BUY or DIY. Three words beneath the photographs, offering two different ways into the same object. BUY led to a handmade cassette listed for five dollars postage paid. DIY led to the audio files, freely available to anyone willing to find a blank tape, press record, print something out, and create another Private Release. One path offered the copy made by James Boyd. The other removed James from the manufacturing process entirely.
Even the route to the Big Cartel shop was disguised through a dereferer. The store could receive a visitor without being handed a trail leading directly back to the blog. It was a peculiar little arrangement: the object was public, the source remained partially obscured, and anyone who did not want to buy it was invited to reproduce it. Nothing was protected very fiercely except the freedom to keep moving.
Private Release briefly became a physical cassette label around this time, although “label” may be too grand a word for what was happening. Blank tapes were ordered from Tapeline in the United Kingdom, recorded at home, given handmade covers, and placed online at a price that made financial success nearly impossible. One tape sold through Big Cartel. The others eventually went to Econojam Records in Oakland, where every copy sold.
The difference was touch.
A cassette on a webpage is information about a cassette. A cassette in a record store is a small machine waiting inside a plastic case. It can be lifted, turned over, opened, unfolded, examined through the light. Its weight is modest but definite. The tape is visibly wound around the hubs. The cover has edges. The folds never disappear completely. A person holding it can tell that someone else sat somewhere and made it.
The Candyman cover began as a full-color image removed from a dance catalog, the kind sent to schools advertising clothing and supplies for dance teams. Before it became part of this tape, the image belonged to an ordinary sales pitch. Young people posed in coordinated costumes, arranged into the polished cheerfulness expected from school catalogs. There was no darkness in the original purpose of the picture. Its job was to appear healthy, energetic, organized, and safe.
Placed with Nicole 12, the picture changes without physically changing at all.
The music occupies a world of pedophilic desire, predation, abuse, and the diseased fantasies surrounding children. The dance photograph brings that world uncomfortably close to the familiar surfaces of school life. It does not accuse the people in the picture of anything. It does not celebrate the person looking at them incorrectly. It creates a pressure between an image and a context, then leaves that pressure unresolved.
That distinction is important. Art can approach an evil thing without becoming an advertisement for it. It can enter a criminal or destructive mental space without asking anyone to commit the act being examined. Sometimes art is the only available room where a person can look directly at something unbearable, turn it around, feel its weight, and leave without carrying it into behavior.
There are subjects that become impossible to explore once every image is treated as evidence and every curiosity as confession. The normal world prefers clean borders. Good people are expected to think only good thoughts. Victims are expected to explore their experiences through approved language. Anyone drawn toward the artistic expression of cruelty risks being mistaken for the cruelty itself.
Candyman does not respect that border. Neither did the collage made for it.
Inside the cover are flowers cut from a seed catalog, another kind of ordinary mail that arrived carrying an entirely different audience and purpose. Seed catalogs commonly promise future beauty to people old enough to understand waiting. A photograph of a flower is a picture of something that has already bloomed, printed so that another person might imagine planting it months later. The image carries youth, age, reproduction, decay, patience, and the hope that something buried will eventually appear.
The young dance figures remain outside. The flowers wait within.
There is no need to force this into a fixed symbolic system. The images were selected through feeling before explanation. That is often where collage becomes most alive. Two fragments recognize something in each other that language cannot immediately name. The maker senses the connection first. Any explanation arrives later, usually with part of the original sensation already missing.
The catalogs themselves were free material ordered through the mail specifically to be cut apart. This was before James began working for the Postal Service. Mail was already entering the Private Release process as a supply line, bringing stacks of commercial imagery into the house while thousands of music packages were leaving through Discogs. More than 2,000 packages were sold and mailed during 2019 and 2020. Music came in, images came in, pieces were rearranged, and different objects went back out.
The cassette belongs to that circulation. It is not simply a homemade edition of an existing recording. It is a place where several systems briefly crossed: international tape manufacturing, free American advertising, underground music, digital file sharing, mail order, a hidden referral link, an Oakland record store, and one person’s private method of understanding difficult feelings.
BUY or DIY was not merely a choice between paying and downloading. It described two attitudes toward possession. BUY said that this particular arrangement of shell, sound, paper, ink, labor, and intuition could be owned. DIY said that the arrangement was not sacred. Make another one. Change the cover. Use a different tape. Let the object leave the authority of its maker and become something else in another room.
The purchased cassette and the homemade copy would contain the same recording, but they would not be the same object. The difference would live in the hands that assembled them, the materials available, the accidental folds, the printer running out of ink, the choice of image, the length of the leader tape, and whatever private meaning gathered around the process.
That may be the most accurate definition of a Private Release. It is not private because nobody else can have it. It is private because nobody else can completely reproduce the reasons it was made.
