Mangle is a title that does not waste energy pretending to be mysterious. It tells you the operating procedure. MOT and Violent Shogun are not collaborating in the polite sense, where two artists meet in the middle and shake hands over a balanced object. They are mangling each other: twisting, crushing, misusing, refeeding, roughening the source until identity becomes less stable than texture.
Released in 2022 by Absurd Exposition as AE62, Mangle appeared as an edition of 100 pro-dubbed tapes, with risographed covers and inserts housed in hard-plastic double-tape cases. The label’s Bandcamp description says MOT and Violent Shogun return with “hissing dirges” built from tape misuse, ruined loop manipulation, and analog murk, with each artist also mangling source material from the other. That is the whole release in miniature: not a clean split, but a small exchange of damage.
The structure is simple and smart. MOT opens with “Mot Mangles Violent Shogun,” then follows with “Unfit.” Violent Shogun answers with “Violent Shogun Mangles Mot,” then “Illfit.” The titles turn the tape into a mirrored deformity. Fit becomes unfit, then illfit. Each side of the collaboration seems to test whether sound can survive being made less suitable, less healthy, less properly shaped.
That is where the tape becomes more interesting than a generic harsh noise exchange. “Mangle” is physical language. It suggests hands, machines, blades, accidents, bodies altered by force. But the label’s description points toward a more specific kind of violence: tape misuse and loop ruin. This is not only noise as volume. It is noise as handling. The sound has been touched badly. Loops are not clean repetitions. They wobble, scrape, decay, drag, and come back wrong.
The “anti-tapes dipped and/or brushed with gold paint” are a perfect object-detail. Gold usually suggests value, ceremony, luxury, reward. Here it is applied to anti-tapes inside a harsh noise cassette package, turning trash, refusal, and decorative absurdity into part of the artifact’s personality. It is funny, but not cute. It makes the object feel like something found in a drawer after a small cult, a failed art opening, and a basement noise show all shared the same afternoon.
After the Incapacitants run, Mangle feels smaller but not lesser. Incapacitants often turn overload into ecstatic weather. MOT and Violent Shogun work closer to the bench: tape, loop, hiss, murk, pressure, misfit materials. The scale changes from storm system to workshop injury. That shift is useful. It reminds the archive that noise culture is not only monuments and legends. It is also limited editions of 100, risographed inserts, broken loops, mutual defacement, and the pleasure of an object that probably looks as hostile as it sounds.
The Montreal/Scream & Writhe / Absurd Exposition context matters too. This is contemporary noise culture as small-batch transmission: local enough to feel personal, distributed enough to travel, handmade enough to resist becoming frictionless. A tape like this does not present itself as the final word on anything. It behaves more like a contaminated postcard from a scene where people still care about the physical comedy of format.
As a Private Release post, Mangle fits because it speaks the same language as the archive’s process: source material passes through other hands, other systems, other intentions, and comes out changed. A rip is a transformation. A reupload is a transformation. A blog post is a transformation. This tape simply makes that violence explicit. MOT mangles Violent Shogun. Violent Shogun mangles MOT. The archive mangles circulation into memory.
The result is not polished, and that is the point. Mangle is noise as damaged exchange: hissing, murky, loop-sick, object-conscious, and happily unfit for respectable rooms.
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