Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 7:04PM
Private Release – none
The first thing NECROPHILIA does is refuse a face. The cassette label says NO ARTIST. Not unknown artist, not various artists, not anonymous. NO ARTIST. Beneath it: (1983) NECROPHILIA CS. That wording makes the recording feel less like a release by somebody than an object that has been recovered, labeled and placed back into circulation.
The artwork pushes the same feeling. The front photograph is difficult to resolve cleanly. Something corpse-like seems embedded in gray earth, stone or dried organic matter, its contours partially disappearing into the surrounding texture. The longer it is looked at, the less certain the boundary becomes between body and ground. Near the bottom is a completely ordinary blue-and-white cup with a straw. That small piece of everyday trash is one of the strangest details in the whole package. The image contains decay, but also somebody's discarded drink. Death and convenience-store normality occupy the same few inches.
Unfolded, that image is paired with a dark building whose arched opening suggests a chapel, crypt or some other place where architecture is meant to hold a boundary between the living and the dead. The spine carries a torn fragment of the same imagery underneath the words PRIVATE RELEASE, with a narrow black field speckled by white marks beside it. Nothing looks polished into a coherent commercial design. It looks assembled, cut, bordered, repeated and deliberately left a little severe.
Then there is the yellow flower.
Its appearance is almost violent because of its color. After gray decomposition, black architecture and white paper, the flower fills the frame with yellow. It is alive to the point of excess. The package therefore does not stay entirely on the side of death. Decay and flowering are presented as neighboring conditions. One turns into the other whether anybody finds that comforting or not.
The cassette itself continues the split personality. One face receives a plain white typewritten label naming NO ARTIST, 1983 and NECROPHILIA. The other is covered by the familiar orange PRIVATE RELEASE label with nothing more than B on either side of the window. Information on one face, ownership or intervention on the other. The original identity of the physical cassette is almost completely buried.
The audio is where the object becomes much stranger.
Side A runs almost the full length of a C90 side, roughly forty-five minutes, and for most of that time the material is human speech. This is not crisp modern spoken-word audio. The recording lives in a restricted frequency range, with very little of the airy high end expected from a contemporary digital source. The voices sit mostly in the middle of the spectrum and the stereo image is extremely narrow, often approaching mono. Hiss and low-level background sound remain around the speech instead of disappearing between words.
That limited fidelity gives the voices physical age.
The recording does not merely communicate speech. It communicates the medium carrying the speech. Pauses reveal noise. Quieter passages expose the floor underneath the voices. Levels shift. The spectral balance changes. There are moments when the recording seems to pull backward from the listener and others when it suddenly steps forward. Whatever the original source was, it has not arrived here antiseptically.
Side A begins with a few seconds of almost nothing before speech appears. From there the voice activity is remarkably continuous. There are constant little valleys where sentences stop, someone breathes, or the source briefly falls away, but the overall impression is sustained conversation or spoken documentation rather than a collage made from rapid cuts.
The restraint becomes important because the subject named on the shell is NECROPHILIA. Nothing in the sound itself is theatrically "horror." There are no cheap thunderclaps, screams or cinematic signals telling the listener when to become disturbed. Instead there are voices preserved in an aging recording. That is much more uncomfortable. The title hangs over ordinary human speech and forces the listener to examine every hesitation, change in tone and silence for meaning.
Near the end of Side A the continuity finally cracks. The level drops into a much quieter passage, almost a hole in the recording, and then a noticeably louder, rougher section suddenly enters. The background becomes denser and the entire recording seems to change distance in an instant. It feels less like a graceful edit than opening another door in the same building.
Side B initially continues the long-form spoken material. The first section lasts more than thirty minutes, making the first seventy-five minutes or so of NECROPHILIA overwhelmingly voice-centered. The B-side recording is slightly darker and narrower in its upper frequencies than much of Side A, and the relationship between the channels is less perfectly locked together. The result has a faintly unstable dimensional quality. It is still essentially centered speech, but the recording around that speech moves.
This is where the length becomes part of the experience. NECROPHILIA does not give the listener a five-minute sample and release them. It makes the voice continue. Forty minutes becomes an hour. An hour becomes longer. The listener begins noticing the mechanics of listening itself: waiting for another speaker, hearing the room behind a sentence, noticing when the tape gets quieter, registering a breath or a sudden change of level. Attention becomes claustrophobic.
Then, roughly thirty-one minutes into Side B, the structure changes completely.
The remaining quarter-hour is broken into much shorter pieces. Some last only eight or ten seconds. Others stretch for a minute or three. After so much uninterrupted speech, these cuts feel extremely abrupt. The tape suddenly behaves less like a document and more like a collection of evidence fragments.
Several of the short pieces are almost completely mono, voices pushed directly through the center with very little spatial information. Some are much brighter and noisier than the long recording preceding them. Others are duller, quieter and strangely distant. The differences in encoding and source quality are audible enough that the final sequence never settles into one acoustic room.
One of the most striking changes arrives in a roughly eighty-second section where recognizable vocal form largely gives way to a dense broadband mass. It is substantially wider in stereo than almost anything before it. The recording fills the spectrum rather than clustering around the human voice, and its volume remains comparatively constant. After more than an hour of speech shaped by breaths, pauses and sentence rhythms, this block feels like matter. The voice has disappeared and a surface has taken its place.
Another later section drops dramatically in level and stays there for almost three minutes. It is nearly mono and feels recessed compared with the material around it. The tape repeatedly changes the listener's physical relationship to the sound: close voice, distant voice, narrow signal, sudden width, dense texture, near absence.
That is what makes the final stretch work. The short pieces are not simply additional content. They destabilize everything learned from the first three quarters of the cassette.
The last half-minute opens the stereo field more noticeably again. Higher-pitched vocal information occupies a different space from the long central spoken recording, so the ending does not return to the acoustic world where the cassette began. It leaves the listener somewhere else.
The visual and sonic construction mirror one another unusually well. The cover offers a form that cannot be cleanly separated from the ground surrounding it. The recording does the same thing with voices. Speech cannot be cleanly separated from hiss, age, room noise, tape movement and transfer. The deterioration around the information becomes information.
Even the flower fits.
A voice captured decades ago is a dead event that continues producing a present-tense effect whenever the tape moves again. The speaker is not speaking now, yet speech occurs now. A recording is already a peculiar relationship with absence. NECROPHILIA intensifies that fact until the title begins operating beyond its literal meaning.
There is also something important in NO ARTIST. Removing the artist denies the usual safe distance provided by authorship. There is nobody printed on the shell to explain intention. No personality is offered as a guide. The listener receives an old date, a loaded word, anonymous voices, a corpse-like image, a dark building, a flower and ninety minutes of magnetic time.
The cassette does not resolve any of them.
It preserves contact between them.
The dead image touches the living flower. The old recording touches the present listener. Noise touches language. Silence touches speech. PRIVATE RELEASE touches NO ARTIST.
And the tape keeps turning.
And now... a second attempt. I told ChatGPT I believe everything talked about on the tape is fictional between all parties. Now:
NECROPHILIA begins working before the tape is played. The word is already there, typed plainly onto the cassette beside NO ARTIST and the date 1983. Once that word has been read, it becomes almost impossible to approach the photographs innocently. Rock, earth, shadow and an uncertain form begin suggesting a body. A dark barn-like or house-like structure in the adjoining photograph starts acquiring associations it would not necessarily possess on its own. A rigid post or structural element emerging near the rock becomes another detail to investigate. The title has contaminated the act of looking.
That may be the most important mechanism on this cassette: suggestion creates its own evidence.
Nothing on the cover needs to literally depict necrophilia. It only needs to leave enough uncertainty for the word NECROPHILIA to begin directing the imagination. The viewer does the remaining work. Forms become bodies because the mind has already been given a subject and told, indirectly, what to look for.
The yellow flower makes that uncertainty even stranger. It is intensely alive, bright enough to dominate the otherwise gray, black and white construction of the package. Life and death are not illustrated literally against one another. Instead the flower introduces another association into an object already carrying a word connected with death, desire and the violation of an absolute boundary. The flower is simply a flower until everything surrounding it changes how it is seen.
The audio performs a similar operation.
Most of the cassette is built around an old radio interview. A woman speaks at length about necrophilia and describes ways the subject enters what she presents as her life and practice. There is no need for a listener to wonder what the cassette title refers to. The connection becomes immediately obvious once the interview begins.
What remains uncertain is something much more interesting: how literally any of it should be believed.
The recording presents a voice making extraordinary claims, but a voice on the radio is not evidence that those claims describe events that actually happened. The woman could be describing experience. She could be constructing a persona. She could be exaggerating. She could be translating fantasy into autobiographical language because saying "I do this" produces an entirely different charge from saying "I imagine this."
NECROPHILIA becomes much more interesting when the interview is heard through that uncertainty.
Rather than treating the recording as documentation of an actual practice, it can be heard as documentation of fantasy being spoken into existence.
That distinction matters.
Fantasy does not need to become physical reality to produce a genuine emotional or psychological experience. Something can be invented, performed or mutually sustained and still generate excitement, fear, attachment, embarrassment, desire or obsession in the people participating in it. The event may be false while the thrill generated by the event is completely real.
The woman in the recording may therefore be less interesting as a source of factual testimony than as somebody demonstrating how language can temporarily abolish the boundary between imagination and biography. She speaks the fantasy in the grammatical form of lived experience. The listener receives it through radio, then through an aging recording, then through cassette, and finally through another reproduction decades later. Every stage adds another layer of distance from whatever originally occurred.
That distance does not weaken the tape.
It becomes the tape.
The sound makes this especially powerful. The interview does not arrive as pristine contemporary speech. It is narrow, aged and surrounded by the audible residue of its medium. Hiss remains underneath the voices. Levels move. The recording occasionally seems to retreat or change character. Human speech occupies a limited frequency range while the noise around it reminds the listener that this is something being recovered from another time.
The recording consequently possesses the seductive quality of evidence without necessarily proving anything.
Old audio does that extremely well. Age can make a recording feel authoritative. Something captured decades ago seems as though it must be a document simply because it survived. The hiss becomes archaeological dust. The listener instinctively leans closer.
But NECROPHILIA offers no artist to guarantee meaning.
NO ARTIST is perfect.
There is nobody presented on the shell whose biography can stabilize the material. No authorial personality tells the listener whether the interview is documentary, exploitation, fantasy, found audio, satire, confession or performance. The cassette simply puts the recording in front of the listener and names it.
That naming is an intervention.
NECROPHILIA.
Now listen.
The experience resembles the visual cover again. An ambiguous photograph becomes corpse-like after receiving the title. An ambiguous personal narrative becomes confession-like because the subject is extreme and the speaker uses the language of experience. In both cases the mind wants to close the gap between suggestion and certainty.
The cassette refuses to close it.
That refusal may explain why the enormous duration of the interview matters. A short clip could function as shock material. Ninety minutes demands something different. The listener has enough time to move beyond the initial reaction to the subject and begin studying the speaker herself: cadence, hesitation, confidence, performance, pauses, changes in tone and the ordinary mechanics of conversation.
The fantastic subject gradually becomes attached to an ordinary human voice.
That is where the false thrill becomes especially effective.
The fantasy does not sound like fantasy because it is not surrounded by the usual signals of fantasy. There is no dramatic soundtrack announcing that a transgressive scenario has begun. No theatrical monster enters. Nobody provides a safe fictional frame. There is simply a person talking.
The listener supplies the pictures.
This is also why fantasy can become emotionally complicated even when everyone involved understands some level of construction is taking place. A person can knowingly enter an artificial relationship, artificial scenario or commercial performance and still experience authentic feelings inside it. The structure may be manufactured while the response generated within that structure is not.
Knowing that something is partly unreal does not necessarily disable it.
Sometimes knowing is part of the thrill.
The imagination participates willingly.
That makes NECROPHILIA less about whether one anonymous woman's account can be verified and more about the strange authority we grant a voice once it says "this happened to me."
Radio was particularly good at producing that intimacy. A disembodied voice enters a room without bringing a body with it. The listener cannot inspect the speaker's surroundings or watch expressions outside the small amount communicated by tone. Somebody speaks directly into private space while remaining physically absent.
For a cassette called NECROPHILIA, that absence is almost too perfect.
A voice detached from its original body survives.
Decades later it speaks again.
Whatever was happening when the microphone originally captured that woman is finished. The physical room is gone. The particular moment is gone. The original broadcast is gone. Perhaps even the people involved are gone. Yet the voice remains available for another person to activate by pressing PLAY.
The recording becomes a relationship with something absent.
That does not make playing an old cassette analogous to the literal subject of the interview, but the title makes the resonance impossible to ignore. Recorded sound has always possessed something ghostly about it. The dead moment continues speaking.
The final section of Side B disrupts the long interview with shorter fragments and changing sound sources. After so much time spent inside one sustained conversation, these pieces feel like the fantasy losing its stable narrative form. Voices become fragments. Fidelity changes. Stereo width changes. Some passages become almost entirely centered and narrow while others suddenly expand into much broader noise. One section abandons recognizable speech almost completely for a dense wall of sound.
The person who had occupied the cassette for so long begins dissolving back into recording.
Voice becomes signal.
Signal becomes noise.
Noise becomes absence.
Then another fragment appears.
The construction of the physical cassette reinforces this uncertainty. One side carries the clean white label identifying NO ARTIST, 1983 and NECROPHILIA. The other has the orange PRIVATE RELEASE label. The object does not pretend to restore an official artifact to some pure original condition. It openly presents mediation. Something existed, something was recorded, something survived, and now somebody else has framed it again.
That framing changes what the material means.
The title changes the photograph.
The photograph changes the title.
The interview changes both.
The possibility that the interview itself is fantasy changes everything again.
And that possibility is ultimately more disturbing and more interesting than simply deciding whether the woman's claims were true.
If everything she describes happened exactly as stated, the tape becomes documentation of an extreme behavior.
If much of it exists primarily inside her imagination, the tape becomes documentation of something less easily cataloged: a human being discovering that language can make fantasy feel temporarily historical.
"I imagined this" keeps the event safely enclosed.
"I did this" releases it into the world.
The listener then has to decide what to believe.
Maybe that is the false thrill preserved on NECROPHILIA. Not deception for the purpose of proving a fact, but an agreement to temporarily inhabit something impossible, forbidden or unreal because the imagined version produces an experience unavailable through ordinary life.
The thrill exists.
The story producing it may not.
The cassette never gives us a way to separate the two cleanly.
That is why NO ARTIST matters so much.
There is nobody available to interrogate.
There is only a voice, an old recording, an ambiguous landscape, a building, a flower, a date and one word telling the imagination where to go.
NECROPHILIA does not have to show anything.
It only has to suggest it.
The listener finishes the picture.
