Sadio - 2018 - Questionable Pleasures C40

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 3:32PM

Private Release – none

The cassette almost looks like a piece of candy. Clear plastic is densely suspended with tiny red, green and silver glitter, the hubs and guide rollers are bright red, and two narrow strips of hot pink paper carry the typewritten words SADIO and Questionable Pleasures. There is very little conventional design beyond that. No album photograph is attached to the cassette, no elaborate logo covers the reels, and the title has been physically separated into its own little strip as though somebody typed the words, cut them out with scissors and decided that was enough. Through the transparent shell the magnetic tape becomes another graphic element, forming one solid dark circle behind the left reel while the right side is almost empty. Turn the cassette over and even the identifying labels disappear. There is only clear glittering plastic, red hubs and the black mass of tape now occupying the opposite reel. It is one of those cassettes where the mechanics are allowed to become part of the artwork simply because almost nothing has been placed in front of them.

The glitter is especially good here because “Questionable Pleasures” is already a phrase that invites the listener to wonder what kind of pleasure is being questioned and who gets to decide that it is questionable. The shell itself looks pleasurable in the most uncomplicated physical sense. It sparkles. It catches light. The red and green specks move visually every time the cassette changes angle. The pink labels are loud enough to look almost fluorescent against the transparent body. There is something tactile about the whole thing even in a photograph. You can imagine turning the cassette over just to watch the tiny reflective pieces change. Nothing about enjoying glitter is difficult to understand. Then the title is sitting directly on top of it introducing doubt into the word pleasure. Not forbidden pleasures. Not dangerous pleasures. Questionable pleasures. That is a much less settled phrase because a question requires somebody asking it.

The original Freak Animal description of the album emphasizes seven tracks of fierce power electronics, feedback assaults, pulsating signals, broken rusty sound and wild vocals, with a heavier and more layered approach than some of Sadio’s previous material. That description is useful because it gives the physical cassette another dimension without requiring this Private Release version to reproduce the original album’s visual language. The sound was already designed to provide intensity. The cassette can glitter. The pink labels can look almost playful. The object does not have to dress itself in black and gray industrial imagery in order for the recording to remain what it is. This is the same process that keeps occurring throughout these tapes: the recording arrives with its own history and identity, then passes through another layer of physical selection. Shell. Label color. Typewriter. Image. Case. Sequence. None of those choices replaces the original recording. They become the surroundings in which this particular copy exists.

Then there is the photograph inside the J-card. Instead of a close photograph of individual flowers, the image opens into a landscape. Huge tree trunks rise through what looks like an almost continuous carpet of tiny blue or blue-violet flowers. The blossoms spread from the foreground deep into the picture, wrapping around the bases of the trees until the entire ground begins looking tinted blue. Above them is a darker layer of green vegetation and shadow. There is very little sky, if any. The viewpoint stays low enough that the ground itself becomes the event. Thousands of small individual flowers combine into one large field of color. It has a completely different scale from the cassette. The shell invites looking at tiny glitter particles trapped inside plastic. The photograph invites looking at thousands of tiny flowers spread across open ground. In both cases a mass is created from repeated small units.

That repetition may be the most interesting visual connection between the two surviving images. Glitter works because no individual speck matters very much. A single red fleck inside clear plastic would barely register. Hundreds of them create a surface. The flowers behave similarly. One tiny blue blossom would be almost insignificant in this photograph, but thousands collectively transform the landscape. The cassette and the garden are both built visually through accumulation. Magnetic tape works that way too. A recording lasting dozens of minutes is physically represented by an enormous length of extremely thin tape wound into one compact dark circle. Sound becomes another accumulation hidden inside the object.

This also fits the larger Private Release process unusually well. No individual decision has to explain the whole project. One shell color does not define it. One photograph does not define it. One tape does not define it. The identity becomes visible through accumulation. Make another cassette. Type another label. Use another image that was already circulating through the room. Put another recording into the sequence. Photograph it. Send it somewhere. Repeat the procedure enough times and what looked like isolated choices starts becoming an archive with its own visual behavior. The flowers become particularly obvious when these tapes are viewed together because gardens keep resurfacing beside recordings from radically different musical worlds. One tape gets tulips. Another receives crocuses. Another has hyacinths. Here the flowers are so numerous that the ground itself almost disappears beneath them. The specific species matters less than the recurrence of growth, color and natural form moving from cassette to cassette.

Questionable Pleasures also follows Sophisticated Methods In Torture in a way that makes the two Sadio objects interesting beside each other. The earlier Private Release copy used an opaque black shell with a large white typewritten label. It was visually closed, severe and almost administrative. This one is transparent and sparkling. You can see through practically the entire body. The earlier cassette hides its mechanics behind black plastic while this one exposes every wheel, post, screw and section of tape. The titles change and so does the physical personality of the cassette. Put the two next to each other and they are unmistakably related through the same Private Release process while remaining completely different objects. That is much closer to making hundreds of different releases on an imaginary record label than manufacturing hundreds of identical copies of one release. The repetition is in the method rather than the product.

There is something satisfying about the cheap material reality of it too. Glitter cassette shells are not precious objects in the traditional art sense. The pink identification strips are not luxurious printing. The lettering is mechanically typed. The flower photograph came from another printed source rather than being commissioned for Sadio. Everything looks available, usable and close at hand. That accessibility is part of the energy. There is no waiting for an art department, printer, pressing plant or marketing schedule to grant permission for the thing to become real. The recording exists. A blank cassette exists. Images exist. Paper exists. Put them together and there is now another physical object in the world.

That logic has a distant relationship to underground music itself. Freak Animal issued Questionable Pleasures as catalog number FREAK-CD-103 in 2018, documenting a very specific Finnish power-electronics collaboration that exists far outside the ordinary commercial center of recorded music. Private Release then takes that already specialized recording and moves it again, this time away from its factory-made CD form and onto a one-off or tiny-run cassette object. The music becomes increasingly specific rather than increasingly universal. Instead of trying to make the album look acceptable to the largest possible audience, the cassette records one particular encounter with it.

The photograph does the same thing. It does not tell everybody what they are supposed to think about Sadio. It merely says that, for this object, this field of blue flowers ended up here. Years later the choice becomes evidence of what material was moving through the room at the same moment as the music. A garden photograph and Finnish power electronics crossed paths. Glitter plastic and magnetic tape crossed paths. Hot pink paper and a typewriter crossed paths. Nobody needed those things to meet, but now that they have, the photographs preserve the meeting.

The title remains the sharp little hinge holding everything together: Questionable Pleasures. Pleasure in sound. Pleasure in noise. Pleasure in aggression. Pleasure in collecting. Pleasure in flowers. Pleasure in color. Pleasure in making another cassette even though there is no practical necessity to make one. Pleasure in taking something that already exists and giving yourself a physical version that exists differently. Which of those pleasures are questionable depends entirely on who is doing the questioning.

The cassette itself never answers.

It just sparkles.