dead.
The track begins with something that feels almost dormant, then gradually develops activity without ever becoming recognizably animate. It grows, widens, changes pressure and reorganizes itself. Those are behaviors associated with living systems, but the sound itself remains completely abstract.
That ambiguity also connects unexpectedly with the visual material. The front photograph contains a body-like human form overwhelmed by machinery, pavement and contrast. The insert contains another black-and-white photograph, this time showing people spread through a wooded field. The surviving printed caption identifies them as British soldiers near a drop zone, waving cloth in an attempt to attract attention.
Communication appears again.
Someone is trying to be seen.
Something is trying to be heard.
The cassette repeatedly places signals inside environments where successful reception is uncertain.
The second side is entirely occupied by “Severed Hand Dialing.”
The title is ridiculous, grotesque and strangely perfect for a fifteen-minute piece built from repeated mechanical insistence.
Unlike “Unnatural Things Alive or Dead,” this track does not spend several minutes gradually discovering stereo width. It begins wide. The channels are essentially independent from the start, producing an unstable field with almost no fixed center. Whatever appears on the left does not need to be mirrored by the right. The listener is placed between simultaneous activities rather than in front of a single performance.
For the first five minutes, the balance is relatively consistent. Low frequencies occupy a large portion of the recording while a rough band of midrange noise continually works above them. The upper frequencies are present but limited, preventing the track from becoming thin or brittle. Everything remains heavy.
Then the center of gravity slowly drops.
Around the fifth minute, the low end begins increasing. By the ninth minute the recording becomes noticeably louder and darker at the same time. The higher abrasion retreats slightly while the lower mass grows.
That shift is crucial because fifteen minutes of noise can easily become one undifferentiated block if nothing changes except detail. “Severed Hand Dialing” instead changes weight.
The first half grinds.
The second half leans.
Around nine minutes in, something substantial happens. The overall level rises by roughly a decibel while the spectral center drops sharply. It is not an enormous jump numerically, but in material this consistent it feels major. The sound becomes denser and more bodily, as though whatever has been making the call has finally put its full weight against the receiver.
The title keeps becoming stranger the longer the piece continues.
A severed hand cannot communicate intention.
A telephone can continue producing a signal whether anyone is there to answer.
Dialing is repetitive by nature.
Numbers become pulses.
Connection becomes repetition.
Whether anybody responds is another problem entirely.
The three pieces therefore produce an unexpectedly coherent thirty-minute arc. “The Skulls Have Spoken” begins as abrasive midrange communication with almost no stable stereo center. “Unnatural Things Alive or Dead” starts dark and nearly unified, then gradually separates into a much wider low-frequency organism. “Severed Hand Dialing” begins already divided and spends fifteen minutes slowly increasing its physical weight.
The sequence moves from speaking, to uncertain existence, to attempted contact.
None of it requires a voice.
The artwork is equally uninterested in explanation. The front image is violent without offering a narrative. The soldiers in the field are clearly engaged in some act of signaling, but the photograph captures only a fragment of the event. The track list itself withholds an entire piece. Even the reverse side of the cassette preserves the original TDK branding underneath the new PRIVATE RELEASE identity.
Everything here carries incomplete information.
That incompleteness may be the strongest connection between the sound and the object.
The skulls have spoken, but whatever they said has been converted into noise.
Something exists, but whether it is alive or dead remains unresolved.
A hand keeps dialing after the body required to explain the action has disappeared.
The signal continues.
The explanation does not.

Too Short - 1985 - Don't Stop Rappin' C60

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 6:30PM

Private Release – none

The first thing this cassette gives away is how little decoration the music actually needs. The J-card is almost entirely information: 75 Girls Presents, a black-and-white portrait, TOO SHORT, “Don’t Stop Rappin’,” EXPLICIT LYRICS. The photograph has the severe directness of an identification picture. Leather jacket open at the chest, cap, glasses, heavy pendant, arms crossed, expression giving nothing away. Inside the translucent orange case the entire cover takes on an amber cast, making an already spare piece of 1985 design look even more like an object recovered from a particular moment rather than something reconstructed later to advertise that moment.
Open the J-card and the economy continues. Side One lists “Don’t Stop Rappin’” and “Shortrapp.” Side Two lists “Girl,” “Female Funk” and “Playboy Short.” The credits are unusually satisfying because they leave a physical trail behind the music: Dean Hodges as executive producer, Too Short on vocals, several people credited with keyboards, Marvin Holmes and Mattheus on guitar, recording at Different Fur, mastering at Fantasy Studios, and 75 Girls Records and Tapes giving an Oakland address at 7618 Sunkist Drive. There is even the wonderful period artifact “P.S. ‘In God We Trust’” sitting above the extra thanks.
The cassette itself strips things down further. Black shell, white typewritten labels. Side A says only TOO SHORT / Don’t Stop Rappin’ CS. Side B says 75 GIRLS RECORDS. Compared with the printed J-card, it feels almost archival, as though the shell exists simply to identify what is supposed to happen when PLAY is pressed.
The audio is where the object becomes enormous.
The first side does not sound like five-minute songs designed to get in, make their point and leave. “Don’t Stop Rappin’” stretches for a little over twelve minutes. That duration changes the function of repetition. The beat does not merely support the vocal. It establishes territory and stays there long enough that tiny changes begin mattering enormously.
This transfer is very bass-heavy. A huge percentage of the energy sits below the region where modern recordings usually make their detail obvious. The low end and low-midrange form the floor, while the upper frequencies fall away relatively quickly. Cymbals, percussion edges and vocal consonants are present, but they never become glossy or sharp. The recording feels rounded at the top and physically heavy underneath.
That imbalance is part of its character.
The bass does not sound enormous because it has been digitally sculpted into a perfect sub-frequency shape. It sounds enormous because so much of everything else has been reduced around it. The rhythm occupies the available space with remarkable simplicity. Repetition becomes hypnotic precisely because the recording is not constantly throwing new information at the listener.
Too Short’s voice remains the organizing element. It sits close to the center of the stereo image, with the two channels highly related rather than separated into a wide modern field. The result is almost confrontationally direct: beat, bass, voice. The mix does not create a luxurious environment around the rapper. It keeps returning attention to the words and cadence.
The first minute of “Don’t Stop Rappin’” is slightly quieter than much of what follows. The track gradually settles into its working level and then stays remarkably consistent for long stretches. That stability makes the duration feel intentional rather than excessive. Once the groove has established itself, the listener stops waiting for a conventional chorus-change-chorus structure and starts hearing smaller details: emphasis in a line, a tiny rhythmic alteration, keyboard movement, the way a phrase lands slightly differently against the same repeating foundation.
Around twelve minutes the recording breaks, leaving a few seconds of real separation before “Shortrapp” begins.
“Shortrapp” is immediately louder. Not dramatically, but enough that the entire cassette seems to step forward. It is also slightly brighter, with more energy surviving in the upper range, yet the stereo image becomes even tighter. The channels are nearly locked together. Instead of expanding outward, the second track becomes denser in the center.
That is a great sound for this material. There is nowhere for the rhythm to escape.
The two pieces together occupy about nineteen and a half minutes, which should be the end of the printed Side One program.
It is not the end of this cassette.
After the listed Too Short material, another recording enters. The file supplied with this copy identifies it as Stylz & The J.I.Z., material from “Smack It Up (Flip It--Rub It Down),” dated 1994. It runs another six and three-quarter minutes. Sonically it makes immediate sense as an intruder because its low end is even more dominant than the Too Short material and its overall level is stronger. It sounds like another era of bass music suddenly finding available magnetic space on a tape whose printed artwork insists that it belongs to 1985.
Then comes El DeBarge’s “Who’s Johnny.”
That transition is glorious.
After nearly twenty-six minutes dominated by rap and bass-heavy rhythm, an unmistakably different kind of mid-1980s pop recording appears for almost four minutes. The stereo field suddenly becomes much wider. More upper-frequency information survives. The recording has noticeably more sparkle, arrangement and spatial separation. Even without knowing the song, the ears would recognize that the acoustic universe has changed.
The J-card says nothing about either addition.
That makes Side A much more interesting as a physical cassette than a perfectly faithful digital reproduction would be. The printed object promises one program. The tape keeps going. Whatever the reason those recordings occupy the remaining space, deliberate filler, material already associated with this particular copy, or another stage in its construction, the cassette now contains more history than its artwork can account for.
Side B begins darker than Side A.
Much darker.
“Girl” runs close to nine minutes and has an extraordinary amount of its spectral weight concentrated at the bottom. The upper frequencies are so restrained that the track feels almost enclosed. The bass and low-midrange do most of the physical work while the voice inhabits a comparatively narrow band above them. This is not the same tonal balance as “Don’t Stop Rappin’.” The second side sounds as if another layer of cloth has been placed over the speakers.
Yet “Girl” is also the most dynamically restless of the five listed tracks. Quiet and sparse passages create much larger differences in level than on the other songs. When the full rhythm returns, it feels heavier because there has actually been room for it to disappear.
A short pause separates it from “Female Funk,” and suddenly the recording jumps forward by several decibels.
“Female Funk” is compact at a little over five minutes, louder and more continuously pressurized. The bass remains the dominant physical element, but there is somewhat more upper information than on “Girl.” The stereo image also opens slightly. Not wide, just enough to let the recording breathe around the center.
Then “Playboy Short” takes nearly another nine minutes.
Its tonal balance sits between the previous two tracks. It retains the very dark low-frequency foundation of Side B while allowing slightly more upper-midrange information through. More importantly, it returns to the long-form logic established by “Don’t Stop Rappin’.” The beat is not in a hurry. Repetition is given enough time to stop behaving like repetition and start behaving like environment.
The complete printed Too Short program therefore runs a little over forty-three minutes, nowhere near enough to fill the C60 shell photographed with the post.
Side A solves that problem with the two unlisted recordings.
Side B has its own ghost.
After “Playboy Short” ends, another short piece remains, supplied here under the filename “Marvin.” Its embedded information points toward a comedy or novelty source rather than the 75 Girls program. Again the sound changes. The stereo image is different, the frequency balance is different, and the listener is suddenly hearing something that the J-card cannot explain.
Those additions are one of the most valuable things about this particular cassette because they expose what physical media can do that a clean album folder cannot.
A digital release usually knows exactly where it begins and ends.
A cassette only knows how much tape is left.
Empty magnetic space becomes an invitation.
Something can be added after the official program. Something can survive from somewhere else. Something can be recorded because there are four minutes left and four minutes is too much silence to waste. Decades later those decisions become inseparable from the identity of the individual object.
The irony is sitting right there on the J-card: “Unauthorized duplication is a violation of applicable laws.”
That sentence has survived beautifully.
So has everything around it.
The 75 Girls address.
The production credits.
The portrait.
The black shell.
The typewriter labels.
The deep low end.
The rolled-off high frequencies.
The long stretches where a beat is allowed to exist without anxiety about changing every eight bars.
And then, after the official record is supposedly finished, another record begins.
That may be the best reason to preserve cassettes as cassettes rather than reducing them entirely to discographies and track lists. A track list tells us what an object was supposed to contain.
The tape tells us what actually happened to its available time.

Basses-Terres - 2017 - Counting Pulsations C62

Originally post Oct 2, 2019 6:34PM

Private Release – none

Counting Pulsations announces its method in the title. The music repeatedly takes a pulse, counts it long enough for the listener to recognize a pattern, then alters the spacing, weight, frequency or surrounding atmosphere until counting stops being useful. Rhythm gradually becomes texture. Texture starts behaving like rhythm. Across a little more than an hour, Basses-Terres keeps moving back and forth across that boundary.
The physical cassette almost illustrates the idea before it is heard. The shell is transparent and filled with tiny gold glitter particles. Hundreds of separate points are suspended throughout the plastic, each one meaningless by itself but collectively forming a field. Behind them sits the black tape wound into a large dark circle. The pale yellow typewritten label is almost aggressively plain: BASSES-TERRES 2017 / Counting Pulsations. Mechanical repetition inside decorative excess.
The exterior artwork is harder to identify and better for being so. Black-and-white photographs crop a human figure so tightly that the body becomes secondary to a dense shaggy or fur-like surface. Folds, strands, dark masses and partial pieces of skin interrupt one another. The image is readable as a person but refuses to provide a conventional portrait. The figure has been converted into texture.
That visual treatment has a direct parallel in the audio. Recognizable musical events repeatedly become surfaces.
“opening triangulated” begins with one of the strangest structures on the cassette. The opening is extraordinarily quiet compared with what eventually develops, with isolated vertical attacks appearing against a thin background. Above them, a repeating electronic sweep travels gradually upward and downward through the frequency range in enormous arcs. The shape returns again and again, but never feels like a conventional melody. It behaves more like scanning equipment, a rotating signal or some electronic organism taking a very long breath.
The sweep is important because it establishes two simultaneous kinds of time. Beneath it are much faster pulses, individual events that can almost be counted. Above them is a huge slow cycle taking close to a minute or more to complete. The listener therefore hears microscopic repetition inside macroscopic repetition. Counting one layer means losing track of another.
As “opening triangulated” develops, the initially thin recording becomes substantially heavier. The center of the track fills with low-frequency material while the sweeping upper signal continues passing overhead. Toward the final portion the sound begins thinning again. The whole seven-minute piece behaves like something gradually entering range, becoming fully visible, then moving away.
“The mask of a person who no longer listens” removes most of that brightness. The median energy collapses downward into the low frequencies, making it one of the darkest tracks on Side A. A deep continuous foundation remains while isolated higher events appear above it like brief openings in a ceiling. Around the middle, these interruptions become more frequent and much brighter. The low body remains almost stubbornly in place while other information tries to break through it.
The title makes an interesting companion to the sound because the track seems to preserve hearing while withholding response. Signals arrive. Some are strong enough to briefly illuminate the entire recording. The underlying mass simply continues.
“trypophobia / legs wide open” changes the scale again. It begins with a relatively exposed high-frequency field before a much denser low-middle body enters. The track then divides itself into large blocks. Dense sections alternate with thinner passages, but the transitions are not smooth fades. They feel more like gates opening and closing.
There is a particularly strong physical quality to the repetition here. The pulse does not function as a traditional drum beat. It repeatedly presses the recording forward. Broad noise, low tones and vertical attacks accumulate until the entire spectrum seems occupied, then portions disappear and the structure can be counted again.
That title, “trypophobia,” almost accidentally describes the visual logic of the glitter shell. Hundreds of tiny points cover the cassette while the music repeatedly creates fields of small repeated events. The eye counts specks. The ear counts pulses. Eventually both give up and perceive a surface.
“formed, unformed, re-formed” may be the clearest structural statement on Side A. Its first minute is comparatively sparse, built from low material and separated electronic events. Then the pulse rate increases dramatically. Repeated vertical attacks begin arriving several times per second. The track grows denser until individual impacts are difficult to isolate.
Around the middle, the structure suddenly clears.
Then it begins again.
The title is almost literal sonic instruction: material establishes a form, breaks that form apart, then builds another from the same basic ingredients. Nothing needs to disappear completely. The relationship between the ingredients changes and the listener perceives a new object.
“lines of dismemberment II” is where Counting Pulsations becomes nearly mechanical. It is one of the most dynamically consistent pieces on the entire cassette. For more than four minutes, a dense grid of recurring attacks occupies almost the full frequency range. The pulses are so persistent that the ear stops interpreting them individually and begins hearing a continuous vibrating body.
Something especially interesting happens gradually across the track: the spectral center keeps climbing. The recording becomes progressively brighter even though its overall level remains remarkably stable. It is almost as though the same machine is running continuously while somebody slowly changes the material being fed through it.
Then, during the final half-minute, the grid breaks.
The dense vertical repetition gives way to clearer sustained bands and a more obviously tonal shape. After several minutes of nearly uninterrupted impact, the appearance of sustained sound feels enormous. The pulse has finally been dismembered.
“undecipherable eyes, protected from the sunlight” closes Side A by withdrawing almost everything that “lines of dismemberment II” accumulated. This is one of the sparsest tracks in terms of attacks, built around a deep dark foundation with isolated high events striking far above it. More importantly, it suddenly opens the stereo field far wider than almost anything before it.
Most of Side A is extremely centered, sometimes nearly mono. Here the sides separate dramatically. Sound begins existing around the listener rather than only in front. That widening makes the title feel oddly appropriate without requiring a literal reading. Something previously protected or enclosed has been opened spatially.
The track begins quietly, grows into a long dark central plateau, then spends its final section retreating almost to nothing.
Side A lasts roughly thirty-two minutes. Side B is slightly shorter at around twenty-eight and a half, but it does not feel like a reduced second half. It begins by accelerating the entire language.
“one way / voice link” has one of the highest densities of discrete attacks on the cassette. Repeating blocks appear, disappear and return in changing forms. The spectrum repeatedly expands upward, contracts, then expands again. The whole piece gradually increases in level through its first four minutes before rapidly falling away near the end.
The track also has substantially more stereo width than most of the earlier material. The result is restless. Pulses do not simply repeat in time; they seem to occupy changing positions and depths.
“Kiss in the neck / reversed reflex” is almost the opposite spatially. It is essentially mono, locked tightly into the center, and it contains the fastest continuous event density on the cassette. The attacks arrive so rapidly that pulse and buzz begin becoming interchangeable.
The first three minutes maintain remarkable pressure. Behind the rapid surface are slowly moving tonal curves, shapes rising through the spectrum underneath the constant repetition. The listener receives fast and slow motion simultaneously again, but in a much more compressed form than on “opening triangulated.”
Then, during the last minute, the structure partially disassembles. The upper field drops away, the repetition thins and isolated elements become easier to distinguish. A reflex repeated enough times has become involuntary; reversing it means recovering the individual motion.
“fissure methedrin” is the longest track on the cassette at about seven and a half minutes and spends much of that time deep in the lower frequencies. Its first two minutes are almost subterranean. A low continuous body remains while small vertical events flicker above it. Later, periodic brighter eruptions begin appearing, first widely separated and then in increasingly complicated arrangements.
The track never becomes as spectrally crowded as “lines of dismemberment II” or “ionosphere.” Its power comes from endurance and low-frequency occupation. It holds one region for so long that every new higher sound feels like a rupture.
Toward the final third, those ruptures become more frequent. The fissure widens.
“ionosphere” immediately moves upward. Large repeating columns of sound extend much higher through the spectrum, appearing at regular intervals across the first half. The pattern resembles enormous electronic breaths or pressure fronts. Each recurrence occupies enough frequency space to feel architectural rather than percussive.
Then the second half becomes increasingly dense.
Individual blocks start overlapping. The lower foundation thickens. The upper spectrum fills. What began as separated events gradually becomes a nearly continuous atmosphere. The title fits because this piece seems less concerned with objects than with layers, regions and charged fields.
It is also one of the loudest sustained tracks here. Where “opening triangulated” slowly approaches and recedes, “ionosphere” keeps increasing its occupation of the available space until the listener is effectively inside it.
“oubliettes the circuitsclosed” ends the cassette with the widest dynamic journey of all eleven tracks. The first minute is extraordinarily restrained. Low pulses appear against a nearly empty background, each one surrounded by enough silence to be counted easily.
Then the floor rises.
A low drone begins accumulating around the pulses. Around two minutes in, large sweeping shapes begin arching upward through the spectrum. They recur irregularly, each one briefly exposing higher frequencies before collapsing downward again.
The middle of the piece is much heavier than the beginning, but it never becomes frantic. Instead the circuits seem to be slowly closing. Each new layer reduces the amount of empty space available.
Then the opposite process begins.
During the final minute the recording loses weight rapidly. The pulses become isolated again. Higher information disappears. By the final seconds, almost everything that had accumulated has drained away.
The cassette ends not with an impact but with subtraction.
That arc makes the interior photograph particularly interesting. Open the J-card and the abstract black-and-white exterior suddenly gives way to a bright color photograph of men with customized motorcycles, including a large three-wheeled machine filling most of the frame. Metal tubing, engine components, wheels, cables, luggage and mechanical assemblies occupy the image. One person holds a small handheld device toward the camera. The right edge becomes another cropped fragment of ground and scattered objects.
The relationship to the music does not need to be literal to work. Counting Pulsations constantly converts machinery into something almost organic and organic repetition into something mechanical. Electronic cycles breathe. Drones behave like pressure systems. Rapid pulses harden into surfaces. A pulse can resemble a motor, but after enough repetition a motor can resemble a heartbeat.
Then there is the glitter cassette.
It might be the most appropriate part of the physical edition. Each gold particle is discrete and countable. There are simply too many of them to make counting worthwhile.
That is also what Basses-Terres does throughout these sixty minutes.
One pulse.
Another pulse.
Another.
Another.
At some point quantity changes perception.
The listener stops counting.
The pulsations remain.

Hellhammer - 1983 - Satanic Rites C50

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 6:41PM

Private Release – none

Satanic Rites looks almost too calm for its own name. The front of the cassette is a dark outdoor photograph: a small tree or shrub turning reddish-orange in the foreground, a patch of grass, and a wooden building disappearing into shadow behind it. Open the J-card and the scene becomes clearer. This is not an invented gothic landscape. It is an ordinary rural place, vegetation growing around a house or outbuilding, rock rising immediately behind it. The photographs have the accidental seriousness of something encountered while walking rather than staged for a record cover.
Then the inside opens into a mass of pale yellow flowers.
That image changes the entire object. “Satanic Rites” surrounded by flowers could have been played as obvious irony, but nothing here really winks. The flowers are allowed to remain beautiful. The house is allowed to remain a house. The rock is allowed to remain rock. Hellhammer supplies all the ugliness necessary once the cassette begins moving.
The cassette itself is nearly transparent, including its hubs, with the dark wound tape forming a black circle behind one reel and a thin red leader tracing its path around the shell. “HELLHAMMER 1983 / Satanic Rites” appears in small typewriter lettering near the top. Turn the cassette over and those words remain visible backwards through the plastic. Nothing is hidden by a label. The machinery, tape path, screws, pressure pad, leader and reversed title are all part of the appearance.
The recording opens with about a minute of “Intro,” and immediately establishes a sound different from the main songs. It is quieter, darker and much narrower than what follows. The two channels are more closely tied together and most of its energy sits considerably lower in the spectrum. It behaves like an entrance corridor. The cassette is already making noise, but the full body of the recording has not arrived yet.
Then “Messiah” enters and the door opens.
The first seconds are still relatively restrained, but within the opening half-minute the recording swells noticeably. The upper frequencies spread outward, the level rises and the primitive mass of guitar, drums and voice establishes itself. The sound is wider than the intro but still nowhere near a polished modern stereo image. Instruments do not occupy carefully carved spaces. They overlap. Guitar distortion becomes atmosphere. Cymbals dissolve into a dirty metallic wash. The voice sits inside the band instead of being placed safely above it.
That congestion is important. Satanic Rites does not sound merely old. It sounds physically crowded.
“Messiah” keeps changing internally without ever becoming clean. There are brighter stretches where cymbals and guitar edges claw farther upward, then darker sections where everything folds back into the middle. The track gets increasingly rough toward its final minute, not necessarily louder but more exposed in the upper frequencies. By the end, the recording seems to have worn away some of its own covering.
“The Third Of The Storms (Evoken Damnation)” begins from farther back again. Its opening is noticeably quieter than the body of the song, then the recording surges forward. The track moves through a series of pressure changes rather than simply holding one volume. Around the middle it briefly loses some weight, then recovers, and the final minute becomes one of its strongest stretches before suddenly dropping away.
The music continually demonstrates how much can happen inside bad fidelity.
A clean recording gives detail by separation. This recording gives detail by instability.
Something shifts in the microphone balance and the drums suddenly become more apparent. A riff moves slightly upward in frequency and the entire recording changes color. A passage loses volume and what had been background noise becomes audible structure. The ears begin learning the dirt.
“Buried And Forgotten” is the longest piece on Side A and gives that unstable sound enough time to become a whole environment. It runs just over six minutes and repeatedly contracts and expands. There are several obvious drops in pressure during the track, but they never resemble polished studio dynamics. They feel structural, almost geological, like portions of the recording sinking and then being pushed upward again.
The last half-minute is especially effective. After maintaining so much density for so long, the track begins losing mass. The final seconds collapse toward near silence instead of delivering some gigantic conclusion. “Buried And Forgotten” does exactly what the title suggests sonically: it seems to disappear into the medium carrying it.
Then “Maniac” arrives noticeably sharper.
Of the Side A songs, it throws some of the strongest energy into the upper part of the recording. The guitar abrasion and cymbal spray become more exposed, giving the song a nervous brightness compared with the darker center of “Buried And Forgotten.” It still has the same crowded body underneath, but there is more scrape on the surface. Around the middle the recording briefly relaxes, then returns to full pressure.
That small difference is enough to make the song feel faster even before tempo is considered. Brightness becomes aggression.
“Eurynomos” closes Side A in a compact three-minute rush. Its recording is comparatively consistent after the longer fluctuations of “Buried And Forgotten” and “Maniac.” It enters quickly, reaches its working pressure almost immediately and remains there. The cassette has spent more than twenty minutes teaching the listener its language by this point, so there is no need for another transition. The side simply finishes inside the sound it has created.
Side A runs a little over twenty-one minutes.
Side B begins with seven minutes of “Triumph Of Death.”
That length matters. It is not merely the longest track on this side before “Satanic Rites.” It changes the scale of the cassette. The opening is darker and quieter than much of Side A, and the first minute takes time accumulating weight. The recording gradually becomes brighter and more forceful rather than announcing everything immediately.
For several minutes “Triumph Of Death” hovers inside a relatively dark spectrum. The guitars feel thick instead of sharp. Then, toward the middle, the upper frequencies begin opening more consistently and the recording becomes increasingly abrasive. The changes happen slowly enough that they are difficult to notice moment by moment. By the time the track reaches its strongest middle section, the ears have traveled somewhere without receiving a clean transition.
The final minute sinks downward again.
This is one of the most interesting recordings on the cassette because its seven-minute duration allows the fidelity itself to develop like part of the arrangement. The same musical language feels different depending upon how much treble survives, how strongly the two channels separate, and how completely the distortion occupies the center.
“Revelations Of Doom” reverses that immediately. It is one of the brighter recordings here, throwing substantially more energy upward than “Triumph Of Death.” The guitar and cymbals feel shredded rather than buried. The entire track is also remarkably even in level until the closing seconds suddenly fall away.
Then “Reaper” darkens everything again.
It is short, direct and heavier in the low-middle frequencies. The upper edge is less pronounced, so the rhythm section seems larger. It sounds like the same room with the lights changed. The cassette does not need radical production differences to make each song distinct. Tiny shifts in bandwidth and recording balance do the job.
The title track is the giant on the second side.
“Satanic Rites” runs more than seven minutes and continually changes its internal temperature. The first forty seconds are quieter and darker, almost another introduction. Then the recording opens sharply. During the next several minutes the upper frequencies repeatedly surge and retreat. Some stretches are abrasive enough to rival “Maniac” and “Revelations Of Doom”; others fold back into thick, darker distortion.
Around the four-minute mark the sound noticeably sinks. For nearly a minute the track becomes duller and quieter, as though the recording has moved farther from the listener. Then it rebuilds. By five minutes the brightness has returned, and the later portions alternate again between cutting upper-frequency attack and heavier middle-range crush.
Seven minutes is long enough for the noise to stop feeling like a defect.
It becomes weather.
“Crucifixion” follows with less wandering. Under three minutes, comparatively bright and consistently forceful, it feels like the cassette tightening everything after the long title track. There is no need to develop another landscape. The song arrives, occupies the available space and leaves.
Then comes “Outro.”
Like the opening minute of the cassette, the outro is sonically separate from the songs. It is narrower, darker and more strongly centered. Its spectrum sits far below the abrasive height of “Satanic Rites” or “Revelations Of Doom.” The frame closes around the recording.
The full program runs a little over forty-six minutes, almost perfectly suited to a C50. Side A is roughly twenty-one and a half minutes; Side B approaches twenty-five. The difference is largely created by the enormous pairing of “Triumph Of Death” and “Satanic Rites,” which together occupy almost half of Side B.
The physical object makes those forty-six minutes stranger.
Unlike the pink shell used for Death Fiend, this cassette nearly disappears. The clear plastic exposes the mechanism, while the artwork outside it is filled with an ordinary building, rock, vegetation and flowers. The satanic language exists primarily in the typewritten title and the audio. Nothing in the photographs performs evil for the listener.
That creates a better collision than conventional imagery could.
The outdoor photographs are quiet.
The flowers are almost ridiculously soft.
The cassette is transparent.
Inside it, the recording is opaque.
Hellhammer's sound is the opposite of the shell containing it. Guitars and drums merge into one another. The voice struggles inside distortion. Frequency ranges overlap until individual sources become difficult to separate. There is very little transparency in the music at all.
You can see straight through the cassette.
You cannot see through the sound.
And when the outro finally collapses, the tape stops inside a clear plastic box surrounded by yellow flowers.

Hellhammer - 1983 - Death Fiend C35

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 6:51PM

Private Release – none

There is something wonderfully wrong about the physical appearance of this tape before a second of Hellhammer is heard. A pale pink cassette. A tiny fluorescent orange typewritten label. A mountain building beneath a clear blue sky. Yellow and white daffodils filling the inside panel. None of the visual vocabulary normally attached to titles like “Death Fiend,” “Chainsaw,” “Ready For Slaughter” or “Sweet Torment” appears anywhere. There are no skulls, inverted crosses, graveyards, demons or black-and-white photocopied menace. Instead there is sunlight, rock, flowers, painted wood and an almost toy-like pink shell.
That contradiction is much stronger than simply putting ugly music inside ugly packaging. The cassette looks gentle enough to contain a children's story. Then “Maniac” starts.
The recording immediately establishes its own physical world. This is not spacious, cleaned-up metal where every drum and guitar has been separated and polished. The sound is concentrated heavily in the low-middle and middle frequencies, with guitar, bass, drums and voice crowded together into a thick central body. The stereo image exists, but it is narrow and highly connected between channels rather than presenting instruments in neat left-and-right positions. Everything seems to be fighting for room inside the same strip of magnetic territory.
“Maniac” begins slightly below its eventual weight and settles quickly into a remarkably consistent wall. The important sound is not simply distortion. It is compression by circumstance. The guitar does not float above the rhythm section; it rubs against it. Cymbal energy produces a rough spray across the upper frequencies while the bulk of the recording remains lower and heavier. The vocal feels embedded rather than pasted over the top. When the arrangement changes, the recording does not suddenly become clearer. The entire mass changes shape together.
That makes the primitive quality enormously appealing. “Primitive” here does not mean incompetent. It means the recording has not been disciplined into the sonic conventions that later became normal for extreme metal. The edges are still sticking out.
“Angel Of Destruction” has one of the more noticeable entrances on the cassette. The first half-minute is comparatively restrained and uneven in level before the recording grows into its full body. There is almost a sense of machinery warming up. Once it reaches cruising pressure, the track becomes particularly thick in the lower mids. The top end is less aggressive than several of the tracks that follow, giving it a darker, heavier enclosure. The drums arrive as physical impacts inside the guitar sound rather than pristine individual pieces of a kit.
Then “Hammerhead” sharpens everything.
Its upper-mid and treble energy is noticeably stronger than the songs around it. The first twenty seconds are especially abrasive, with a brighter scrape cutting through the otherwise heavy center of the recording. It sounds more exposed, almost as though somebody briefly removed a layer of cloth from the speakers. The track eventually settles closer to the overall sound of the tape, but that opening bite gives “Hammerhead” its own identity before the riffing even has time to establish itself.
“Bloody Pussies” is the longest piece on Side A and also one of the darkest recordings here. Nearly five minutes gives it enough time to become an environment instead of merely another short attack. High-frequency extension is more restricted than on “Hammerhead” or “Death Fiend,” so the track seems to sink downward into guitar, bass and the thud of the drums. The recording remains dense almost continuously, but subtle changes in pressure matter. Around the latter half the sound pushes forward, relaxes, then thickens again. Nothing becomes clean enough to provide relief.
That is the remarkable thing about Side A. There is very little empty acoustic space. Even when individual instruments stop or change, the recording itself seems occupied. Amplifier residue, room sound, distortion and the limited fidelity of the source fill the gaps. The music does not simply happen inside the recording. The condition of the recording becomes part of the music.
Flip the pink cassette and “Death Fiend” is waiting.
It is the brightest, most abrasive recording on the tape. The spectral balance reaches farther upward than anything on Side A, which gives the guitars and cymbals a shredded metallic edge. The difference is immediately audible after “Bloody Pussies.” Side A closes dark and congested; Side B begins with a blade.
That makes “Death Fiend” an excellent title track for this particular transfer. It feels less covered over. The high end is ugly in exactly the useful way: not sparkling, not detailed, but splintered. The sound resembles metal being torn rather than polished.
“Dark Warriors” swings in the opposite direction. It is one of the loudest and thickest tracks on the cassette, with a great amount of energy concentrated below the harshest guitar frequencies. The result is heavier, more bodily and slightly less exposed. There are moments where the texture suddenly thins or changes character before returning to the larger mass. Those irregularities keep the recording alive. A perfectly controlled production would remove them. Here they become landmarks.
“Chainsaw” is almost four minutes and spends most of that time maintaining a stubbornly consistent pressure. The title encourages an obvious comparison, but the guitar really does occupy that kind of continuous mechanical zone: not the clean buzz of a modern high-gain recording, but a coarse middle-frequency grind with percussion repeatedly breaking through it. Late in the track the texture changes enough to feel like the machine has shifted gears, yet the overall dirt remains.
“Ready For Slaughter” has more upper-frequency attack again. Its opening is particularly sharp before the recording settles into the same central crush that links the tape together. About a minute in, the balance changes enough to create a small internal reset, then the pressure builds back around it. These are not dramatic studio tricks. They sound like performance, microphone, room and recording level interacting in real time.
“Sweet Torment” is the shortest track and a perfect final piece because it does not attempt a grand ending. It begins quieter, reaches full force quickly and spends barely more than two minutes inside the established sound before disappearing. There is something satisfying about ending a cassette this ugly with a title containing the word “Sweet,” especially when the physical tape itself is pink and the J-card has been hiding a garden of daffodils.
The complete program is only about thirty minutes: Side A approximately fourteen minutes and fifty seconds, Side B a little over fifteen minutes. That compact length helps. Nothing has enough time to become historical monument or sacred artifact. These nine tracks still behave like a demo being blasted through equipment rather than an institution explaining why the demo became important.
The sound carries much of that effect. Across the cassette, more than half of the musical energy repeatedly sits in roughly the low-midrange where distorted guitar, bass weight and drum body collide. The recordings differ significantly in how much upper-frequency information survives. “Bloody Pussies” is comparatively dark. “Death Fiend” suddenly throws far more abrasive high-frequency material into the listener's face. “Hammerhead” also bites harder above the central mass. “Dark Warriors” pushes downward again. Those differences make the tracks feel physically separate even though they clearly belong to the same ugly family.
The transfer also refuses the enormous artificial width associated with much later heavy music. The channels remain strongly related throughout the tape. Sound gathers near the center instead of wrapping luxuriously around the listener. That narrowness increases the feeling of confinement. Hellhammer does not surround the room. Hellhammer occupies a dirty rectangle in front of the listener and keeps hitting it.
Then there is the packaging.
The front photograph shows a wooden mountain building cut diagonally by its roofline, with bare gray rock climbing behind it into blue sky. Unfolded, the image continues through another view dominated by rock and the edge of another roof. The photographs feel observational rather than dramatic. No attempt has been made to force them into darkness. Their daylight remains daylight.
Beside them is the PRIVATE RELEASE spine: stark black lettering on white, next to a narrow black strip speckled with tiny white marks. Then the J-card opens farther and suddenly produces a dense field of daffodils, yellow, white and orange against dark green.
The contrast becomes almost comical when the cassette itself appears. The shell is an uninterrupted dusty pink with a fluorescent orange rectangle typed:
HELLHAMMER 1983
Death Fiend
There is no logo.
No illustration.
No attempt to reproduce a known metal aesthetic.
Just those words sitting on pink plastic.
That may be the strongest visual decision in the whole object precisely because nothing about it tries to explain itself. “Death Fiend” does not become less violent because it is written on a pink cassette. The pink cassette becomes stranger because it contains “Death Fiend.” The flowers do not soften “Ready For Slaughter.” “Ready For Slaughter” changes what happens when the flowers are seen afterward.
This is one of the pleasures of a reproduced cassette that does not pretend to be an official facsimile. The recording and the object are allowed to establish a new relationship. Hellhammer's audio is already overloaded with distortion, abrasion, crude mass and physical limitation. Giving that sound predictable black-and-red artwork would merely confirm what the ears already know.
Mountain sunlight, flowers and pink plastic create friction instead.
The audio is harsh.
The object is almost pretty.
Neither wins.
Thirty minutes later the reels stop and the daffodils are still there.

No Artist - (1983) Necrophilia C90

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 7:04PM

Private Release – none

The first thing NECROPHILIA does is refuse a face. The cassette label says NO ARTIST. Not unknown artist, not various artists, not anonymous. NO ARTIST. Beneath it: (1983) NECROPHILIA CS. That wording makes the recording feel less like a release by somebody than an object that has been recovered, labeled and placed back into circulation.

The artwork pushes the same feeling. The front photograph is difficult to resolve cleanly. Something corpse-like seems embedded in gray earth, stone or dried organic matter, its contours partially disappearing into the surrounding texture. The longer it is looked at, the less certain the boundary becomes between body and ground. Near the bottom is a completely ordinary blue-and-white cup with a straw. That small piece of everyday trash is one of the strangest details in the whole package. The image contains decay, but also somebody's discarded drink. Death and convenience-store normality occupy the same few inches.

Unfolded, that image is paired with a dark building whose arched opening suggests a chapel, crypt or some other place where architecture is meant to hold a boundary between the living and the dead. The spine carries a torn fragment of the same imagery underneath the words PRIVATE RELEASE, with a narrow black field speckled by white marks beside it. Nothing looks polished into a coherent commercial design. It looks assembled, cut, bordered, repeated and deliberately left a little severe.

Then there is the yellow flower.

Its appearance is almost violent because of its color. After gray decomposition, black architecture and white paper, the flower fills the frame with yellow. It is alive to the point of excess. The package therefore does not stay entirely on the side of death. Decay and flowering are presented as neighboring conditions. One turns into the other whether anybody finds that comforting or not.

The cassette itself continues the split personality. One face receives a plain white typewritten label naming NO ARTIST, 1983 and NECROPHILIA. The other is covered by the familiar orange PRIVATE RELEASE label with nothing more than B on either side of the window. Information on one face, ownership or intervention on the other. The original identity of the physical cassette is almost completely buried.

The audio is where the object becomes much stranger.

Side A runs almost the full length of a C90 side, roughly forty-five minutes, and for most of that time the material is human speech. This is not crisp modern spoken-word audio. The recording lives in a restricted frequency range, with very little of the airy high end expected from a contemporary digital source. The voices sit mostly in the middle of the spectrum and the stereo image is extremely narrow, often approaching mono. Hiss and low-level background sound remain around the speech instead of disappearing between words.

That limited fidelity gives the voices physical age.

The recording does not merely communicate speech. It communicates the medium carrying the speech. Pauses reveal noise. Quieter passages expose the floor underneath the voices. Levels shift. The spectral balance changes. There are moments when the recording seems to pull backward from the listener and others when it suddenly steps forward. Whatever the original source was, it has not arrived here antiseptically.

Side A begins with a few seconds of almost nothing before speech appears. From there the voice activity is remarkably continuous. There are constant little valleys where sentences stop, someone breathes, or the source briefly falls away, but the overall impression is sustained conversation or spoken documentation rather than a collage made from rapid cuts.

The restraint becomes important because the subject named on the shell is NECROPHILIA. Nothing in the sound itself is theatrically "horror." There are no cheap thunderclaps, screams or cinematic signals telling the listener when to become disturbed. Instead there are voices preserved in an aging recording. That is much more uncomfortable. The title hangs over ordinary human speech and forces the listener to examine every hesitation, change in tone and silence for meaning.

Near the end of Side A the continuity finally cracks. The level drops into a much quieter passage, almost a hole in the recording, and then a noticeably louder, rougher section suddenly enters. The background becomes denser and the entire recording seems to change distance in an instant. It feels less like a graceful edit than opening another door in the same building.

Side B initially continues the long-form spoken material. The first section lasts more than thirty minutes, making the first seventy-five minutes or so of NECROPHILIA overwhelmingly voice-centered. The B-side recording is slightly darker and narrower in its upper frequencies than much of Side A, and the relationship between the channels is less perfectly locked together. The result has a faintly unstable dimensional quality. It is still essentially centered speech, but the recording around that speech moves.

This is where the length becomes part of the experience. NECROPHILIA does not give the listener a five-minute sample and release them. It makes the voice continue. Forty minutes becomes an hour. An hour becomes longer. The listener begins noticing the mechanics of listening itself: waiting for another speaker, hearing the room behind a sentence, noticing when the tape gets quieter, registering a breath or a sudden change of level. Attention becomes claustrophobic.

Then, roughly thirty-one minutes into Side B, the structure changes completely.

The remaining quarter-hour is broken into much shorter pieces. Some last only eight or ten seconds. Others stretch for a minute or three. After so much uninterrupted speech, these cuts feel extremely abrupt. The tape suddenly behaves less like a document and more like a collection of evidence fragments.

Several of the short pieces are almost completely mono, voices pushed directly through the center with very little spatial information. Some are much brighter and noisier than the long recording preceding them. Others are duller, quieter and strangely distant. The differences in encoding and source quality are audible enough that the final sequence never settles into one acoustic room.

One of the most striking changes arrives in a roughly eighty-second section where recognizable vocal form largely gives way to a dense broadband mass. It is substantially wider in stereo than almost anything before it. The recording fills the spectrum rather than clustering around the human voice, and its volume remains comparatively constant. After more than an hour of speech shaped by breaths, pauses and sentence rhythms, this block feels like matter. The voice has disappeared and a surface has taken its place.

Another later section drops dramatically in level and stays there for almost three minutes. It is nearly mono and feels recessed compared with the material around it. The tape repeatedly changes the listener's physical relationship to the sound: close voice, distant voice, narrow signal, sudden width, dense texture, near absence.

That is what makes the final stretch work. The short pieces are not simply additional content. They destabilize everything learned from the first three quarters of the cassette.

The last half-minute opens the stereo field more noticeably again. Higher-pitched vocal information occupies a different space from the long central spoken recording, so the ending does not return to the acoustic world where the cassette began. It leaves the listener somewhere else.

The visual and sonic construction mirror one another unusually well. The cover offers a form that cannot be cleanly separated from the ground surrounding it. The recording does the same thing with voices. Speech cannot be cleanly separated from hiss, age, room noise, tape movement and transfer. The deterioration around the information becomes information.

Even the flower fits.

A voice captured decades ago is a dead event that continues producing a present-tense effect whenever the tape moves again. The speaker is not speaking now, yet speech occurs now. A recording is already a peculiar relationship with absence. NECROPHILIA intensifies that fact until the title begins operating beyond its literal meaning.

There is also something important in NO ARTIST. Removing the artist denies the usual safe distance provided by authorship. There is nobody printed on the shell to explain intention. No personality is offered as a guide. The listener receives an old date, a loaded word, anonymous voices, a corpse-like image, a dark building, a flower and ninety minutes of magnetic time.

The cassette does not resolve any of them.

It preserves contact between them.

The dead image touches the living flower. The old recording touches the present listener. Noise touches language. Silence touches speech. PRIVATE RELEASE touches NO ARTIST.

And the tape keeps turning.

And now... a second attempt. I told ChatGPT I believe everything talked about on the tape is fictional between all parties. Now:

NECROPHILIA begins working before the tape is played. The word is already there, typed plainly onto the cassette beside NO ARTIST and the date 1983. Once that word has been read, it becomes almost impossible to approach the photographs innocently. Rock, earth, shadow and an uncertain form begin suggesting a body. A dark barn-like or house-like structure in the adjoining photograph starts acquiring associations it would not necessarily possess on its own. A rigid post or structural element emerging near the rock becomes another detail to investigate. The title has contaminated the act of looking.

That may be the most important mechanism on this cassette: suggestion creates its own evidence.

Nothing on the cover needs to literally depict necrophilia. It only needs to leave enough uncertainty for the word NECROPHILIA to begin directing the imagination. The viewer does the remaining work. Forms become bodies because the mind has already been given a subject and told, indirectly, what to look for.

The yellow flower makes that uncertainty even stranger. It is intensely alive, bright enough to dominate the otherwise gray, black and white construction of the package. Life and death are not illustrated literally against one another. Instead the flower introduces another association into an object already carrying a word connected with death, desire and the violation of an absolute boundary. The flower is simply a flower until everything surrounding it changes how it is seen.

The audio performs a similar operation.

Most of the cassette is built around an old radio interview. A woman speaks at length about necrophilia and describes ways the subject enters what she presents as her life and practice. There is no need for a listener to wonder what the cassette title refers to. The connection becomes immediately obvious once the interview begins.

What remains uncertain is something much more interesting: how literally any of it should be believed.

The recording presents a voice making extraordinary claims, but a voice on the radio is not evidence that those claims describe events that actually happened. The woman could be describing experience. She could be constructing a persona. She could be exaggerating. She could be translating fantasy into autobiographical language because saying "I do this" produces an entirely different charge from saying "I imagine this."

NECROPHILIA becomes much more interesting when the interview is heard through that uncertainty.

Rather than treating the recording as documentation of an actual practice, it can be heard as documentation of fantasy being spoken into existence.

That distinction matters.

Fantasy does not need to become physical reality to produce a genuine emotional or psychological experience. Something can be invented, performed or mutually sustained and still generate excitement, fear, attachment, embarrassment, desire or obsession in the people participating in it. The event may be false while the thrill generated by the event is completely real.

The woman in the recording may therefore be less interesting as a source of factual testimony than as somebody demonstrating how language can temporarily abolish the boundary between imagination and biography. She speaks the fantasy in the grammatical form of lived experience. The listener receives it through radio, then through an aging recording, then through cassette, and finally through another reproduction decades later. Every stage adds another layer of distance from whatever originally occurred.

That distance does not weaken the tape.

It becomes the tape.

The sound makes this especially powerful. The interview does not arrive as pristine contemporary speech. It is narrow, aged and surrounded by the audible residue of its medium. Hiss remains underneath the voices. Levels move. The recording occasionally seems to retreat or change character. Human speech occupies a limited frequency range while the noise around it reminds the listener that this is something being recovered from another time.

The recording consequently possesses the seductive quality of evidence without necessarily proving anything.

Old audio does that extremely well. Age can make a recording feel authoritative. Something captured decades ago seems as though it must be a document simply because it survived. The hiss becomes archaeological dust. The listener instinctively leans closer.

But NECROPHILIA offers no artist to guarantee meaning.

NO ARTIST is perfect.

There is nobody presented on the shell whose biography can stabilize the material. No authorial personality tells the listener whether the interview is documentary, exploitation, fantasy, found audio, satire, confession or performance. The cassette simply puts the recording in front of the listener and names it.

That naming is an intervention.

NECROPHILIA.

Now listen.

The experience resembles the visual cover again. An ambiguous photograph becomes corpse-like after receiving the title. An ambiguous personal narrative becomes confession-like because the subject is extreme and the speaker uses the language of experience. In both cases the mind wants to close the gap between suggestion and certainty.

The cassette refuses to close it.

That refusal may explain why the enormous duration of the interview matters. A short clip could function as shock material. Ninety minutes demands something different. The listener has enough time to move beyond the initial reaction to the subject and begin studying the speaker herself: cadence, hesitation, confidence, performance, pauses, changes in tone and the ordinary mechanics of conversation.

The fantastic subject gradually becomes attached to an ordinary human voice.

That is where the false thrill becomes especially effective.

The fantasy does not sound like fantasy because it is not surrounded by the usual signals of fantasy. There is no dramatic soundtrack announcing that a transgressive scenario has begun. No theatrical monster enters. Nobody provides a safe fictional frame. There is simply a person talking.

The listener supplies the pictures.

This is also why fantasy can become emotionally complicated even when everyone involved understands some level of construction is taking place. A person can knowingly enter an artificial relationship, artificial scenario or commercial performance and still experience authentic feelings inside it. The structure may be manufactured while the response generated within that structure is not.

Knowing that something is partly unreal does not necessarily disable it.

Sometimes knowing is part of the thrill.

The imagination participates willingly.

That makes NECROPHILIA less about whether one anonymous woman's account can be verified and more about the strange authority we grant a voice once it says "this happened to me."

Radio was particularly good at producing that intimacy. A disembodied voice enters a room without bringing a body with it. The listener cannot inspect the speaker's surroundings or watch expressions outside the small amount communicated by tone. Somebody speaks directly into private space while remaining physically absent.

For a cassette called NECROPHILIA, that absence is almost too perfect.

A voice detached from its original body survives.

Decades later it speaks again.

Whatever was happening when the microphone originally captured that woman is finished. The physical room is gone. The particular moment is gone. The original broadcast is gone. Perhaps even the people involved are gone. Yet the voice remains available for another person to activate by pressing PLAY.

The recording becomes a relationship with something absent.

That does not make playing an old cassette analogous to the literal subject of the interview, but the title makes the resonance impossible to ignore. Recorded sound has always possessed something ghostly about it. The dead moment continues speaking.

The final section of Side B disrupts the long interview with shorter fragments and changing sound sources. After so much time spent inside one sustained conversation, these pieces feel like the fantasy losing its stable narrative form. Voices become fragments. Fidelity changes. Stereo width changes. Some passages become almost entirely centered and narrow while others suddenly expand into much broader noise. One section abandons recognizable speech almost completely for a dense wall of sound.

The person who had occupied the cassette for so long begins dissolving back into recording.

Voice becomes signal.

Signal becomes noise.

Noise becomes absence.

Then another fragment appears.

The construction of the physical cassette reinforces this uncertainty. One side carries the clean white label identifying NO ARTIST, 1983 and NECROPHILIA. The other has the orange PRIVATE RELEASE label. The object does not pretend to restore an official artifact to some pure original condition. It openly presents mediation. Something existed, something was recorded, something survived, and now somebody else has framed it again.

That framing changes what the material means.

The title changes the photograph.

The photograph changes the title.

The interview changes both.

The possibility that the interview itself is fantasy changes everything again.

And that possibility is ultimately more disturbing and more interesting than simply deciding whether the woman's claims were true.

If everything she describes happened exactly as stated, the tape becomes documentation of an extreme behavior.

If much of it exists primarily inside her imagination, the tape becomes documentation of something less easily cataloged: a human being discovering that language can make fantasy feel temporarily historical.

"I imagined this" keeps the event safely enclosed.

"I did this" releases it into the world.

The listener then has to decide what to believe.

Maybe that is the false thrill preserved on NECROPHILIA. Not deception for the purpose of proving a fact, but an agreement to temporarily inhabit something impossible, forbidden or unreal because the imagined version produces an experience unavailable through ordinary life.

The thrill exists.

The story producing it may not.

The cassette never gives us a way to separate the two cleanly.

That is why NO ARTIST matters so much.

There is nobody available to interrogate.

There is only a voice, an old recording, an ambiguous landscape, a building, a flower, a date and one word telling the imagination where to go.

NECROPHILIA does not have to show anything.

It only has to suggest it.

The listener finishes the picture.

VA - 2018 - New New C94

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 7:19PM

Private Release – none

Track Listing:
1. To Seek Safety In Other People (True Freedom Remix) (Internazionale & Lana Del Rey)  (4:31)
2. A Love Vibration (Ann Peebles) ( 2:48)
3. Story About What (Man on News) ( 0:19)
4. Fooled Around And Fell In Love (Elvin Bishop) ( 2:54)
5. Hype (UFC 207) ( 1:13)
6. The Tracks Of My Tears (Gladys Knight & The Pips) ( 3:04)
7. Beton (Rondo Session) (Die II. Liga) ( 1:15)
8. Depression (Koko Joe And The Jobhunters) ( 2:24)
9. WTF (DJ Speedsick / Seymour & His Heartbeat Trumpet) (15:08)
10. Cheap Vodka (Acid Bath) ( 2:14)
11. Cold Pop (Lady on News) ( 0:22)
12. Just Dropped In (Kenny Rogers & The First Edition) ( 3:18)
13. Ka Poo Yah (Lady on News) ( 0:41)
14. I Must Be Losin' You (Willie Clayton) ( 2:27)
15. Illegal Butt (Man on News) ( 0:02)
16. The Time Of Me (Ebony Web) ( 3:23)
17. Aah blblbl (Man on News) ( 0:17)
18. Radio Collage (Felix Kubin) ( 3:22)
19. Funerary Despair (Funerary Despair) ( 1:42)
20. It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me (Barry White) ( 3:23)
21. Genocidal Alchemy (Gath Šmânê) ( 0:23)
22. Beat To Death (Burned Copy) (Total Freedom) ( 3:07)
23. Leeches Cling To His Flesh Until There Is Nothing But Dust (Orgy of Carrion) ( 3:48)
24. On The Good Ship Lollipop (Shirley Temple) ( 3:30)
25. The Idea Of It Is More Potent (Violence) ( 4:15)
26. Sirene (Genoasejlet) ( 3:44)
27. Salt (Wonderland Club) ( 8:14)
28. Stimulation From Assault (Disgusting Sanctum) ( 6:14)
29. Domination Of The Will (Carved Cross)

NEW NEW is not a clean mixtape. It crackles, interrupts itself, jumps between decades, changes fidelity without warning and repeatedly allows the physical condition of the source material to become part of the composition. Static is allowed to remain static. A dirty 45 is allowed to sound dirty. A television fragment can be two seconds long. A drum solo can suddenly occupy the center of the universe. The cassette does not flatten everything into one consistent listening experience. The differences are the experience.

Even the object looks deceptively respectable. An old black Maxell XLII sits inside a clear case with a plain orange typewritten label. The artwork is assembled from anonymous catalog-style clothing photography: sweaters, a necktie, trousers, a hand adjusting a belt. Faces either disappear entirely or belong to people performing the harmless happiness of commercial photography. Everything outside the tape looks orderly, suburban and properly dressed. Inside is another situation completely.

Internazionale & Lana Del Rey's "To Seek Safety In Other People (True Freedom Remix)" begins Side A in a wide, hazy space. It feels less like an introduction than entering halfway into somebody else's dream. The title itself becomes useful later because this side repeatedly returns to voices seeking connection, losing connection, falling in love, losing love, talking nonsense and being violently interrupted by the outside world.

Then Acid Bath's "Cheap Vodka" kicks the door off.

The jump is brutal because there is no attempt to make the two recordings agree with each other. The softer atmosphere of the opener is simply replaced by distortion, physical weight and abrasion. That decision establishes NEW NEW's real sequencing language. A transition does not need to be smooth to be correct. Sometimes the violence of the cut is the transition.

The NEWS fragments begin almost immediately after that. "Cold Pop," "Ka Poo Yah," "Illegal Butt," "Ah Blblbl" and "Story About What" are not little novelty tracks decorating the mixtape. They function more like damaged punctuation. They are mostly narrow, broadcast-like recordings, voices appearing without enough context to explain themselves and disappearing before the brain can settle around them. "Illegal Butt" lasts barely long enough to exist. That is exactly why it works. The cassette keeps poking holes into its own continuity.

Kenny Rogers' "Just Dropped In" lands perfectly inside this method because the song already feels psychologically unstable. The psychedelic studio production is recognizable, but surrounded by these scraps of television and speech it stops behaving like familiar old rock. It becomes another intercepted transmission.

Then Side A develops one of its most important textures: old records.

Willy Clayton's "I Must Be Losin' You" does not arrive as a clean digital restoration. The sound is dark, narrow and worn. The groove is part of the recording. There are tiny snaps and pieces of surface noise living around the music, and when the arrangement relaxes the age of the record becomes even more obvious. This is not damage that needs to be removed. It gives the song a body. The voice is accompanied not only by the band but by the physical memory of a needle traveling through an old piece of vinyl.

That quality becomes even stronger with Ebony Web's "The Time Of Me." The recording feels pulled through a small dusty opening. The high end is softened, the image is almost mono, and the surface of the record remains audible around the music. There is something completely different about hearing an old soul record this way instead of hearing a spotless reissue. The record is not merely reproducing the past. Its scratches are evidence that the object itself traveled through time.

Ann Peebles' "Love Vibration" has its own version of the same thing. Little bright clicks and pops flash across the groove like accidental percussion. That word, vibration, becomes wonderfully literal when the actual mechanical vibration of a stylus and a worn record is still audible inside the transfer. The music, the groove and the dirt cannot be completely separated anymore.

This is one of NEW NEW's strongest qualities. Fidelity is emotional information.

A worn 45 does not feel the same as an MP3. A news recording does not feel the same as a studio master. A blown-out underground recording does not feel the same as a professionally recorded soul single. Instead of hiding those differences, the tape continually places them beside one another.

Elvin Bishop's "Fooled Around And Fell In Love" continues the romantic current, but by this point romance on NEW NEW is already contaminated by interruption. Love songs keep getting approached, damaged and abandoned. The songs themselves may be sincere, but the cassette refuses to leave them alone for very long.

Then comes the UFC recording.

Suddenly private longing is interrupted by public combat. Human beings beating each other becomes another form of broadcast entertainment before Gladys Knight & The Pips arrive with "The Tracks Of My Tears." It is hard not to hear the title differently after the surrounding sequence. Tears, fighting, love, television, violence, ridiculous speech fragments and old vinyl surface all occupy the same side of tape. Nothing is categorized according to whether it is serious or stupid. Everything is usable.

The worn record sound matters particularly here because "The Tracks Of My Tears" does not float above history. It drags some history into the room with it. The little imperfections around the recording make the emotional content feel strangely physical. The sadness has dust on it.

Die II Liga's short, hard "Beton (Rondo Session)" begins breaking apart the soul-heavy middle of the side. Koko Joe And The Jobhunters' "Depression" follows with another old-record presence, but the title now feels like a door opening into the final section. The cassette is moving away from recognizable sentimental structure and toward something much less stable.

The last fifteen minutes of Side A are especially important because they are not one continuous texture. Mantar occupies the lower, heavier body of the stretch, then around the final third the sound itself changes character. The spectrum suddenly becomes brighter, more shredded and more agitated as DJ Speedsick / Seymour & His Heartbeat Trumpet's "WTF!?" takes over. The side does not politely end. It mutates.

Flip the cassette.

Felix Kubin's "Radio Collage" immediately makes explicit what the NEWS fragments had been doing throughout Side A. Radio is no longer an interruption between songs. Radio has become the song. Voices, edits and signals fire past each other so quickly that language begins behaving like percussion. The listener has already been trained for this without realizing it.

Then comes Total Freedom's "Beat To Death (Burned Copy)."

This is the heart of the cassette.

Drum breaks on records are everywhere. Entire cultures have been built around finding four bars, eight bars, sixteen bars where the rest of the band gets out of the drummer's way. An entire vinyl track where the drums themselves are the main event is something else. There is no need to wait for the break in "Beat To Death." The break ate the song.

The recording begins with space around the hits. You can feel individual impacts rather than merely hearing a rhythm. Then the performance begins accumulating weight. Low drum energy takes over more and more of the sound while the upper percussion sprays outward around it. The dynamics are enormous compared with what follows. Sections swell, stop, nearly disappear and then restart. Around the middle it seems to fall through a hole before the drums reassemble themselves. Later another interruption clears the floor again. Then the final section comes back louder and more sustained, as though the performance has decided it is finished negotiating.

That breathing is what makes it great. It is not simply somebody playing fast. There is architecture in the violence. Empty space makes the next impact bigger. The pauses make the drums feel physical because the ear gets to experience the room reopening before it is struck again.

For three minutes there is almost nothing to hide behind. No singer. No guitar riff waiting for the drummer to finish. No conventional song insisting that the solo return control. Just drums.

Calling "Beat To Death (Burned Copy)" the greatest drum solo track of all time sounds like an intentionally unreasonable statement until it is sitting in this exact position on NEW NEW. Then it starts making perfect sense.

Because look at what surrounds it.

Felix Kubin's "Radio Collage" comes before it as frantic information: cuts, voices, signals, language and electronic movement. "Beat To Death" removes the information and replaces it with the body. Then Orgy Of Carrion's "Leeches Cling To His Flesh Until There Is Nothing But Dust" arrives afterward and removes the breathing room.

That three-record sequence is a supreme audio sandwich.

Radio collage on one side. A gigantic drum performance in the middle. A nearly solid mass of compressed sound on the other.

Broadcast. Body. Obliteration.

Orgy Of Carrion barely breathes dynamically compared with the drum track. After the openings, collapses and restarts of "Beat To Death," "Leeches Cling To His Flesh Until There Is Nothing But Dust" feels like the walls have moved inward. The sound maintains its pressure. The title is grotesque enough before anything is heard, but placed after something as physical as the drum solo it becomes even more bodily.

And then Shirley Temple sings "On The Good Ship Lollipop."

Perfect.

Not because it is merely funny. The move is much stranger than a joke. After Orgy Of Carrion, the thin antique recording suddenly sounds almost supernatural. Childhood innocence arrives carrying its own archival noise and limited bandwidth, a tiny cheerful voice transmitted from another technological age. The recording is sweet, but its placement makes the sweetness unstable. Nothing about the source has been altered. Context does all the damage.

Violence's "The Idea Of It Is More Potent" almost provides a thesis for the cassette. The idea of something can be more powerful than a literal representation of it. NEW NEW constantly creates meaning this way. Two unrelated recordings touch and both become different.

Genoasejlrt's "Sirene" spreads strangely through the stereo field rather than sitting comfortably in the center. It feels less like an object in front of the listener than something moving around the edges of hearing. Wonderland Club's long "Salt" then settles into sustained pressure. By this point Side B has largely abandoned the quick emotional switching of Side A. Instead of fragments punching holes into songs, whole pieces become environments.

Disgusting Sanctum's "Stimulation From Assault," Carved Cross' "Domination Of The Will" and Funerary Despair push farther inward. The recordings become increasingly constricted, murky and claustrophobic. Funerary Despair in particular feels almost buried, with much of its energy packed into a dark low-middle register. It sounds less like a performance occurring in a room than something being heard through earth.

And then Barry White walks in.

"It's Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next To Me" would be an absurd transition on almost any other cassette. Here it feels earned.

More importantly, Barry White does not arrive digitally polished. The record has a surface. There is noise around it. The dynamics open up again after the compressed darkness before it, but the warmth is still being delivered by a physical object with age on it. That changes everything. Ecstasy is not presented as spotless fantasy. It crackles.

The sequence becomes almost unbearably human at that point. After domination, assault, despair and sustained noise, this huge lush declaration of physical closeness appears, still carrying the imperfections of an old record. Desire becomes another damaged artifact rescued from a groove.

Then Gath Smane's "Genocidal Alchemy" gets barely enough time to exist before the tape is gone.

No resolution.

NEW NEW never wanted resolution.

The title makes more sense after hearing the entire cassette. Nothing here needed to be newly recorded in order to become new. Old 45 rpm singles, dirty grooves, familiar songs, obscure records, television audio, radio collage, extreme music, sports broadcasts and stray nonsense become new because of relation. The old object itself participates in the idea: a used Maxell cassette receives another identity while traces of what it originally was remain completely visible.

The scratches matter.

The hiss matters.

The snap, crackle and pops matter.

The wildly different recording levels matter.

The abrupt cuts matter.

The fact that one record sounds beautifully warm and another sounds almost destroyed matters.

The fact that a ridiculous television fragment can sit next to a devastating soul record matters.

And the fact that an almost unknown drum solo can suddenly become the greatest drum solo in the world for exactly three minutes matters.

NEW NEW does not preserve recordings in glass.

It puts them in contact.

Then it waits to see what catches fire.