AWB Recording – AWB 016
PETER SOTOS – BUYER’S MARKET
Year: 1992
Label: AWB Recording
Catalog number: AWB 016
Country: United States
Format: CD
Style: Sound collage / spoken word / non-music
Compiled by: Peter Sotos
Produced by: Steve Albini
Project coordinated by: Mark Solotroff
1. Children – 17:52
2. McMartin – 9:03
3. Trash – 11:24
4. Bundy – 10:04
5. Victims – 13:23
Total time: 61:46
Content note: Documentary speech concerning sexual abuse, murder, grief and disputed testimony.
The face on the cover of Buyer’s Market is not given a name. It is given a market condition.
A high-contrast photograph of a child occupies the center of an otherwise nearly blank white sleeve. Above it, BUYER’S MARKET appears in large black capitals. There is no visible artist name on the front, no explanatory subtitle and no sign that this is supposed to be music. The cover could be a missing-person leaflet, a cheaply printed sociological report, an evidence photograph or an advertisement whose product has become unspeakable.
The title commits the first violation before the disc begins.
A buyer’s market is one in which supply is plentiful, choice belongs to the purchaser and prices tend to favor whoever is doing the buying. Placed above a child’s face, the phrase turns personhood into availability. It suggests not one isolated crime but abundance: an oversupply of stories, images, accusations, witnesses, victims and public grief waiting to be selected.
It also implicates everyone who approaches the object. The press buys stories. Television buys attention. Collectors buy the CD. Audiences purchase access with time, revulsion and curiosity. Peter Sotos purchases existing voices from the public record and rearranges them into a work bearing his name.
The market has no innocent position reserved behind the counter.
Buyer’s Market contains no conventional songs. There is virtually no musical cushioning, no rhythm section leading the listener through the hour and no instrumental atmosphere explaining when to feel dread, sympathy or release. Its materials are recorded voices gathered from interviews, news programs, documentaries, police discussions and other publicly circulated accounts involving sexual violence, child abuse, murder and bereavement.
Sotos largely removes his own speaking voice. His authorship resides in selection, cutting, duration and sequence.
That absence does not make him neutral. It makes the editor’s power easier to overlook.
A singer can be challenged for what he says. A compiler can hide inside what other people have already said, even while deciding who speaks first, who is interrupted, which hesitation remains, which sentence is removed from its original program and what new meaning appears when two fragments are placed beside one another.
Buyer’s Market is therefore less a documentary than an editing room with the door left open.
The voices arrive without the broad framework that television normally supplies. There is no presenter explaining what has been established, what remains alleged or how the speaker’s account fits within a larger investigation. Names, dates and locations are often absent. A person begins speaking halfway through a thought, finishes, and is replaced by someone from another room, year or case.
The listener receives testimony without a court and grief without a funeral.
This produces an immediate feeling of exposure. Television usually allows painful speech to exist for several seconds before cutting to a reporter, commercial, expert or establishing shot. Buyer’s Market removes those relief valves. The voices remain for long stretches, one after another, with no comfortable visual information to occupy the eyes.
It forces attention toward pauses, pronunciation, nervous laughter, adult prompting, changes in recording quality and the strange social pressure of being asked to describe something unbearable to a microphone.
The sound collage is not noisy in the usual industrial sense. Its violence comes from intelligibility.
Steve Albini’s production credit is striking for precisely that reason. He is best known for recordings in which drums, guitars and physical rooms acquire enormous presence. Here there is no band to capture and almost no musical performance to enlarge. His recognizable rock sound is irrelevant. What matters is that the speech remains dry, close and legible.
The production does not disguise the recordings as cinema.
No mournful piano arrives to certify sorrow. No electronic drone announces evil. No harsh-noise eruption gives the listener permission to convert distress into an exciting physical sensation. The words must provide their own pressure.
This can be understood as restraint. It can also be understood as a more efficient delivery system.
The sequence of track titles tells its own story:
Children.
McMartin.
Trash.
Bundy.
Victims.
It begins with a group defined by age, moves to the name of a notorious case, descends into an insult, grants a famous perpetrator the dignity of a surname, then closes by collecting everyone harmed beneath one administrative plural.
Only the celebrity murderer receives the kind of name that immediately summons a complete public mythology.
The victims remain a category.
That imbalance is central to Sotos’s work and to the media he draws upon. Criminals acquire faces, biographies, nicknames, preferences, methods and recognizable personalities. The people they harmed are frequently remembered in clusters, lists and numbers. A murderer can become the subject of ten books while several victims remain represented by one school photograph repeated in all of them.
Buyer’s Market may be criticizing that economy, but it uses the same currency.
“Children,” the longest track, begins the record with voices that are especially difficult to hear ethically. Children answer questions about abuse while adults prompt, define and direct the conversation. The listener is not hearing an untouched memory rise naturally into speech. The account has already passed through an interview, a recording apparatus, an institution and some form of broadcast before reaching Sotos’s edit.
Each stage claims to preserve the voice while shaping it.
This is one of the album’s most important observations. A microphone does not simply capture truth. It creates a situation in which one person is expected to speak and another person decides what kind of answer will count.
The adults may be attempting to help, document or investigate. They may also introduce vocabulary, expectations and narrative structure. The child must navigate the event being remembered, the adult’s question, the desire to provide a satisfactory response and the knowledge that the conversation concerns something frightening.
The track’s length prevents these voices from becoming a brief appeal to emotion. Yet duration does not automatically restore control to the speakers. Their accounts remain material selected by someone absent from the recording.
The title “Children” makes this problem visible. No individual is identified. The word is protective and obliterating at once.
The second track gives the first one a dangerous afterimage.
“McMartin” refers to the McMartin Preschool case, which began in Manhattan Beach, California, in 1983 and expanded into an enormous prosecution involving seven defendants, hundreds of children and extraordinary accusations. The case continued for seven years and ended without a single conviction. It later became a defining example of suggestive interviewing, media contagion, institutional failure and the wider satanic-panic climate of the 1980s.
Placed immediately after “Children,” it makes certainty difficult.
The point should not be that children cannot describe abuse or that testimony should be dismissed. The McMartin catastrophe demonstrates something more unsettling: adults can be so committed to protecting children, prosecuting evil or confirming a theory that their methods begin manufacturing the story they expect to hear.
Repeated questions can become instructions without sounding like instructions.
Buyer’s Market gives no lecture explaining this. It places the voices close enough that the listener must begin wondering how testimony is made, who has shaped it and whether emotional intensity proves factual accuracy.
That ambiguity is artistically potent, but the album does not provide the source information needed to evaluate every recording. Its public release data names Sotos, Albini and Solotroff while leaving the people whose voices form the work largely unidentified. The listener is made responsible for research the object itself refuses to supply.
Uncertainty becomes atmosphere.
The title “Trash” then changes the language from case description to contempt.
Whatever distinction may have existed between person, victim, witness, sex worker, grieving relative or television subject is gathered beneath a word associated with waste. The title can be heard as the voice of a perpetrator, the media, society or Sotos himself. The packaging does not assign it safely to anyone else.
That refusal matters.
A transgressive artist can reproduce hateful language and claim to be exposing it. But when the work removes quotation marks, context and opposition, exposure becomes difficult to separate from use. The slur receives the artist’s sequencing, typography and authority even when its origin lies elsewhere.
“Trash” is not merely an account of dehumanization. The title performs it.
The fourth track requires only one word: “Bundy.”
By 1992, Ted Bundy had become one of the most commercially recognizable criminals in American culture. He had been the subject of national television coverage, books, courtroom reporting and years of speculation before his 1989 execution. His surname had become a compact product containing charm, deception, murder, sexual violence and the media’s fascination with the apparent contradiction between social appearance and private brutality.
The album does not need to print “Ted.”
The brand is complete.
Naming the track after Bundy continues the structure that Buyer’s Market may also be attempting to criticize. Once again, the offender organizes the material. Other people’s terror, grief and survival are arranged beneath his identity.
A victim’s name might require explanation. “Bundy” sells itself.
The track’s position is especially revealing. It follows “Trash” and precedes “Victims.” The person designated as waste remains unnamed, while the murderer becomes a proper noun and the harmed become a plural condition.
This is the hierarchy of criminal celebrity compressed into three track titles.
The final piece, “Victims,” offers no return to individuality. Its title is accurate but insufficient, a word used by police, courts, reporters, therapists, campaigners and perpetrators to describe radically different human lives after harm has connected them.
The plural creates solidarity while erasing difference.
One person may be mourning a child. Another may be speaking about an assault. Another may be a relative questioned by reporters at the worst moment of a life. Their relationships to violence are not interchangeable, but the album makes them neighbors within one thirteen-minute compartment.
The track closes the record without a restorative gesture. There is no update explaining what became of the speakers, no naming ceremony, no movement from victimhood into survival and no final argument delivered by the compiler.
The voices end because the disc ends.
That refusal of closure is one source of the album’s power. Real suffering does not resolve itself when a documentary reaches its credits. A parent’s grief does not become meaningful because a reporter found a strong concluding sentence. Violence persists after the audience has moved to another program.
Buyer’s Market refuses the emotional housekeeping that true crime frequently performs.
It also refuses responsibility for what happens to the voices after using them.
The strongest defense of the album is that it exposes the machinery hidden inside respectable media. Every recording on the disc had already been made available to an audience by someone else. Cameras had been brought into homes, interviewers had asked devastated people to explain themselves, and producers had selected the most affecting portions for broadcast.
Sotos did not create the first extraction.
He re-edited the extraction until its appetite became difficult to ignore.
Ordinary reporting places concern around that appetite. It claims that the audience is being informed, warned or invited to understand. Buyer’s Market removes the official purpose and leaves the desire for proximity exposed.
Why do people want to hear this?
What is being learned?
When does witnessing become consumption?
The record does not answer because answering would give the listener another moral exit.
The opposing argument is equally strong. Knowing how exploitation works does not exempt a second exploitation from participating in it. The voices on Buyer’s Market were spoken within specific encounters and then detached from them. Their speakers did not necessarily address an experimental-music audience, enter a collaboration with Peter Sotos or choose to become components within a release sold through a provocative industrial label.
The album takes speech that has already been extracted and extracts it again.
Its criticism is built from the thing it criticizes.
That contradiction cannot be solved by calling the album either documentary or pornography, compassion or sadism. It can function differently for different listeners. One person may hear a devastating exposure of media voyeurism. Another may use the same material for morbid excitement. A third may experience both reactions and be unable to separate them.
The object offers no mechanism controlling what kind of attention reaches it.
This is why the title is so exact. A market does not require every buyer to share a motive. It requires available material and a transaction.
Mark Solotroff coordinated the project and released it through AWB Recording, a small Chicago imprint whose identity was itself deliberately provocative. Solotroff later explained that the label’s name was derived from the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging, the far-right South African movement. That choice places Buyer’s Market within an underground culture where politically and morally charged symbols could be selected partly for their power to repel outsiders and bind a smaller audience together.
The label was not a neutral delivery service surprised by the contents.
A 2003 mail-order listing still offered AWB 016 for twelve dollars, advertising serial murder, child killings, victims’ families and Steve Albini’s engineering as the product’s distinguishing features.
That small catalog description makes the title literal.
Trauma becomes copy.
Albini’s involvement gives the release another complicated afterlife. Decades later, while publicly reconsidering the offensive posture of his younger years, he described Sotos as a friend and former influence. He characterized the writing as repellent but believed its entry into a sadistic mind could produce a shock proportionate to the horror of the real acts being examined.
That is a serious defense, not merely a claim that people are too sensitive.
It argues that tasteful representation can falsify atrocity. A cleanly written newspaper account may allow the reader to remain civilized, untouched and superior. Sotos attempts to destroy that protected position by making the language itself contaminating.
Yet an accurate sensation of contamination is not the same as justice for the people used to produce it.
The legal history surrounding Pure makes the problem impossible to treat as abstract. Years before Buyer’s Market, Sotos had been indicted in Illinois for possessing illegal abusive images. The Illinois Supreme Court case that followed distinguished such material from ordinary obscenity because its production records actual abuse and continued circulation extends the harm.
Buyer’s Market contains voices rather than the same kind of illegal visual material, but the ethical question survives in another form: what obligations remain attached to documentary evidence after it has entered public circulation?
Does availability equal permission?
The record never asks that question in a voice separate from its appetite.
Within Sotos’s career, Buyer’s Market occupies a crucial position. Pure had converted clippings, photographs, criminal records and hateful narration into visual pages. The later Parasite issues and books would continue breaking down the distinctions among reporter, consumer, criminal, victim and author.
Buyer’s Market moves that editorial method into sound.
Paper permits some distance. A reader can close a page, skim a paragraph or look away from a photograph. Recorded voices enter the room and take time. The speaker’s breath continues whether the listener feels prepared or not.
The work is therefore more intimate than Pure and, in some ways, more invasive.
It is also formally narrower. One hour of documentary voices can become monotonous, and monotony is not automatically profundity. The album sometimes relies on the inherent force of its source material rather than transforming it through especially elaborate composition.
The cuts do not need to be brilliant when the testimony is already devastating.
That raises another uncomfortable question: how much artistic achievement belongs to the compiler, and how much has been borrowed from people describing the worst experiences of their lives?
Buyer’s Market is not important merely because it is difficult to hear. Plenty of worthless objects are unpleasant. Its importance comes from the unusual precision with which every element points toward the same economy.
The unnamed child beneath the title.
The absence of music.
The uncredited public voices.
The famous killer granted a surname.
The victims reduced to a plural.
The label advertising the controversy.
The listener paying for access.
The compiler gaining authorship through arrangement.
Even the notation “Volume One” contributes to the effect. It suggests that the available material is inexhaustible, that another shipment could arrive whenever the first hour has been consumed. No direct Buyer’s Market Volume Two followed, but the implied continuation remains one of the coldest details on the object.
There will never be a shortage.
The album’s defenders are right that it reveals something ugly about true crime, television and moral spectatorship. Its critics are right that revelation does not cancel participation.
Buyer’s Market does not stand outside the culture that converts suffering into media. It is one of that culture’s most stripped and self-conscious products.
The disc asks who is buying.
It never proves that Peter Sotos is not also selling.
After sixty-one minutes, the child’s face remains beneath the same two words. Nothing heard on the record restores a name to it.
The market has been exposed, but the merchandise is still on display.
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