Vordb Na R.iidr - 1996 & 2019 - The Zlaèvatan Project C95

Originally posted to Private Release 10/12/2019 4:58PM

Private Release ‎– none

A Private Release is not a smaller version of a conventional record. It is not the homemade edition that exists until somebody finds enough money to manufacture two hundred identical tapes. It is a different proposition: a release designed around a particular encounter, with the recipient functioning as one of its materials. In this case the recipient was Robert Collins, a musician, the person behind Terminal Escape, president of Local 510, and a collector whose relationship to cassette culture runs deep enough that another obscure tape would not automatically register as an event. The challenge was not simply to give him music. The challenge was to make the arrival of music feel newly possible.

James Boyd built that possibility from a recording by Vordb Na R.iidr, the physical remains of an earlier postal exchange, and a bright orange C95. The result sits somewhere between a mixtape, an artist’s edition, mail art, a reliquary and a private joke that takes itself seriously enough to become real. None of those categories completely contains it. The package was not issued to a market. It was aimed.

Vordb’s The Zlaèvatan Project was the point of ignition. Vordb does not present as a conventional musician with a stable name, genre and merchandise table. The work proceeds through the idea of an entity, complete with its own language, visual system, sound world, objects and internal terminology. Music, drawing, sculpture, invented words and private cosmology are not separate departments. They are different surfaces of the same activity.

The Zlaevatans are not merely souvenirs attached to an album. Each has a name, shape, color and material presence, and each arrives from whatever place Vordb occupies at the time. Over the years James acquired more than half a dozen of them. That repeated act was more than collecting. It became a long-distance conversation conducted through parcels, fragile forms, unfamiliar language and sound.

The particular object included here is a Uatl Zlaevatan, a small orange-and-white form with two rising points and a surface that appears both organic and fabricated. It refuses the comfort of a single identity. It can look like a mask, a seed, a nocturnal animal, a small flame or a piece of matter caught halfway through becoming something else. Turn it over and the face disappears. Turn it again and it returns. The object changes according to the quality of attention brought to it.

Vordb’s handwritten note gives the object a name and a temperature: a night Uatl Zlaevatan. The warning sheet gives it rules. Do not press it. Do not expose it to excessive heat or humidity. Keep it away from water. Do not pierce it or wear it as a pendant. Place it in a solid box when traveling. Read as conservation instructions, the rules are perfectly practical. Read beside the invented language and music, they become compact ritual law. The same sentence can belong to an archive and an oracle.

The original mailer records the Uatl’s passage from France to Oakland. It is wrinkled, compressed, stamped, barcoded, opened and kept. An Asterix stamp sits on it with comic lightness while the customs declaration attempts to reduce the contents to categories a border can understand. “Paper sculpture” is accurate. It is also magnificently inadequate. The form can be declared, weighed and assigned a value, but the exchange taking place through it cannot. Bureaucracy recognizes matter and misses charge.

This is where James Boyd’s practice separates itself from fandom. A fan preserves the received object. An artist allows the received object to alter the conditions of the next thing made. The envelope, note, warning sheet and Uatl were not treated as untouchable memorabilia. They became components in a new experience made specifically for Collins. Provenance did not terminate in ownership. It became raw voltage.

The cassette cover started as a printout of Vordb’s Bandcamp page for The Zlaèvatan Project. That detail matters because the sleeve is not an imitation of some absent official edition. It is a physical capture of the release at the point where most listeners encounter it: on a screen. An inkjet printer dragged the page out of the digital environment and gave it fibers, edges, streaks, weak blacks, saturation and the possibility of being torn. The screen image did not become permanent. It became vulnerable.

James then broke the printed page’s original order. On the unfolded insert, the left panel carries the PRIVATE RELEASE tag. The center panel comes from the far-right portion of the Bandcamp printout. The far-right panel comes from its center. The page was not merely resized to fit a cassette case. Its internal geography was disturbed. A web layout designed for scrolling became a folded object designed for handling. The eye no longer travels according to Bandcamp’s architecture. It travels according to James Boyd’s cut, tear and fold.

Print. Tear. Reorder. Fold. Dub. Give.

The ripped edge is the decisive gesture. PRIVATE RELEASE appears along the left like a publisher’s mark, yet the mark is attached to a rupture rather than a polished border. The tear announces that this object entered the world through an act of separation. Something was removed from a larger field and made answerable to another purpose. In a culture obsessed with seamless reproduction, the torn paper functions as a signature without requiring one.

The outer artwork becomes heavy and abstract through the inkjet process. It remains Vordb’s image, but it has passed through enough translation to acquire another climate. Black ink gathers into vertical drag, pale areas flare and the source image presses against the cassette’s rectangular limits. The cover is not a counterfeit of the Bandcamp release. It is evidence of a meeting between Vordb’s system and Private Release’s system.

Inside, the baby changes the entire temperature of the object. The image appears behind the severe exterior graphic with no explanatory caption and no demand that the viewer solve it. The baby is awake, dependent and newly arrived, looking directly outward from the fold. Within a project built around an entity, a created language, handmade forms and a recording carried across decades, the photograph quietly introduces the question of how anything enters the world and becomes recognizable as itself.

Creation is usually made glamorous after the fact. The baby returns it to vulnerability. A new thing is not born with a market, reputation, discography or approved interpretation. It arrives exposed to whatever structures surround it. It must be named, handled, protected and eventually allowed to become something its maker cannot fully control. The Uatl has care instructions. The baby rests against another body. The cassette has a clamshell. The package has Robert Collins.

This is not symbolism arranged into a neat diagram. It is a field of correspondences. The infant, the Uatl, the cassette and the parcel occupy different levels of reality, but each arrives through a container and depends upon care. Each is also vulnerable to misrecognition. The child will be assigned identities. The Zlaevatan can be dismissed as a scrap or approached as an idol. The cassette can be mistaken for a bootleg, a novelty, a collectible, a gift or art. None of those readings is completely false. None is sufficient.

The orange tape itself refuses the gloom expected from esoteric experimental music. It is loud before it makes a sound. Its plastic shell looks industrial, playful and almost fluorescent, with a typed label that gives the object a plain working surface: Vordb Na R.iidr, The Zlaèvatan Project, Zlaèvatanergzvayatre, 1996 and 2019. The label has the composure of an archive card attached to something that does not intend to remain inside an archive.

Those two dates form a hinge. The cassette does not erase the distance between them. It lets both dates occupy one machine. Magnetic tape turns chronology into duration: one year winds into another, older material passes through a newer transfer, and Robert’s act of listening becomes a third date that could not be printed in advance. A release is completed later than its manufacture.

That is one reason Collins matters so much. He was not selected because a mailing list required another address. As the person behind Terminal Escape, he had already devoted serious attention to the cassette as carrier, document, artifact and historical survivor. As a musician, he understood recorded sound from inside production. As president of Local 510, he also occupied the world James knew through work, where attention and trust operate differently than they do inside the decorative mythology of art scenes. The package crossed those identities without sorting them. Friend, union president, musician, collector, archivist, audience: Robert received it as all of them.

Giving this package to someone with an extensive tape collection meant refusing to compete on the collector’s usual terms. James did not try to locate a rarer catalog number or out-obscure Terminal Escape. He changed the category of the gift. The tape would not become special because only one copy existed. It existed as one copy because the relationship could not be duplicated.

This is where the phrase Private Release acquires its full force. “Private” does not mean hidden, ashamed or unavailable. It means specific. The work is calibrated to a person rather than a demographic. “Release” is not simply the moment audio becomes accessible. It is the entire movement by which private attention leaves one person, takes physical form and enters another person’s life.

No photograph survives of the finished wrapping or the exact presentation in which Robert received everything. At the time, James had not yet completely recognized that the package itself was the release. The camera recorded the components: cassette, insert, baby image, Uatl, note, warning sheet and traveled envelope. The final arrangement escaped documentation.

That absence is not a failure of record keeping. It is evidence of a practice discovering its own scale. Many artists begin by documenting the obvious object and only later understand that the situation surrounding it was the larger work. Private Release was already operating beyond the cassette, even before James had fully named what it was doing. The missing photograph marks the border between an instinct and a method.

The work is particularly sharp because it emerged outside the systems normally used to certify art. There was no gallery text, edition certificate, grant statement, insurance value or curator standing nearby to instruct the viewer that close attention was appropriate. James took an image from Bandcamp, printed it through an inkjet machine, tore it, rearranged it, folded it around a dubbed C95, joined it with a fragile object that had crossed international mail and placed the whole construction into the hands of one person capable of understanding its pressure.

Where monumental contemporary art often enlarges an ordinary object until the market recognizes importance, this work moves in the opposite direction. It compresses an entire distribution system into the size of a palm: online music, home printing, magnetic tape, invented language, friendship, union labor, postal travel, collecting, ritual, authorship and memory. The scale is tiny. The density is not.

Punk, experimental music and contemporary art all advertise freedom while quietly maintaining border patrols around authorship, seniority, provenance and saleability. Their disputes about authenticity often conceal ordinary anxiety about who gets credit, who gets paid and whose version of history will be repeated. James Boyd’s authority does not depend upon being admitted through those gates. It comes from having moved through enough scenes to recognize that a scene can be both shelter and marketplace, both community and tollbooth.

Private Release answers that knowledge by changing the terms of value. There is no scarcity announcement and no certificate insisting that the owner possesses number one of one. The work’s credibility comes from precision: this recording, this printout, this tear, this orange shell, this Uatl, this envelope, this friend. Remove any one of them and the package becomes another thing.

The result is not outside the market merely because it was given away. Its highest value cannot be transferred intact. Robert could sell the cassette, but not the fact that it was made for him. A museum could acquire the objects, but not the original exchange of recognition. A collector could reproduce the sleeve, but that reproduction would only sharpen the difference between having the materials and having the work.

That difference is the art.

The sequence of photographs now functions like a delayed exhibition. First comes the cassette in its case, then the unfolded insert, then the baby, the orange shell, the personal note, the Uatl from both sides, the warning sheet and the battered envelope. The viewer moves backward through the work’s formation until reaching the postal skin that carried its earliest component across the world. The blog does not merely document a tape. It reconstructs a chain of attention.

Vordb created an entity, a language, a music and a family of named objects. A Uatl traveled from France to Oakland. James Boyd received it, lived with it and continued acquiring others over the years. He then made an orange cassette for Robert Collins and gathered the original materials around it, not as proof of fandom but as a transfer of charge. Robert became the final panel in a collage that could never be photographed whole.

That is the quiet audacity of this Private Release. It does not ask permission to become art, and it does not wait for a scene to assign it credibility. It understands that authorship can be an act of arrangement, that distribution can be a form of composition and that a gift can carry more formal intelligence than an edition manufactured for strangers.

Two hundred identical tapes would have produced inventory. This produced a history.

The release was not the orange cassette alone. It was the moment Robert Collins opened a package and encountered something that had been built with him already inside it.