Nicole 12 - 2006 - Braces C11

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 2:47PM

Private Release – none

This C11 sits near the beginning of a period when Private Release was becoming more deliberately physical. By October 2019, James Boyd was already using Private Release as the name of his music blog, his Discogs identity and marketplace, and the white-paper mark he attached to packages and objects. He had been selling records and tapes, watching a small pile of money accumulate, and thinking about putting that money back into making more music rather than simply buying more of it. The economics were almost comically simple: producing short cassette editions could cost less than continually purchasing records, and the finished tapes could be slipped into Discogs orders for free. Buy some music, receive some unexpected music. Boyd was already decorating outgoing packages, so the shipment itself could become part of the same loose Private Release system.

One practical result was an order of unusually specific cassette lengths from Tape Line in the UK. Boyd began working with the shortest tapes first, and Nicole 12’s Braces fit almost perfectly onto a C11. The four tracks run only about nine and a half minutes altogether: “In The Spotlight,” “Dozen Summers Behind,” “Braces” and the minute-long “Nippon Lolita Substitute.” The short duration gives the cassette a concentrated quality. There is no long introduction and very little dead space. It arrives, establishes an atmosphere, and disappears.

Nicole 12 was a project by Finnish musician Mikko Aspa built around one of the most socially radioactive subjects available to an artist: pedophilia, meaning adult sexual attraction to prepubescent children, along with the imagery, fantasies, cultural evasions and moral panic surrounding it. The value of the work is not that the subject is secretly acceptable, nor that discomfort itself is automatically profound. Its force comes from refusing to make the subject comfortable enough to consume. The listener has to confront what the material is about while also confronting the instinct to judge the person presenting it. That distinction mattered to Boyd. Part of the attraction of making this cassette was the possibility of upsetting a person who needed every difficult artwork to arrive with its moral conclusion already printed on the package.

The artwork does not avoid the subject. It makes the relationship more direct. The central photographic source is not an adult fashion model but a preteen girl taken from a cheerleading magazine. That image is paired with music explicitly concerned with pedophilia. The choice is intentionally uncomfortable, and describing it vaguely would miss what the object is doing. At the same time, the collage is not pornographic. It uses an ordinary image of childhood drawn from mainstream culture, then places it in a radically different context. The disturbance comes from the collision between those contexts.

The front image is fragmented with torn white paper. The girl’s face remains visible while parts of the surrounding photograph are blocked, interrupted or separated. On the unfolded insert, another crop isolates the lower leg and bare foot. The method is simple, almost crude, but effective: the original magazine image has been physically broken into pieces and reassigned to a new object. That act of rearrangement connects naturally to the title Braces. Braces are themselves a system of controlled alteration, small pieces of hardware applying continuous pressure until part of the body changes position. The title carries an additional association with childhood and adolescence, making it particularly loaded within Nicole 12’s subject matter. On the Private Release version, the title, the age of the photographic subject, and the cut-and-reassembled image all press against one another.

“In The Spotlight” begins with a dense, abrasive electronic field and processed voice, its title immediately introducing the problem of attention. A spotlight is not neutral. It selects something and demands that it be looked at. The cover performs a related action by leaving the girl’s face as the clearest point inside a photograph that has otherwise been partially dismantled. “Dozen Summers Behind” is harsher and more restless, with its voice pushed further into the electronic material. The title measures time strangely. Twelve years becomes twelve summers, turning age into accumulated seasons rather than arithmetic. Within the context of Nicole 12, that phrasing is impossible to hear innocently.

The title track is the longest piece and also the one most naturally fused with the object around it. “Braces” works through pressure, repetition and altered vocal material, while the cassette itself is an exercise in alteration: a 2006 record transferred to an eleven-minute shell, surrounded by images removed from their original printed environment and rebuilt into something else. The final track, “Nippon Lolita Substitute,” lasts barely more than a minute. Its brevity gives the tape a particularly abrupt ending. The word “substitute” is the important one. Nicole 12 repeatedly approaches the territory between actual abuse and the images, representations, fantasies and cultural products that orbit forbidden desire. The song does not solve that territory. It leaves it sitting there.

Then the cassette opens and there are flowers.

The inside spread is filled with yellow and white daffodils, along with enlarged fragments of the same floral source. Their brightness makes the object stranger rather than softer. Flowers carry associations of spring, growth, childhood, decoration and ordinary domestic beauty, yet here they sit inside a cassette built around material that most people would prefer never to contemplate. The contrast is not incidental to Private Release. These particular flower centers became source material for later Private Release artwork, recurring across subsequent posts and objects. Their later appearances can be traced back to this group of Nicole 12 tapes. What begins here as a piece of found floral photography becomes part of the project’s continuing visual language.

That recurrence is worth noticing because Private Release was never only a conventional label. The same name could identify a Discogs account, a blog, a handmade cassette, a decorated shipping package or a small white paper tag attached to some other object. Images could behave the same way. A flower cut from one source could appear years later somewhere completely different and still carry a connection to everything it had passed through before.

Braces is an early example of that process working particularly well because nothing about it resolves cleanly. The cassette is tiny and attractive. The label is pink. The flowers are cheerful. The photographic source comes from the ordinary world of youth cheerleading imagery. Inside is power electronics concerned with adult sexual attraction to children. None of those facts cancels the others. They are forced to occupy the same plastic case.

That was part of Boyd’s intention. The sinister element did not need to announce itself theatrically. It could sit inside something small enough to disappear into another person’s Discogs shipment, an unsolicited additional piece of music tucked in with whatever record they had actually ordered. The receiver could enjoy it, hate it, misunderstand it, throw it away, become offended by it or wonder why someone had chosen to put these particular sounds and images together. Private Release did not have to decide the reaction in advance.

The tape simply had to get there.

— ChatGPT