Sadio & Caligula031 - 2016 - Split C45

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 3:26PM

Private Release – none

The cover is built from three different fragments of fetish imagery rather than one complete scene. At the top, a pair of bare legs stands in delicate high-heeled sandals, the rest of the body removed by a rough torn edge. Directly beneath them another pair of legs appears in glossy black thigh-high or over-the-knee fetish boots, elongated by extremely high heels and rendered in stark black-and-white line work. Open the J-card and the second panel introduces a maid figure in a dark dress, white apron and headpiece, holding what looks like a bundle of switches or a small flogger in one hand while the other hand handles cords or restraints hanging beside her. A partial hand enters from the lower right, another piece of an image whose larger situation has been cut away. None of these fragments is presented as a complete narrative. Legs without bodies. A maid without the person she may be addressing. Hands and implements without explanation. The fragmentation is especially effective because fetish imagery often depends upon objects, surfaces and roles acquiring an exaggerated importance. Shoes, stockings, boots, uniforms, restraints, posture and material can become more significant than a complete portrait. Here the collage physically does the same thing. It removes context until the selected detail is almost all that remains.

The cassette carries another version of that selective reduction. It is transparent plastic packed with blue and gold glitter, with dark hubs and a single hot-pink strip of paper reading SADIO / CALIGULA031. There are no individual track names on the shell and no explanation of which side belongs to which artist. The black magnetic tape forms a nearly perfect dark circle behind one reel, surrounded by hundreds of glitter particles suspended inside the plastic. Flip the tape and that black circle moves to the opposite side. The shell looks decorative and almost glamorous, particularly beside the harsh subject matter associated with both projects. The pink label makes it even more visually excessive. Yet the cassette remains completely transparent. Every wheel, screw, post and moving section of tape is visible. The object displays its machinery while the cover imagery displays selected pieces of bodies and clothing. One reveals how it functions mechanically while the other withholds almost everything except the fetishized detail.

The original 2016 split divides the record very cleanly between two power-electronics projects. Sadio occupies one side with three tracks: “Inhale the Animal Filth,” “Slavemarket” and “Innocent And Pure.” Caligula031 occupies the other with four: “Needle Park - Platzspitz 1990,” “Nothing Comes For Free,” “Sponge Of The Sidewalk” and “Sob Story.” Sadio is the Finnish collaboration of Grunt and Kommando Skin-Graft, while Caligula031 is the project of Italian artist Marco Deplano, also associated with Wertham. Contemporary descriptions of the release characterize Sadio’s material as especially raw and minimally polished, with piercing mid-to-high frequencies, overloaded feedback, low-end pressure and barked vocals appearing through an abrasive live-in-studio sound. “Innocent And Pure” reportedly slows that attack into something more atmospheric, using sweeping tones, bass rumble and distant vocals rather than simply repeating the first two tracks’ violence. Caligula031’s half approaches a different subject. Its four pieces revolve around heroin addiction, prostitution, degradation and the social world surrounding the notorious Platzspitz “Needle Park” in Zurich. The electronics are described as murkier and more restrained, leaving larger spaces for heavily accented vocals and samples concerning addiction, crime and bodies being exchanged for the next fix.

That division makes this cassette more interesting than simply having two similar noise artists sharing forty-five minutes. Sadio and Caligula031 are both working inside a hostile electronic vocabulary, but the emphasis is not identical. One side appears to push physical sonic aggression forward as the event itself. The other uses electronics as an environment for stories of dependency and human deterioration. Even the track titles reveal the difference. Sadio gives the listener commands and images that are immediate and bodily: inhale, animal filth, slave market, innocent and pure. Caligula031 supplies locations and consequences: Needle Park, nothing comes for free, sidewalk, sob story. The first vocabulary sounds like entering a situation. The second sounds like watching what remains after people have been living inside one for too long. The split format allows those two approaches to touch without needing to merge into one identity. Turn the cassette over and a different artist takes control of the same physical object.

The original vinyl packaging apparently pushed its subject matter into the object itself. Freak Animal described the edition as limited to 250 copies in plain white sleeves with pasted artwork and actual blood splatter, each copy therefore slightly different. Private Release takes the same recording and gives it another transformation entirely. The blood-marked white sleeve is gone. In its place are glitter, hot pink paper, fetish illustrations and a flower photograph. Nothing here attempts to imitate the original edition. This is another stage in the recording’s physical life. The music remains Sadio and Caligula031, but the object surrounding it becomes unmistakably part of the wider Private Release run. That distinction is increasingly important when looking across these tapes. They are not replicas pretending to be original pressings. They are records of another person encountering already-existing recordings and deciding to make them physically present again through a personal system of shells, labels, found imagery and collage.

The inside photograph makes that system impossible to miss. A dense bed of tulips fills almost the entire image in red, pink, purple, yellow, white and orange. Some have smooth petals, others are fringed, others striped or multicolored. The photograph is so crowded that the flowers barely have room to exist individually. Along the bottom edge the image has been torn rather than neatly trimmed, leaving a white irregular shape cutting into the blossoms. That torn edge links the flower photograph back to the fragmented fetish illustrations outside. In both cases the source image is visibly handled. The original rectangle is not sacred. Printed material gets torn, trimmed, overlapped and repurposed to fit the cassette. The flowers also continue a visual rhythm already established across these tapes. Again and again, recordings associated with noise, metal, industrial music, violence, sex, domination or bleak historical subjects open into flowers. After enough examples the flowers stop feeling like surprise contrast and start behaving like part of the Private Release alphabet. They are simply one of the recurring visual materials through which the archive speaks.

This particular object also makes the relationship between fetish imagery and the Private Release process unusually visible without requiring the images to “mean” the recording in any fixed way. Fetish depends heavily upon selection. Attention becomes concentrated on one object, one action, one surface, one role or one piece of clothing. The collage does that through scissors and tearing. A pair of legs is selected and the person disappears. Boots are selected and the rest of the illustrated body disappears. The maid survives because of the recognizable uniform, the stance and the objects in her hands. The photographs and drawings have been converted into fragments that can operate outside whatever original publications contained them. The same thing is happening sonically at a different level. Existing albums are selected from an enormous field of recorded music, removed from their original commercial objects and transferred onto another cassette. The point is not that these processes are identical. It is that selection itself keeps appearing as an action.

Across Private Release, that action accumulates until it becomes a kind of authorship without pretending that the source material originated here. Sadio made Sadio. Caligula031 made Caligula031. Other people drew and printed the fetish images. Somebody photographed the tulips. Somebody manufactured the glitter cassette shell. The typewriter supplied its standardized mechanical letters. Private Release brings those separate things into contact. One recording meets one shell. One shell meets one label. One label meets several pieces of printed erotic imagery. Open the object and those fragments meet an explosion of flowers. Put the cassette beside the Sadio tapes that came before it and another layer appears: opaque black plastic becomes red-and-green glitter, then blue-and-gold glitter; white labels become hot pink strips; hyacinths become blue woodland flowers and then a packed field of tulips. None of these objects explains the others, but together they develop continuity.

That may be the strongest quality of this tape visually. Everything is already somebody else’s material, but the particular collision is new. Finnish power electronics, Italian addiction narratives, fetish illustrations, flowers, glitter plastic and typewriter text should have no inherent reason to occupy the same small cassette case. Yet they do. Once assembled, photographed and placed into the archive, that meeting becomes permanent enough to be revisited years later. The black circle of magnetic tape moves from reel to reel. The glitter remains trapped in clear plastic. The maid keeps holding her switch. The boots remain suspended without a body. The tulips remain impossibly crowded together behind the cassette. Another recording passes through the Private Release system and leaves behind one more physical arrangement that did not exist before somebody decided to make it.