Morrissey - 1997 - Maladjusted C45

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 3:49PM

Private Release – none

VA - 2005 - Ol' School DJ Throwdown C60

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 4:22PM

Private Release – none

The front of this cassette does not announce itself with turntables, spray paint, microphones, sneakers, boom boxes or any of the other visual shortcuts that could immediately tell somebody they are looking at an old-school hip-hop collection. Instead there is a yellowed printed illustration of two people sitting together on a couch in an elaborately furnished room. A woman leans toward a stiff-looking man in glasses and dark formal clothing. Her hand reaches across toward him while he sits almost rigidly upright, staring outward rather than returning her attention. Behind them are curtains, framed pictures, a houseplant, two round balloon-like forms rising above the couch and a patterned rug filling the floor. The illustration has been torn from whatever larger printed context once explained it, leaving a rough white edge down the left side. That missing context is important because the scene now has to survive entirely on posture and expression. Something is happening between these two people, but the original caption, joke, story or surrounding page is gone. What remains is an awkward little social performance preserved inside the standard Private Release frame. This is exactly the kind of visual material that keeps moving through these tapes: an existing picture made for some other reason, found among books, magazines and paper, removed from its original environment, then allowed to acquire another meaning simply because it has been placed beside a particular recording.

Open the J-card and that old monochrome drawing disappears into an enormous field of color. Yellow, purple and white crocuses cover nearly the entire interior photograph, densely packed along a garden bed and stretching backward until individual flowers begin turning into pattern. The photograph itself has been cut into sections to make it occupy the cassette format. On the right edge, additional narrow fragments extend the garden image rather than allowing the original photograph to dictate the dimensions of the object. This is one of those places where the recurring Private Release method becomes more visible than any specific attempt to illustrate the music. The flowers are not trying to explain DJs. They are not a visual pun about scratching, breakbeats or turntables. They were part of the visual material available at the time and entered the sequence the same way flowers enter so many neighboring Private Release objects. After enough tapes, the flowers become connective tissue. One cassette carries tulips, another daffodils, another crocuses, another an image of some completely different plant, and eventually the listener is no longer looking at isolated covers. A visual rhythm starts forming from object to object. The same thing happens with torn illustrations, erotic pictures, nature photographs, old printed matter, the repeated black borders and the typewritten labels. Each tape is different, but the method keeps returning. That makes the collection work somewhat like a giant mixtape in which the transition is happening not only from one song to another but from one physical object to the next.

The cassette itself is a wonderfully plain piece of hardware compared with the colorful flowers hidden inside the J-card. The shell is an earthy brown or olive color, while the large paper label is pale mint green and cut neatly around the cassette window. Typed across the top is simply VARIOUS - / Ol’ School DJ Throwdown. The typography does almost all of the informational work. No individual performers are listed on the shell. No track numbers. No logo. No attempt to make the tape resemble an official commercial edition. The dark wound tape is visible through the center window behind the green label, and that little rectangle of exposed magnetic tape is actually one of the most appropriate visual elements on the entire object. DJ culture has always made recorded sound feel physical. A record is not merely a container delivering a finished song. It can become raw material. A break can be isolated. A few seconds can be extended. Two copies can allow one section to repeat beyond the duration originally given to it. A hand can interrupt playback, reverse it, release it, cut between sources and use a mixer to reorganize recordings in real time. The record becomes something played in both meanings of the word. Old-school DJ recordings preserve that moment when manipulating playback equipment itself becomes performance. The person behind the turntables is not simply choosing the next record. The equipment becomes part of the musical act.

That makes the word “Throwdown” especially good. It suggests display, challenge and demonstration rather than passive sequencing. Somebody is showing what they can do with records, hands, timing and machines. The source collection is built around precisely that old DJ language of cuts, scratches, jams, grooves and turntable routines rather than being another compilation of recognizable rap singles. Davy DMX, Daryl Cee, Beat Box Master Quick, Charlie Chase and Hitman Howie Tee appear across the original program, and titles such as “Scratch Attack II,” “Davy’s Scratch,” “Scratch Track,” “Davy’s Groove” and “Talkin’ Tables” make the emphasis unusually explicit. The attraction is the manipulation itself. A scratch does not hide the fact that somebody is touching the medium. It magnifies it. The sound of intervention becomes the point. That is interesting inside Private Release because the cassette operates through a related attitude toward objects. The source is not treated as something that must remain physically untouched in its original commercial package. It is handled again. Re-recorded. Given another shell. Given unrelated imagery. Typed onto paper. Photographed. Sent outward. The music remains somebody else’s music, but another physical encounter with it is created around the recording.

There is also a nice technological loop happening here. The DJ performances originate from a culture centered heavily around vinyl records and analog playback, then become commercially compiled recordings, then this version is placed onto cassette, another magnetic format built around physical movement. Nothing about the cassette lets the listener jump instantly to an individual cut. You can fast-forward, rewind, estimate, listen for the beginning and watch the amount of tape migrate from one reel to the other. The medium imposes continuity. That changes the experience of material originally concerned with DJs interrupting continuity on purpose. On the turntable, the DJ can seize a moment and refuse to let the original recording continue normally. On cassette, all of those interventions become fixed into another linear recording. A scratch that originally represented physical spontaneity is now permanently encoded onto tape. The moment of somebody disrupting recorded music becomes recorded music itself. Then Private Release records that recording again. Layers keep accumulating.

The domestic illustration on the front becomes funnier the longer it sits beside all of this. The two people on the couch appear locked into a very formal room and a strangely frozen encounter. Nothing in the image moves. Even their body language looks held in place. Behind the plastic cassette case, however, the recording is about movement performed through recorded media: records being stopped, redirected, repeated and manipulated. The front image does not have to symbolize any of that deliberately. Its usefulness comes from not being an obvious answer. It forces the viewer to make the connection, or not make one at all. Maybe the picture was chosen because it happened to be sitting nearby. Maybe its awkwardness was amusing. Maybe the particular texture of the reproduction simply worked. Private Release does not require every visual choice to become a coded message. Sometimes selection itself is enough.

That becomes increasingly important across this archive. Thousands of fragments do not need thousands of explanations. A person can repeatedly choose images, recordings, shells, colors and formats and eventually the accumulation begins revealing patterns that no single object could announce on its own. This tape contributes a stiff old domestic illustration, a huge explosion of crocuses, an olive-brown cassette, a mint label and a collection built around people physically rearranging records. None of those elements originated together. They meet here because this particular object caused them to meet. Then the tape joins everything made before it and everything made afterward. One more recording. One more cover. One more handful of somebody else’s cultural material passing through the same room and becoming another fragment carrying the PRIVATE RELEASE process forward.

VA - (1965) The Red Bird Girls: Very First Time In Stereo 1964-1966 C80

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