The cassette itself is transparent plastic filled with tiny blue and gold glitter, almost festive under light. Through the shell, the wound magnetic tape forms two dark circular masses beneath a pale typewritten label: 2019 / GOD IS WAR / King Of The Arabs. Outside it, the J-card uses a torn sepia erotic illustration. A nude or nearly nude lower body has been isolated from its original scene, with pale fluid-like marks across the skin and another fragment of the same illustration continuing across the opposite panel. The paper has been ripped rather than cleanly cut, leaving irregular white borders and large areas of empty space. Open the J-card and huge pink tulips fill the inside, backed by green leaves and soft garden color. The original 2019 program runs a little over thirty-nine minutes across six pieces: “The Arrival of the King,” “The Ascension to His Throne (The 1979 Purge),” “Chemical Ali (Halabja 1988),” “To Be A Woman, Chosen By A Prince,” “The Final Assault on the Princes” and “Sentenced to Hang.” Mack Chami described the concept as dating back to 2011, after moving to the Bay Area and being encouraged by Sam Torres to make a Saddam-focused tape. He eventually framed the album not as a defense of Saddam Hussein’s politics but as an examination of the brutality, domination and terror associated with Saddam and his sons, pushed through what he called hyper-violent industrial music. The sequencing becomes unusually important because the six titles do not behave like unrelated names placed onto abstract electronic tracks. Read in order, they form a compressed rise-and-collapse narrative. “The Arrival of the King” begins with entrance. Before anybody has been purged, gassed, chosen, attacked or executed, a ruler simply arrives. The wording is ceremonial. A king does not walk into a room like an ordinary person. An arrival implies witnesses. Somebody is already expected to look. Then “The Ascension to His Throne (The 1979 Purge)” turns arrival into consolidation. Saddam became president in July 1979 and days later presided over the infamous Ba’ath Party purge, during which alleged conspirators were publicly identified, removed and later subjected to imprisonment and execution. The track title compresses political ascent and elimination into one event: the throne rises because people around it are being removed. That relationship between spectacle and terror matters because Saddam’s rule repeatedly depended upon making power visible. The violence was not always hidden somewhere underneath authority. At times the performance of authority required that people know precisely what could happen to anybody who crossed it.
“Chemical Ali (Halabja 1988)” moves the sequence from internal political control toward mass atrocity. Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s cousin, became known as “Chemical Ali” because of his role in Iraq’s chemical attacks against Kurdish civilians during the Anfal campaign. Human Rights Watch describes him as a principal architect of that campaign and documents the Iraqi chemical attack on Halabja in March 1988, where thousands of civilians were killed. Thousands of tiny reflective particles sit suspended in the clear cassette around a recording containing a piece titled after Halabja. They catch light beautifully. Nothing in the physical material itself warns the eye that one of the titles printed above it points toward chemical warfare and mass death. Then “To Be A Woman, Chosen By A Prince” changes the scale again. The first three titles concern kingship, political purge and mass violence. Suddenly the language becomes personal. One woman. One prince. Chosen. The word “chosen” initially sounds privileged. Fairy tales train the word toward romance: someone is selected, elevated, desired. Inside this sequence, however, power has already established what selection can mean when one side controls the rules. The title allows the supposedly romantic language of being chosen to become threatening without having to explain precisely what occurred. That makes the torn erotic artwork more than decorative sexual material. The exterior does not show an intact erotic scene. It shows the aftermath of cutting or tearing one apart. The original image has lost its surrounding context. A body remains. Flesh becomes composition. One fragment appears on the front, another on the back, while portions of whatever story originally connected them have disappeared into white paper. Erotic images recur across these Private Release tapes because the source material itself recurs. Books, magazines and paper circulating through the same room become a visual reservoir. Something made by another artist is removed from its original publication and starts interacting with completely unrelated music. Here the record contains a title about a woman being “chosen” by power while the Private Release collage places another body beside it without telling the viewer how to interpret the relationship.
Then “The Final Assault on the Princes” reverses direction. The king and princes who occupied positions of overwhelming power earlier in the sequence are suddenly described as targets. “Final assault” implies that the system built around them has reached its terminal confrontation. The people once doing the choosing and eliminating are no longer insulated from force. At nearly ten minutes, it is also the longest piece on the original album. The sequence gives its largest block of time to collapse. Everything ends with “Sentenced to Hang.” No throne. No king arriving. No ascension. No prince choosing. No declaration of dominance. A sentence. A method of execution. An ending imposed by another authority. The album therefore travels from power being acquired to power being removed. The first title elevates its central figure. The last reduces him to a condemned body. Turn the exterior erotic fragments inward and there is no historical image of Saddam Hussein, no battlefield, no execution chamber and no photograph of Halabja. There are simply pink tulips. They are close enough to the camera that only a handful dominate the frame. Their petals shift between pink, purple and pale vertical streaks. The background disappears into soft greens and smaller flowers. That visual move is consistent with the flow across these Private Release objects. Flowers keep appearing where conventional genre packaging would rarely put them. Black metal beside tulips. Hellhammer beside daffodils. Industrial electronics beside gardens. The flowers become part of the larger Private Release sequence rather than illustrations of the recordings themselves. The same room, books, magazines, paper and visual habits keep feeding one object into the next, creating a continuity that operates somewhat like the flow between songs on a mixtape.
The glitter shell participates in that same visual system. If someone encountered only the original God Is War edition, the artwork and packaging would belong to the language established by the artist and label. This version passes the recording through another physical and visual process. Existing music becomes associated with another cassette shell, another photographic sequence and another encounter. The object contains several acts of transformation at once. Historical events become track titles. Historical figures become subjects for experimental electronic music. That music becomes magnetic information on cassette. A manufactured shell becomes a Private Release object through selection, typing and assembly. An erotic illustration becomes collage material through tearing. A garden photograph becomes part of an industrial release because it entered the same visual vocabulary. Nothing begins here. Everything has come from somewhere else. That may be why the torn paper feels so appropriate. The fragment never pretends to be the whole. King. Purge. Chemical attack. Woman. Prince. Assault. Execution. The album itself is six fragments placed in sequence around a much larger and far uglier history. Private Release adds more fragments without pretending to complete it. The flowers do not explain Saddam Hussein. The erotic drawing does not explain God Is War. The glitter cassette does not explain Halabja. They simply become additional information surrounding the recording. Then the tape reaches the end, the reels exchange their dark circles, and the glitter is still there catching light.
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