Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 3:15PM
Private Release – none
The front image almost completely abandons the visual restraint that appears on a lot of these Private Release tapes. There is no ambiguous landscape, old illustration or photograph that needs to be stared at for a while before deciding what might be happening. This is graphic bodily destruction immediately. A torn rectangular photograph fills most of the front panel with dark red, brown, black and sickly flesh tones. Human faces and body parts are caught inside an indistinct mass of blood, wounds and damaged tissue. One pale face sits along the lower right edge with its eye partly visible, while darker material crosses through the center of the image. Open the J-card and the photograph continues into another fragment where a badly damaged face with exposed teeth appears beneath a pale foot. Whether the source photograph documents something real, staged or fabricated is not something the surviving image itself tells us, and that uncertainty is worth leaving intact. What can be seen is enough. Bodies have been reduced to matter. Faces remain recognizable just long enough to make the destruction register as human.
That makes the name H.C.O.D. unusually direct here because H.C.O.D. is itself short for Hideous Colors Of Decay. Normally a title can sit beside artwork and create an association that might or might not have been intended by the original artist. Here the words and the colors practically collapse into one another. The cover really does contain colors of decay: blackened reds, browns, bruised yellows, gray-green flesh and the almost waxy pale tone of the face. The image is not monochrome horror. Its disturbing quality comes partly from color. Decay is not represented as clean black-and-white death. It is wet, stained and chromatic. The picture contains an ugly palette that is nevertheless visually dense enough that the eye keeps moving through it. The title sounds almost formal when typed on the cassette, while the image gives the phrase its literal physical mess.
Then the cassette itself turns the entire object pink.
The shell is solid bubblegum pink with a large pale pink paper label covering most of each side. H.C.O.D. is typed neatly across the top, followed by Hideous Colors Of Decay. Side A and Side B are marked with single typewritten letters beside the reels. Everything about the cassette is orderly. The label has been carefully cut to follow the window and angled corners of the shell. The typewriter gives the information a little administrative precision. Nothing about the physical cassette looks corroded or damaged. It is clean, brightly colored and almost toy-like. The shell could easily have contained pop music, children’s songs or some homemade mixtape. Instead it carries a recording whose identity announces decay before the tape even starts moving.
That bright pink matters within this larger Private Release sequence because colored shells keep functioning almost like punctuation. A recording does not automatically receive the visual conventions normally attached to its genre. Noise does not require black. Black metal does not require black. Something sexually explicit can appear on glitter plastic. Something violent can arrive in pink. The color belongs to the physical object first. After enough tapes, those shells form another sequence running underneath the musical one: transparent, glitter, white, green, brown, black, pink. The listener can line these things up and see a completely different composition than somebody browsing the same recordings digitally. The cassette bodies become color blocks holding pieces of recorded time.
The inside image makes the move even stranger. The gore disappears completely and is replaced by flowers. Bright red and orange tulips fill most of the left side while a separate photograph of purple, white and yellow crocuses has been laid across them toward the upper right. Another narrow strip of greenery and small flowers runs beneath that image. These are visibly separate pieces of printed material rather than one seamless photograph. Their edges overlap. One picture interrupts another. The collage does not attempt to conceal its construction. It looks made by hand because it was made by hand.
That is becoming one of the clearest repeated structures across these Private Release objects. Flowers do not appear once as a clever contrast and disappear. They keep coming back. Tulips, crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils and other garden photographs recur across recordings that otherwise have little connection to each other. The repetition changes their function. At first a listener might see flowers beside extreme noise and think the point is opposition: beauty against ugliness, life against death, softness against brutality. Across dozens of tapes that explanation becomes too simple. The flowers start becoming part of the Private Release vocabulary itself. They were among the printed materials available for making covers. They were selected repeatedly. Eventually their recurrence says as much about the archive as it does about any individual recording.
This one makes that especially visible because Hideous Colors Of Decay already gives color an explicit role. Outside the case, color belongs to damaged flesh. Inside, color belongs to flowers. Red can be blood or tulip. Yellow can be diseased tissue or crocus. Pink can be a cassette shell. None of those colors inherently belongs to one meaning. The object keeps moving them around. That is more interesting than reducing the construction to a simple “life versus death” statement. Color survives every change of subject. The thing being colored changes.
The collage method reinforces that movement. The front gore photograph has torn edges. The interior flower photographs are cut and layered. The spine carries another narrow fragment underneath the familiar PRIVATE RELEASE tag. The source images have been removed from whatever books, magazines or other printed contexts originally gave them meaning. Whatever captions once explained them are gone. Whatever page came before or after them is gone. They are now pieces of paper that can be moved into another sequence. That same treatment has happened repeatedly across the archive with drawings, pornography, gardening photography, historical images, cartoons, art reproductions and other printed fragments. Their previous identities are not necessarily erased, but they are no longer sufficient to explain why they are here.
The recording undergoes a related physical movement. H.C.O.D. existed independently of Private Release. Evidence from the project’s later history places it within a particularly grim form of American industrial noise, with later work described through cavernous bass rumble, abrasive midrange noise, high feedback tones, metallic crunch and a smeared analogue atmosphere. By 2016 H.C.O.D. had developed into longer, sprawling compositions associated with the Northern European “post-mortem” industrial tradition, but documentation also points backward to three earlier tapes issued during 2013 and 2014. This cassette belongs to that early period. I cannot verify enough about the exact recording represented here to pretend that the later descriptions are a precise sonic map of these thirty-five minutes, but they do establish the larger world the project inhabited. This is not simply a name chosen because gruesome imagery looked cool. Hideous Colors Of Decay was the identity around which the project continued to organize its sound.
Private Release then gives that identity another body. The recording becomes magnetic tape inside a pink shell. The pink shell enters a clear plastic case. The clear case receives a white-bordered collage. The collage joins gore with flowers. The spine receives PRIVATE RELEASE. None of those steps changes who made the original sound. What changes is the physical history of this copy.
That distinction is important across all of these objects. They are full of other people’s work, yet the particular relationships between those works did not exist until these tapes were made. Somebody made the noise. Somebody manufactured the cassette. Somebody photographed the flowers. Somebody produced the graphic image on the front. Somebody printed all of those things onto paper. Then these fragments eventually arrived in the same room and were selected for the same cassette. The authorship of Private Release exists partly in that act of bringing unrelated material into contact and then doing it again hundreds or thousands of times.
The title almost becomes descriptive of that larger process too. Decay changes things without necessarily making them disappear. A body decomposes into other material. A magazine gets torn apart and becomes cassette artwork. A commercial recording leaves its original packaging and becomes another tape. A photograph loses its caption and enters another visual sequence. A piece of magnetic tape ages while continuing to hold information. Even the photographs of these objects eventually become another form through which the cassette can survive after the physical object has moved elsewhere or disappeared.
That is why the gore photograph does not have to carry the entire weight of the object. It is the first thing seen, and it is unquestionably extreme, but then the case opens and suddenly there are flowers. Then the tape comes out and there is pink plastic. Then the cassette is turned over and Side B looks almost identical to Side A. Then the tape moves through the machine and an invisible recording emerges from brown magnetic material. Every layer changes what came immediately before it.
The damaged faces remain on the outside.
The flowers wait inside.
The recording waits inside the pink shell.
And all three become another Hideous Color Of Decay.
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