Military Position - 2019 - A Woman's Work Is Never Done C30

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 5:06PM

Private Release – none  247.19MB FLAC

There is something immediately loaded in the phrase “a woman’s work is never done.” It sounds domestic, familiar, almost harmless, the kind of inherited saying that can pass through generations without anybody stopping to examine what it actually assumes. Work belongs to women. Responsibility continues after everybody else is finished. The burden is ordinary enough to become invisible. Military Position takes that familiar sentence and places it inside industrial and power electronics, where repetition, pressure, degradation, confrontation and endurance can make the phrase feel considerably less quaint.

The cassette originally appeared through No Rent Records as a C30, six pieces divided evenly across two sides: “Roses Are Red,” “Baby Let’s Go” and “Touch Me” on Side A, followed by “We Have A Problem,” “Worthless” and “Not That Kind Of Girl” on Side B. The sequence alone moves through an unsettling vocabulary. It begins with the childhood familiarity of “Roses Are Red,” passes into invitation with “Baby Let’s Go,” then physical contact with “Touch Me.” Flip the tape and the language changes. Something has gone wrong. There is a problem. Worth enters through negation. Then identity itself becomes a refusal: not that kind of girl.

Those titles can almost be read as fragments of one conversation whose power keeps shifting.

“Roses Are Red” carries the residue of a nursery rhyme, something learned young enough that its structure becomes automatic. Roses are red, violets are blue. The listener already knows what kind of sentence is supposed to follow. That predictability matters when placed inside a record dealing with expectations imposed upon women. Cultural instruction often works the same way. A form is supplied before the individual has decided whether they want to inhabit it.

“Baby Let’s Go” sounds casual until its position beside the other titles makes the invitation unstable. Who is asking? Who decides where to go? What happens when invitation becomes expectation? The words contain no answer. They simply move the sequence toward “Touch Me,” where distance disappears completely.

“Touch Me” is credited here as originating with Lille Roger, but inside this program the title acquires a different weight because it arrives at the end of a side already moving from formula to invitation to physicality. Touch can be affection, desire, instruction, demand, reassurance, violation or some unstable combination depending upon context. The words themselves are insufficient. Intent and consent create the meaning.

That uncertainty becomes considerably less abstract when considered alongside Harriet K. Morgan’s own description of the record. Morgan has explicitly described it as being about sexual assault and its effects on her life. She has spoken about the body becoming hardened protection and about exhaustion with the male gaze. That information does not transform the record into a puzzle that can suddenly be solved correctly. It does, however, remove the comfortable possibility that the sexual language is merely decorative transgression.

Industrial and power electronics have long used sexuality, domination, bodily violence and taboo as aesthetic material. Military Position complicates that inheritance by turning the gaze back toward the conditions producing it. The imagery of submission or degradation cannot automatically be assumed to celebrate submission or degradation. Something can be presented because it is being examined, inhabited, mocked, survived, rejected or converted into a form of confrontation.

That is where Side B becomes especially severe.

“We Have A Problem” is almost bureaucratic language. It sounds like the point where an uncomfortable situation is finally acknowledged, but even that phrasing keeps emotional distance. Nobody says what the problem is. Nobody says who caused it. The sentence could belong to a relationship, an institution, a workplace, a family, a police report or an emergency. Its vagueness makes it useful because structures often become visible first through the simple recognition that something is wrong.

Then comes “Worthless.”

One word can contain an entire mechanism of control. Worth is assigned externally constantly: physical attractiveness, sexuality, youth, usefulness, obedience, desirability, labor, productivity. Morgan has discussed the way female musicians can be judged through appearance differently from men, particularly the assumption that female worth remains tied to being looked at. “Worthless” therefore does not need to function as a statement of self-definition. It can just as easily expose the language used to diminish somebody.

The final title, “Not That Kind Of Girl,” is the most interesting because it sounds simultaneously defensive, judgmental and resistant. It is a sentence historically used to organize women into categories. Good girl. Bad girl. Respectable girl. Easy girl. The kind you marry. The kind you sleep with. The kind you believe. The kind you blame. Yet saying “not that kind of girl” can also become refusal. A category is offered and somebody declines to enter it.

The cassette ends there rather than supplying a cleaner answer.

That is appropriate because Morgan has described Military Position itself as protest, specifically a protest against the experience and expectations of being female in Australia. The project’s aggression therefore has a direction beyond simple sonic extremity. Rage is not merely an aesthetic texture. It can be a response to being expected to absorb, perform, endure and remain visually acceptable while doing it.

The original physical edition intensifies that tension through its own controlled presentation. No Rent issued one hundred professionally duplicated copies, ten accompanied by a Polaroid. The original green-toned artwork presents a female figure alongside a knotted or entangled graphic form, while the title sits plainly enough that the hostility has to emerge from the relationship between image, language and sound rather than from conventional shock packaging.

And now the recording enters another object through Private Release.

That matters differently.

A Private Release version does not have to replace the No Rent edition or pretend to become an official historical artifact. It represents another encounter with the recording. The source passes through another person’s room, another cassette shell, another set of images and another moment in time. The black-and-white PRIVATE RELEASE tag marks that movement without claiming authorship of Morgan’s experience.

That distinction is important with material this personal. The recording belongs to its maker. The reaction belongs to the listener. A reproduced cassette can preserve the space where those two things meet without pretending they are identical.

That is one reason this fits unusually well among these Private Release objects. The project repeatedly takes existing music and asks what happens when it is physically encountered again, separated from its original commercial life and placed into another chain of relationships. A photograph made by somebody else touches a recording made by somebody else, handled and assembled by another person again. Meaning keeps passing through people without ever becoming exclusively owned by any one of them.

“A woman’s work is never done” can therefore keep changing depending upon who encounters it.

As an old phrase, it can sound resigned.

As an album title, it becomes accusatory.

Inside Military Position, it becomes pressure.

Inside an archive years later, it becomes evidence that somebody made that pressure audible and somebody else considered it important enough to keep moving through the world.

The work remains unfinished.