Sadio & Prurient - 2016 - BDSM Atlantic Partnership C40

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 3:20 PM

Private Release – none

The physical cassette is almost aggressively clean compared with the subject suggested by its labels. The shell is opaque white, its surface mostly empty except for a small rectangle of hot-pink paper centered above the window. One side reads SADIO / BDSM. Flip the cassette over and another pink strip reads PRURIENT / Atlantic Partnership. That is the entire identification system. Two artists, two phrases, two sides of the same object. The cassette itself becomes the dividing line. There is no need for a track list or explanatory text on the shell because physically turning it over performs the split. Sadio occupies one face, Prurient the other. Even the amount of tape visible through the center window changes depending on which side is being photographed, so the recording announces itself through mechanics as much as typography. White plastic, black magnetic tape and fluorescent pink labels create a strangely neat object for music issued as a split LP specifically presented by Freak Animal as raw, violent power electronics. Freak Animal described Sadio as the collaboration of Grunt and Kommando Skingraft, using simple, fierce live-in-studio recording methods, while Prurient’s material was presented as deliberately abandoning some of the project’s more obvious rhythmic and melodic electronic elements in favor of a brutal, noisy recording. The original LP contains four pieces: “One Day We Meet,” “No More Usfull,” “Electric Cord Basement Bondege” and “Rape File.” The wording alone turns BDSM Atlantic Partnership into something less playful than the initials BDSM might initially suggest. Meeting, usefulness, electrical cord, basement, bondage and a file documenting sexual violence form a vocabulary of intimacy, utility, control, evidence and threat.

The title BDSM Atlantic Partnership is particularly good for a split between Finnish and American projects because it makes geographic separation part of the joke or structure. An Atlantic partnership normally sounds diplomatic, commercial or military. Governments form partnerships. Corporations establish transatlantic partnerships. Universities announce them. The phrase belongs to institutions trying to make distance sound administratively manageable. Put BDSM in front of it and suddenly that bureaucratic phrase becomes sexualized and coercive. Two noise projects separated by an ocean are connected through one record, one title and two sides of vinyl. This Private Release cassette makes that division even more literal. You cannot hear both halves simultaneously. One artist exists on one side of a white plastic body and the other artist waits on the reverse. To move from Sadio to Prurient requires removing the cassette, turning it around and putting it back. The international partnership becomes a physical gesture. The hot-pink labels help because they do not look bureaucratic at all. They are almost cheerful, a flash of fluorescent color interrupting the blank white surface. BDSM appears on a tiny piece of pink paper with the casual directness of a file-folder label. Atlantic Partnership receives the same treatment. The extreme title has been reduced to something that could have been typed at a desk and stuck onto an office object.

The flower image pushes that physical vocabulary somewhere completely different. Dense blue-purple hyacinths fill almost the entire photograph, their individual star-shaped blossoms stacked so tightly around each stalk that every flower becomes a column made from dozens of smaller flowers. The photograph is close enough that texture begins taking over from simple botanical identification. Each large form is actually an accumulation. Petal after petal after petal produces a single heavy mass of blue. Bright green leaves cut vertically through the background, with smaller pale flowers and a little yellow showing through at the edges. There is nothing obviously erotic, violent or industrial about the picture. It is simply abundant. The flowers look almost too full, too densely constructed, each stalk carrying more visual information than it seems capable of holding. That makes the photograph work beside this recording without needing to symbolize it. The picture does not tell the listener what Sadio or Prurient means. It gives the object another surface. This recurring movement into flowers has become one of the strongest visual continuities across these Private Release tapes. Different music keeps passing through the same larger visual environment. Industrial electronics, black metal, noise, obscure pop, soul and DJ records can all end up opening into gardens. The repetition gradually becomes more important than the individual pairing. One set of flowers remembers another set of flowers used three tapes earlier. A pink label recalls another pink label. A white shell answers a glitter shell. The sequence develops by recurrence rather than by one strict graphic identity.

There is also something useful in comparing this cassette with the Sadio objects immediately surrounding it. Sophisticated Methods In Torture sat on an opaque black cassette with a large white typewritten label. Questionable Pleasures was transferred onto transparent glitter plastic with red hubs and hot-pink labels. The Sadio/Caligula031 split used another glitter shell, this time blue and gold, again with a bright pink identifying strip. Here all of that glitter suddenly disappears. The body becomes plain white. The hot pink remains. Seen individually, those could be arbitrary choices. Seen consecutively, they start behaving almost like variations inside a set. The music has already been released elsewhere with its own packaging, label identity and intended artwork, so Private Release does not need to duplicate any of that. Each recording can instead pass through the same homemade system and emerge with another physical personality. This is where the idea of making tapes as though operating a record label becomes clearer. A conventional label manufactures a large number of identical objects. Private Release can reverse the economy: rather than making a thousand copies of one artist, make one or a few copies of hundreds or thousands of different artists and let the repeated production method become the label identity. The continuity is not identical product. It is repeated attention.

That makes found imagery particularly appropriate. A photograph of hyacinths already existed for some completely unrelated purpose. Somebody took the photograph, somebody selected it for publication, somebody printed it, and later it became available as physical paper to be cut or fitted into another object. The same basic fact applies to the music. Sadio and Prurient already made the recordings. Freak Animal already manufactured the original record. None of the source material belongs to Private Release by origin. What belongs to Private Release is the encounter between those materials: this recording, this cassette shell, this pink paper, this typewriter, this flower photograph, this moment of assembly. The project does not need to disguise that borrowed structure. In fact, the visible simplicity makes it clearer. The cassette says exactly who made the sound. The flower remains obviously a photograph from somewhere else. There is no attempt to erase provenance and pretend everything sprang from one author. The authorship exists in selection, placement, repetition and the decision that this particular combination deserves to exist physically.

The split format also fits that way of thinking because neither Sadio nor Prurient has to absorb the other. They remain separate entities occupying one object. Their proximity creates a relationship without pretending they have become the same thing. That is what a good split record does. It creates a temporary architecture around difference. One artist enters, uses the allotted space and leaves. Another enters from the opposite direction. The title gives them a shared roof, but each side retains its identity. The Private Release cassette preserves that division more visibly than a digital folder ever could. On a computer, four tracks can simply sit in one list. Here one name is literally inaccessible while the other side faces you. SADIO / BDSM is visible only while PRURIENT / Atlantic Partnership is hidden against the table. Turn the object over and the hierarchy reverses. The listener physically chooses which half of the partnership faces upward.

And behind all of that white plastic and fluorescent pink paper are the blue hyacinths. They do not explain BDSM. They do not explain the Atlantic. They do not explain Sadio or Prurient. They are another fragment that happened to enter the same Private Release current and therefore become part of how this particular recording survives visually. That is increasingly what makes these tapes interesting as a group. Each object documents more than music. It documents what was available to be seen, cut, typed, purchased, handled and combined at that exact point in the process. A flower photograph that once had nothing to do with power electronics now sits permanently beside a 2016 transatlantic noise split. A cheap white cassette becomes its new body. Two tiny pieces of pink paper tell you which side of that body you are holding. Then the tape turns, the black magnetic ribbon moves from one reel to the other, Sadio becomes Prurient, Finland gives way to the United States, and the partnership crosses the Atlantic again.