The cover appears to have been caught halfway between identification photograph and evidence recovered from a private ritual. A dark, hooded or masked figure bends beneath an arch of black fabric, the face almost completely swallowed except for one small reflection of light. Richard Ramirez and RU-486 are written around the image by hand, their names looking scratched onto the edge of a duplicated document rather than placed there by conventional design. Nothing explains who the figure is, what has happened, or whether concealment represents protection, submission, anonymity or threat. The cassette offers no album title to stabilize the image. Two names, two track titles and thirty minutes of sound are all the coordinates supplied.
That lack of a collective title is important. Split releases often invent a phrase capable of pretending that two separately produced works were conceived as one statement. This tape leaves the seam visible. Richard Ramirez occupies one side with “Muscle & Furs Pt. 1”; Thomas Mortigan’s RU-486 occupies the other with “Just Crawl.” The listener must turn the cassette between them, physically reversing the object and allowing one artist’s pressure to disappear before the other begins. Their relationship is not explained through a grand theme. It is created through adjacency, friendship, shared underground activity and the decision to place these particular pieces inside one shell.
Both artists were connected to overlapping American harsh-noise networks, but they entered the split from different historical positions. Richard Ramirez had been active since the end of the 1980s, developing solo work alongside Black Leather Jesus and an extraordinary population of related projects. By 2008, his methods had already traveled through junk noise, industrial abrasion, collaboration, static forms and increasingly specific investigations of queer imagery, fetish materials and bodily identity. RU-486 was much younger. Mortigan formed the project in 2005 with the stated intention of working within harsh noise and power electronics, bringing his background in industrial music, EBM, metal and cassette culture into a more direct electronic assault.
This difference in age does not turn the cassette into a master-and-apprentice arrangement. Mortigan is not merely borrowing Ramirez’s authority, and Ramirez is not presenting a newcomer as an accessory. Destructive Industries places both names at equal scale, one per side, while Mortigan’s labor as label operator gives him another form of authorship over the object. He selected, dubbed, assembled and circulated the container through which both works would enter the world. The tape therefore records more than two performances. It records a relationship between artist and publisher in which those roles continually exchange places.
“Muscle & Furs Pt. 1” is a compact example of how Ramirez could turn apparently simple source material into a difficult surface of bodily suggestion. The title is strange because its two nouns refuse an obvious grammatical relationship. Muscle belongs beneath skin, associated with force, movement, labor and the disciplined production of masculine appearance. Fur covers a body, suggesting animality, warmth, costume, luxury or a particular vocabulary of male physical type. Joined by an ampersand, they become materials placed side by side: interior power and exterior covering, flesh trained into hardness and the soft surface through which that hardness is seen.
The cover’s hidden figure intensifies these possibilities. A hood removes the face, which is normally treated as the primary evidence of personal identity, while leaving the body available to be interpreted through posture, size, clothing and imagined physicality. In many industrial releases, masking is used to create an anonymous agent of violence. Within Ramirez’s wider aesthetic world, concealment can also invoke erotic role-play, leather culture, chosen identity and the productive instability between intimidation and vulnerability. The same image may repel one viewer and invite another to recognize a coded form of desire.
The music does not need to illustrate one precise scenario for the title and image to affect it. Ramirez’s sustained distortion becomes a surface onto which the body can be projected. Dense low and middle frequencies suggest weight without revealing the object producing that weight. Gradual internal changes make the sound feel muscular, but the texture surrounding them remains frayed and tactile, closer to fabric, hair or abrasive skin than to polished electronic tone. The track does not describe a body. It generates the conditions under which listeners begin imagining one.
The “Pt. 1” designation leaves the work deliberately incomplete. A first part implies continuation, but the cassette does not provide it. This transforms the side into a fragment of a larger investigation whose remaining body may exist elsewhere, may have been planned and abandoned, or may simply be created by the listener’s expectation. Noise discographies are full of such incomplete sequences, alternate versions and titles that point toward missing companions. The absence is not always a cataloguing failure. It can make the surviving piece feel like material extracted from an ongoing private process.
Ramirez’s side also demonstrates how static or slowly changing noise can transfer compositional labor toward the listener. When obvious sections and recognizable instrumental gestures are reduced, hearing begins separating the mass by itself. A rough continuous band may divide into several perceived layers. A pulse appears at one depth and disappears when attention shifts elsewhere. Small changes become disproportionately important because there is no melody or beat announcing what deserves notice. The piece seems fixed, yet the experience of it refuses to remain fixed.
Turning to RU-486 changes the relationship between sound and command. “Just Crawl” is a more active, juddering construction of organized harsh noise, with Mortigan’s shrieking and howling vocals forced through the electronics. The title is only two words, but “just” makes the imperative especially ugly. It can mean simply crawl, do nothing else, abandon argument, surrender height and accept the floor. It can also express impatience, as though the person issuing the command has grown tired of explaining why obedience is expected.
Crawling changes the human body’s social meaning. Standing upright is associated with independence, visibility and adult authority. Crawling belongs to infancy, injury, concealment, exhaustion, animal movement and coerced submission. The command therefore attacks status before it threatens physical harm. It asks the subject to reduce himself, to occupy the lowest available plane and to move according to another person’s will. Power electronics frequently works through this compression of language, reducing complex relations of domination to a few phrases delivered with enough force that the listener feels the social position they impose.
Mortigan’s voice does not float above the electronics as a clearly understandable narrator. It enters the same damaged field, becoming another strained mechanical event. This matters because pure verbal clarity would make the track easier to classify as a statement. Distortion removes certainty. The listener receives intention, hostility and bodily exertion before receiving complete semantic information. Command becomes atmosphere. The voice may be directing somebody else, speaking to itself, reproducing a remembered authority or inviting the audience to experience the pleasure and disgust of hearing power performed.
The name RU-486 already places the project inside a contested relationship among medicine, bodily autonomy, reproduction and political control. RU-486 was the designation commonly associated with mifepristone, and adopting it as a project name imports that charged history before any individual release declares a subject. Mortigan later emphasized that RU-486 was not a white-power or conventionally political project, describing it instead as a response to things in the world that inspired and disgusted him, including violence, animal rights, personal exploration and current events. The name still ensures that the body is never completely abstract. Technology, law, morality and biological process hover behind the electronics.
“Just Crawl” belongs to RU-486’s earlier period, when Mortigan was still deliberately holding the project within harsh noise and power electronics. He later felt those boundaries had become restrictive and moved toward more composed industrial forms capable of creating detailed mental images and repeatable emotional environments. Heard from that later perspective, this side preserves the project before expansion, concentrating its identity into violent movement, vocal pressure and a narrow command. It is less panoramic than later RU-486, but the limitation has its own severe coherence.
The cassette’s two sides share bodily language while approaching it from different angles. “Muscle & Furs Pt. 1” names substances and surfaces without issuing instructions. The listener is invited to inspect, imagine and possibly desire the unidentified body. “Just Crawl” converts the body into action under command. One side is concerned with what a body appears to be made from; the other with the position it is ordered to occupy. The first builds a wall around an image. The second drives movement across the floor.
This relationship complicates the easy assumption that extreme noise is only about sonic aggression. The more interesting subject is often power over interpretation. Ramirez withholds enough information that the listener must create the body inside the sound. Mortigan supplies a blunt instruction but damages the voice until its exact target remains uncertain. Neither artist grants the audience a stable narrative, yet both manipulate the listener’s awareness of physical position. Where are you standing? What surface surrounds you? Who is looking, who is hidden and who has the authority to speak?
The small cassette edition intensifies this private scale. A C30 is not a grand album architecture. It is one short encounter per side, enclosed within a cheap, durable object that can fit into a pocket or padded envelope. Its materials are mundane: plastic shell, magnetic tape, folded paper and ink. Yet those materials carry an image of concealment and thirty minutes of deliberately hostile sound across cities and national borders. Extremity survives through ordinary manufacturing.
Mortigan later described the physical production of Destructive Industries tapes as a labor of love, with thousands of copies dubbed in real time over the label’s history. That detail changes how the aggression of the object can be understood. Every copy required patience. A thirty-minute cassette consumes thirty actual minutes of duplication, followed by handling, labelling, folding, packing and mailing. The music may stage domination and degradation, but its circulation depends upon repetitive care.
This contradiction runs through much of underground noise culture. Artists cultivate images of isolation, hostility and social rupture while participating in networks maintained by trust, cooperation and shared enthusiasm. Ramirez supplies a side; Mortigan gives it physical form; listeners send money; postal workers protect the package; collectors preserve the tape; blogs later convert it into files. The hostile object survives because numerous people perform small acts of reliability.
Its digital path adds another layer. By January 2012, Badgerstump had placed the cassette on Bleak Bliss with only a few lines of description, allowing the recording to escape the limitations of its original circulation. Fourteen years later, Private Release gives the transfer another public location in a lossless archive. The tape has moved from home duplication to international mail, private collections, blog preservation and re-uploaded FLAC without becoming culturally visible in any mainstream sense. It remains underground while traveling remarkably far.
That movement is not incidental to the release’s meaning. A cassette called untitled, showing a hidden figure and containing one track about absence of stable identity and another about crawling, has survived through people who often remain invisible themselves. Uploaders, rippers and listeners leave faint traces in filenames, dates, blog templates and dead links. The network carries the object while refusing the spotlight, much like the covered face on the sleeve.
The FLAC archive cannot reproduce the pressure of reaching the end of side A, hearing the mechanism stop and physically turning the cassette before “Just Crawl” begins. Digital playback can make the tracks consecutive, reducing the moment of decision between them. Yet the transfer preserves detail that a repeatedly played cassette might gradually lose, and it permits the two sides to continue entering new rooms long after the original label’s distribution moment has passed.
Richard Ramirez and RU-486 remains a modest release in physical scale, but its apparent simplicity conceals a dense social and bodily structure. One veteran and one younger artist share a tape without pretending to merge. One side presents muscle beneath fur, material concealed beneath material. The other forces the body downward until movement becomes obedience. Around them sits the label, the cassette, the masked image and the international preservation network that quietly refused to let the object vanish.
Anyone who owned the original DI004 cassette, remembers ordering it directly from Thomas Mortigan or knows where the later parts of “Muscle & Furs” appeared may be able to complete details that surviving listings cannot provide. Information about the edition size, the physical insert, recording methods and the relationship between these specific pieces would be particularly valuable. The tape withholds explanation, but its history remains open, waiting for somebody from the original network to stand up and speak.
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