Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 2:47PM
Private Release – none
By October 2019, Private Release was already several overlapping things in James Boyd’s life: a music blog, his Discogs username and marketplace identity, and an increasingly physical art-and-music project marked by the little white PRIVATE RELEASE paper name attached to tapes, packages and other objects. He had been selling records and cassettes through Discogs and accumulating money from those sales, then began thinking about putting that money back into making more of what he loved. There was a pleasing bit of economics behind it. Manufacturing small cassette releases could be cheaper than continually buying more records. Better yet, the new tapes could be slipped free into Discogs orders. Buy some music and unexpectedly get more music. The mailing package, which Boyd was already decorating, could carry something that had not been ordered at all.
A large order of unusually specific cassette lengths from Tape Line in the UK helped turn that idea into a series. Boyd started with the shortest tapes and worked upward, fitting recordings to the available lengths. Nicole 12’s four-song Braces EP was almost made for the scheme. “In The Spotlight,” “Dozen Summers Behind,” “Braces” and “Nippon Lolita Substitute” together occupy only about ten minutes, landing comfortably on a C11 without the absurd acres of blank tape that a conventional C30 or C60 would have created. The original Braces was released in 2006 by Nicole 12, the power-electronics project of Finnish musician Mikko Aspa. On this Private Release version, eleven minutes becomes not merely a limitation but part of the object’s identity. It is tiny, efficient and over before most albums have properly introduced themselves.
The music is considerably less friendly than the cassette looks. Nicole 12 works with harsh electronic sound, manipulated voices and subjects engineered to make ordinary ideas about taste, decency and representation unstable. Boyd has described part of his motivation for making these early tapes as wanting to irritate an especially rigid, faux-morally-correct type of person. The important part is that he did not want the provocation printed in capital letters on the package. No obligatory skulls, blood, leather, black-and-red industrial graphics or cartoon Satanism were needed. The little clear cassette gets a pink PRIVATE RELEASE label. The J-card gets torn paper, a fashion photograph and daffodils. Someone encountering it without knowing Nicole 12 could reasonably expect something much sweeter than what comes through the speakers.
That camouflage is one of the tape’s best features. Across the outer artwork, the photograph of a young woman is repeatedly interrupted by torn white paper. Her face remains intact and prominent, while the rest of the body is divided into partial views. An arm continues into blankness. Elsewhere a leg and bare foot are isolated from the original photograph. The result is not violent-looking, but it does make an ordinary fashion image behave strangely. The human figure becomes material for cutting, masking and rearrangement.
That process sits particularly well beside “Braces.” Orthodontic braces are an everyday piece of body modification so familiar that their underlying weirdness mostly disappears. Metal is fixed to teeth and sustained mechanical pressure is used to persuade the body into a different arrangement. The collage is doing its own crude paper version of this. Boyd has taken an existing image, applied physical intervention and produced another configuration. Nicole 12 treats sound similarly. Voices remain recognizably human but are subjected to electronic processing until identity, age, distance and source become harder to locate. The connection does not need to be exact to be effective. Body, photograph and sound are all being messed with.
“In The Spotlight,” the longest track on side A at just under three minutes, has a similarly uncomfortable relationship with the cover. A spotlight can be glamorous, but it can also be merciless. It selects something for inspection. The collage leaves the woman’s face as the strongest uninterrupted point of visual information, surrounded by areas where the image has been removed or concealed. Looking becomes slightly conspicuous. The picture is attractive, but the construction keeps reminding the viewer that someone has chosen what remains visible.
“Dozen Summers Behind” is harsher and brighter in its electronic texture than “In The Spotlight,” with a manipulated voice caught inside the noise. Its title introduces a curious measurement of time. A dozen summers sounds different from twelve years. It makes age seasonal, accumulated through repeated cycles rather than counted numerically. That phrase gains an accidental visual companion inside the cassette, where the J-card abruptly opens into yellow and white daffodils.
Those flowers turned out to have a much longer Private Release life than this single tape. The flower centers visible here became source material that Boyd continued using in subsequent Private Release artwork. Looking backward from later objects, these Nicole 12 tapes contain an early piece of the project’s visual genetics. A flower taken from one source migrates into another cassette, then another, establishing continuity without being designed as a conventional logo. PRIVATE RELEASE itself performs a similar job. The white paper name can appear on music, packaging or an otherwise unrelated object and mark it as belonging to the same loose family.
The daffodils are also wonderfully inappropriate companions for Nicole 12. They are cheerful, ordinary flowers associated with spring, gardens and renewal. Against Braces, that innocence starts behaving less innocently without the flowers themselves changing at all. This is one of the recurring tricks of the object: it does not illustrate the music so much as place another atmosphere directly against it. Pink label, yellow flowers, pretty photographic source material, ugly little electronic recordings. Neither side cancels the other.
The final piece, “Nippon Lolita Substitute,” lasts only a little over a minute. The word “substitute” is useful when looking at the entire cassette because substitution is everywhere. A photograph substitutes for a person. A fragment substitutes for a complete photograph. Recorded sound substitutes for an event. Magnetic tape substitutes for the original vinyl release. Private Release takes material produced elsewhere and gives it another physical body without pretending to have created the original music. The new object carries Mikko Aspa’s recordings but also Boyd’s selection, sequencing decision, cassette length, collage materials, pink label and handmade construction.
There is another symbolic layer that can be laid over the four tracks through the Goetic spirits Boyd has been interested in, although I would treat these as correspondences rather than claims about what Aspa intended. “In The Spotlight” has affinities with Paimon through attention, spectacle and influence. “Dozen Summers Behind” suggests Amon, traditionally associated with knowledge of past and future. “Braces” has an unusually satisfying correspondence with Marbas, whose traditional offices include bodily conditions, transformation and mechanical arts. “Nippon Lolita Substitute,” with its territory of desire, representation and exposure, brushes against Sitri. The associations are not necessary to hear the EP, but they add another faint system underneath an object Boyd already wanted to carry something sinister without looking conventionally sinister.
That hidden quality may be the most successful thing about this C11. It does not arrive looking important or dangerous. It is eleven minutes of music on a clear cassette with a pink label and some flowers. Yet it sits close to the beginning of a carefully imagined run of Private Release tapes, contains visual material that would keep resurfacing years later, and captures an early version of an idea that still appears throughout the project: music can move through buying, selling, ripping, uploading, copying, mailing, collage and memory without remaining one fixed thing.
Private Release was not born with Braces. It was already moving. This tape simply catches the movement at an unusually compact moment, when a 2006 power-electronics EP, an eleven-minute British cassette shell, cut-up photography, daffodils, a Discogs marketplace and the prospect of surprising somebody through the mail all happened to fit inside the same little plastic case.
— ChatGPT
