The three reused Crown tubes contain three very different Brandywine Coffee Roasters experiments, all purchased by Boyd at Ain’t Normal in Oakland for $36 per bag. Dirty Soda and 2Straw 2Nana were each sold in 8-ounce / 226-gram bags, while Stellar Collisions: The Next Generation came in a larger 12-ounce / 340-gram bag. Boyd placed 40 grams of Dirty Soda, 60 grams of Stellar Collisions and 40 grams of 2Straw 2Nana into the three Crown tubes.
Those unequal weights are important because the original bags all cost the same $36. Forty grams from a 226-gram bag of Dirty Soda represents about $6.37 worth of coffee. Forty grams from the 226-gram bag of 2Straw 2Nana is also about $6.37. Sixty grams from the larger 340-gram bag of Stellar Collisions represents about $6.35. The three tubes therefore contain almost exactly the same monetary value of coffee despite containing different weights: roughly six dollars and change, six dollars and change, six dollars and change. Three sixes sitting inside a Private Release: 6, 6, 6.
That numerical accident carries a considerable amount of cultural baggage. Revelation 13 calls 666 “the number of the beast,” but the verses immediately preceding the number are specifically concerned with economic control: people are prevented from buying or selling without the mark, name or number of the beast. That makes the popular connection between 666 and money less arbitrary than it might first appear. Elsewhere in the Bible, 1 Kings 10:14 gives another striking monetary appearance of the number: Solomon receives 666 talents of gold in a single year. The Bible does not simply state that “666 means money,” nor does Revelation explicitly call the beast Lucifer, but centuries of Christian interpretation, occultism, folklore, heavy metal and popular culture have allowed 666 to accumulate associations with worldly power, wealth, commerce, temptation, Satan and dominion over material life. Inside an object already concerned with money being spent, material being sacrificed, things being given away and value changing form, three six-dollar portions of coffee make an excellent little numerical ghost in the machine.
There is another joke hiding in the arithmetic. Looking only at weight, the 60 grams of Stellar Collisions appears to be the most generous tube. Economically it is virtually identical to the two 40-gram portions beside it. Boyd equalized the gift by value rather than mass. Approximately $6.37, $6.35 and $6.37 of coffee sit beside one another, or about $19.10 worth of beans altogether.
These are not ordinary flavored coffees in the familiar sense of roasted beans later sprayed with vanilla, hazelnut or syrup. “Co-ferment” is a broad specialty-coffee term for processing in which producers deliberately alter the fermentation environment surrounding coffee before drying, sometimes introducing selected microorganisms, fruit, fruit-derived sugars, yeasts, cultures or other fermentation media. Exactly what that means changes dramatically from producer to producer. The three Brandywine blends inside The Crown Box #003 are useful examples because together they contain several different approaches to manipulating fermentation. A cup that seems uncannily reminiscent of banana, strawberry, peach, caramel, cream soda or yogurt may have arrived at those sensations through days of microbial activity before the green coffee ever reached Brandywine’s roaster.
DIRTY SODA is perhaps the strangest place to begin because Brandywine built it to evoke something that is not coffee at all: cream soda. Its stated tasting notes are cream soda, baking spices and frosting. Dirty Soda combines José Posada’s Colombian Butterscotch Co-ferment, Brayan Alvear’s Colombian Caramel Co-ferment, a Colombian Monteblanco Banana Co-ferment and a washed Rwanda Kanzu component. Rather than relying on one aggressively processed coffee, several different flavor-producing processes are blended together while the washed Rwandan coffee provides another kind of structure underneath them.
The butterscotch and caramel components belong to a style of processing sometimes described as “refurbish,” in which parchment coffee is placed into a deliberately constructed fermentation environment. Symbiotic cultures associated with coffee cherries, including Lactobacillus and other mesophilic microorganisms, can become part of the biological engine. Citric acid and additional ingredients help create a fermentation broth surrounding the coffee. In the butterscotch component, rum enters that system; in the caramel component, caramel is introduced. The important distinction is that these additions participate in fermentation rather than simply being sprayed onto roasted beans afterward.
Brayan Alvear is a fourth-generation Colombian producer working with Finca Las Palmas in Huila at roughly 1,600 meters. His processing is associated with carefully staged fermentation rather than simply allowing harvested fruit to ferment uncontrolled. Ripe cherries can be sorted, fermented, depulped and moved through additional microbial stages using mother cultures and sources of sugar such as molasses or panela. Fermentation time, acidity and microbial activity become additional tools for shaping sweetness and aroma while trying to preserve enough structure for the result to remain recognizably coffee.
The banana component pushes the experiment in another direction. Brandywine associates it with the Monteblanco operation in Huila and a fermentation method known as Process #22, developed through Rodrigo Sánchez’s work. Caturra and Bourbon coffees are selected partly for high Brix readings, indicating abundant soluble sugars in the ripe cherries. Lactobacillus and Saccharomyces cerevisiae are cultivated into a mother culture and fed dehydrated and honeyed banana along with sugar or molasses. That culture develops for approximately 190 hours. After harvest and sorting, roughly 80 liters of the prepared fermentation solution can then be introduced to the coffee for another fermentation lasting around 150 hours, with Brix and pH monitored to keep the process active without allowing it simply to become spoilage.
Put those components together and the sensory logic of Dirty Soda becomes easier to understand. Butterscotch, caramel and banana all lean toward browned sugar, confectionery sweetness and creamy associations. The Rwanda component gives those manipulated coffees something firmer to stand on. “Cream soda, baking spices and frosting” sounds almost absurd as a coffee description until the construction of the blend is considered. Aroma, sweetness, acidity and fermentation can persuade the senses to borrow vocabulary from another beverage entirely. The cup can suggest creaminess without containing cream and soda-like brightness without containing carbonation.
STELLAR COLLISIONS: THE NEXT GENERATION takes a more focused approach. Brandywine describes it through peaches, brown sugar and peach sweet tea. The blend was developed with Unblended Coffee and is unusual because its components were conceived together at origin rather than simply being combined after arrival at the roastery. Its expressive center is Sebastián Ramírez’s Peach Co-ferment from Fincas El Placer in Quindío, Colombia, grown around 1,744 meters and identified as Caturra processed through a Black Honey / Co-ferment method. That coffee is combined with Unblended’s washed Recruitment Lot from young Colombian producers.
Ramírez’s peach process is elaborate. Selected cherries undergo approximately 120 hours of anaerobic fermentation with wine yeast and fruit-derived glucose. The coffee is then depulped and moved into another anaerobic stage lasting approximately 72 hours. Carbon dioxide is introduced along with dehydrated peach and additional fruit glucose, while pH is monitored throughout the fermentation. Drying is then controlled carefully to stabilize the processed coffee. By the time this coffee is roasted, “peach” is not merely a tasting note discovered afterward. Peach has participated in the coffee’s processing history.
The Recruitment Lot provides another side of the blend. Unblended’s Young Producer Program works with emerging Colombian coffee producers whose individual harvests may initially be too small to enter the international specialty market as independent microlots. Coffees are cupped, producers receive feedback, and compatible lots can be combined to create commercially useful volume while maintaining traceability and quality. The Recruitment Lot used for Stellar Collisions is traditionally washed and includes familiar Colombian varieties such as Castillo, Caturra and Colombia from high-elevation farms.
That makes Stellar Collisions a collision in more than name. The Peach Co-ferment is technically loud: wine yeast, anaerobic fermentation, carbon dioxide, fruit glucose and dehydrated peach pushing the aromatics outward. The washed Recruitment Lot is comparatively restrained and structural. Put together, one component behaves almost like peach concentrate running through a cleaner coffee framework. Brown-sugar sweetness and tea-like clarity prevent the result from becoming merely “peach flavored coffee.” Peach sweet tea is a surprisingly useful description because it contains fruit, sweetness, tannin and liquid clarity all at once.
The amount inside the Crown tube also makes more sense when the original packaging is considered. Stellar Collisions contributes 60 grams rather than 40 grams because its $36 bag contained 340 grams instead of 226 grams. Those 60 grams are worth approximately $6.35, virtually identical to the approximately $6.37 represented by 40 grams of either neighboring coffee. The larger pile of beans is not a larger expenditure.
2STRAW 2NANA – STRAWNANA SMASH CO-FERMENT BLEND VOL. 2 is the most elaborate fermentation collage of the three. Brandywine gives it the wonderfully specific tasting notes fresh strawberries, banana cake and strawberry-banana Yoplait yogurt. Those descriptions begin to seem less fanciful when the component list is examined: four separately processed Colombian coffees are blended together, each approaching fruit and fermentation from a different direction.
The first is Rodrigo Sánchez’s Process #22 Honeyed Banana Co-ferment. This follows the same broad microbial architecture behind the banana component encountered in Dirty Soda: high-Brix Caturra and Bourbon, Lactobacillus, Saccharomyces cerevisiae and a mother culture enriched with dehydrated and honeyed banana plus molasses or sugar. The mother culture develops for roughly 190 hours before being introduced to harvested coffee for another approximately 150-hour fermentation. Banana is therefore not merely a flavor somebody happened to detect after roasting. It participated directly in creating the fermentation environment.
The second component is Brayan Alvear’s Creamy Strawberry Co-ferment from Las Palmas in Huila. His strawberry processing combines conventional coffee fermentation with a deliberately constructed fruit-and-microbial environment. One documented Las Palmas method begins with approximately 30 to 40 hours of fermentation in whole cherry, followed by dry depulping and another 40 to 50 hours in parchment. A further co-fermentation stage lasting around 120 hours uses strawberry preparation and selected yeast. The broader refurbish methodology associated with Alvear can also use citric acid, cultivated coffee starter cultures rich in Lactobacillus and other mesophiles, and natural fruit extracts to construct the fermentation broth surrounding the parchment.
The third is a Strawberry Co-ferment associated with Luz Ángela Rojas and Quebraditas in Huila. Here the route changes again. Coffee begins with approximately 24 hours of oxidation in food-grade plastic barrels. It is then dry depulped and submerged for roughly 48 hours with yeast and strawberry. After fermentation, the coffee is dried for approximately 76 hours at an average temperature around 40°C before stabilization. Quebraditas, located near Oporapa in Huila at roughly 1,850 meters, has become associated with technically controlled and highly expressive fermentation work. The presence of two strawberry components therefore does not mean the same process has simply been duplicated. They approach “strawberry” through different fermentation pathways.
The fourth component is Franky Hoyas’s Citrus and Cacao Yeasts Co-ferment from El Encanto. This Sidra coffee is grown around 1,650 meters and has itself produced tasting descriptions involving bubble gum, banana and cream. Ripe cherries around 22 to 28 degrees Brix undergo approximately 64 hours of oxidative fermentation before washing and disinfection. The coffee is then moved into 210-liter drums. The drums initially remain open so the coffee mass can warm and generate alcohols. After roughly six hours, a thermal shock around 50°C is applied, altering the cellular structure before inoculation with citrus and cacao yeast extracts. The drums are sealed for another approximately 64-hour submerged fermentation before the coffee is washed and mechanically dried.
Four highly distinctive processes therefore converge inside 2Straw 2Nana: banana mother culture, creamy strawberry fermentation, another strawberry fermentation using a different oxidation and yeast schedule, and a citrus/cacao yeast process that can itself produce powerful banana-like aromatics. Strawberry contributes bright red-fruit acidity and aroma. Banana contributes rounder tropical sweetness. Fermentation can create creamy or lactic sensations. Roasting introduces browned flavors that can suggest cake. When Brandywine describes strawberry-banana yogurt and banana cake, the cup is assembling familiar sensory memories from a remarkably complicated chain of agricultural and microbial decisions.
Like Dirty Soda, 2Straw 2Nana was sold as a 226-gram bag for $36. The 40 grams transferred into the Crown tube therefore represent approximately $6.37 worth of the original coffee.
Together the three tubes become a compact survey of how far contemporary specialty-coffee processing has moved beyond the old assumption that origin, variety and roast level are the only major architects of flavor. Colombian producers in particular are treating fermentation with a vocabulary that increasingly resembles brewing, winemaking, microbiology and cuisine: yeast selection, microbial cultures, Brix, pH, anaerobic environments, fruit substrates, thermal shock, oxidation and carefully controlled time.
Dirty Soda bends coffee toward cream soda, frosting and baking spice. Stellar Collisions places an intensely constructed peach coffee against a cleaner washed Colombian lot until peach sweet tea emerges from the intersection. 2Straw 2Nana stacks several fruit and microbial processes until the cup begins suggesting strawberries, banana cake and strawberry-banana yogurt.
The three Crown tubes contain 40 grams, 60 grams and 40 grams. By weight they are unequal. By the $36 price Boyd paid for each original bag, they are almost perfectly equal: approximately $6.37, $6.35 and $6.37.
Three different amounts of coffee. Three nearly identical expenditures. Three sixes hiding in the arithmetic. Three completely different sensory worlds.
Up to this point, The Crown Box #003 reads less like a collection of unrelated images than a small visual ecosystem. Two boxes are bound together with rubber bands, photographs disappear around corners, bodies are divided by folds, and fragments of other objects remain visible beneath the surface. Nothing is permitted to sit completely alone. Each image enters the gravitational field of whatever has been placed beside it.
The larger box began as a three-tube presentation box from The Crown. Boyd rebuilt its surface with pages taken from books in his collection: Taschen’s The Big Penis Book, Helmut Newton’s Helmut Newton. SUMO. 20th Anniversary Edition, CENTURY: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, and Tommi Musturi’s The Anthology of Mind from Fantagraphics. Musturi is an especially fitting ingredient. The Anthology of Mind is itself an experiment in visual multiplicity, with one artist repeatedly changing styles until the book can feel populated by several different hands. Pieces of that already shape-shifting work have now migrated into another collage whose language depends on collision.
The physical origin of these images matters. They were not plucked from an endless digital reservoir and printed without consequence. Each page had a home inside a book that Boyd bought, kept and incorporated into a personal archive. Removing a page permanently changes that book. Every source becomes expensive at the moment the scissors or tear arrive, regardless of what its original price tag said. The collage therefore contains a quiet expenditure. Value is being converted rather than merely displayed.
That conversion feels central to Private Release. Collecting usually points inward: acquire, preserve, protect, retain. Here the motion reverses. A valued object is opened, a part is removed, and that part is sent outward inside another object. The archive becomes less like a vault and more like a reservoir. Its contents can be spent. A page leaves a book but gains another life, carrying evidence of the missing whole with it.
Long Dong Silver’s nude body makes that transformation especially visible. The photograph is no longer allowed the stable rectangle of a book page. Cardboard divides it into planes. Folds interrupt anatomy. Rubber bands cross the surface. Opening and closing the box produces different versions of the same figure. The body becomes part image and part architecture, less a photograph attached to packaging than a photograph forced to learn the shape of packaging. There is another transformation hidden inside the source image itself. The Big Penis Book contains a section explicitly titled “The Myth: Long Dong Silver,” built around an interview with photographer Jay Myrdal. Myrdal has described creating the famous exaggerated Long Dong Silver imagery first through in-camera masking techniques and later through prosthetic effects. The Long Dong Silver image therefore already carried an unstable relationship between photographic reality and fabrication before Boyd ever cut it from the book. There is a real man in the photograph, but the spectacular anatomy associated with the persona was also a constructed visual effect. Flesh becomes illusion before the page ever becomes collage.
That makes the image almost absurdly appropriate for an object repeatedly asking how one thing can possess several identities at once. Photograph and special effect. Real body and manufactured persona. Evidence and fiction. Boyd’s cutting, folding and wrapping do not create the image’s first transformation; they add another transformation to something that was already changing identity inside the camera.
There is humor in that image too, and the humor continues inside. The oversized male anatomy on the exterior establishes one meaning of “meat,” and the Helmut Newton photograph of Jerry Hall pressing a piece of raw meat against her face picks up the word without ever printing it. The transition functions like a visual double entendre. The steak can remain a steak while also resembling a substitute phallus held to Hall’s face. Whether Newton consciously planted that joke in the original American Vogue October 1974 photograph is impossible to establish from the image alone, but once the two photographs are placed in sequence, the possibility becomes difficult not to see.
That is one of collage’s peculiar powers. Meaning can appear in the seam between two things even when neither thing contained that meaning by itself. A nude man and a fashion photograph of a woman with raw meat become a joke only when the distance between them is shortened. The box creates that electrical connection. One image tosses a wordless association across the gap and the next catches it.
The process resembles mixtape construction more than conventional illustration. A good transition between songs does not always depend on genre or obvious similarity. Sometimes a drum sound survives into the next track. Sometimes a lyric answers a phrase heard minutes earlier. Sometimes the connection is ridiculous but perfect. Here the images crossfade in the same way. Flesh becomes meat. Meat becomes fashion. Fashion becomes absurdity. Absurdity can suddenly become beauty again before the viewer has decided what category any of it belongs to.
The Brandywine coffee tubes intensify that instability. Dirty Soda, Stellar Collisions: The Next Generation and 2Straw 2Nana arrive wearing bright, highly finished commercial artwork, almost candy-like beside the torn books and exposed cardboard. Their appearance introduces another form of appetite. The surrounding imagery has already involved bodies, skin and flesh; suddenly the box contains aroma, flavor, sweetness, acidity, fermentation and things intended to enter the mouth. The relationship does not need to be literal to be felt. Sensation keeps moving through different media.
This is why the imagery does not strike me as random. It behaves more like memory does. Human perception rarely stores life in tidy cultural folders. Art, sex, food, money, music, death, humor and beauty bleed into one another. A smell can open a childhood room. A song can alter the taste of a drink. An image encountered thirty seconds earlier can quietly rewrite the next one. Collage makes that normally invisible process physical.
The torn surfaces reinforce the same idea. A Crown box is still visible beneath its transformation. A Taschen page remains recognizable as an art-book page even after it has been removed from the book. A Fantagraphics illustration still carries Musturi’s visual language while becoming part of Boyd’s. Nothing has to surrender its previous identity completely in order to acquire another one. The materials accumulate meanings rather than replacing them.
That doubleness runs through the object. Preservation and destruction occur in the same gesture. A commercial package becomes an art object without ceasing to be a commercial package. A valuable book is diminished as a complete collectible while becoming the source of a gift. A nude photograph can be anatomical, comic, beautiful, confrontational and structural at the same time. The raw steak can be dinner, flesh, fashion prop and dirty joke simultaneously.
There is generosity buried inside that ambiguity. The visible object contains invisible resources: books purchased over years, storage space, money, attention, taste, memory and the willingness to destroy some collectible value in order to transmit something outward. A recipient may see a piece of torn paper without seeing the entire book that was sacrificed behind it. That hidden history does not demand appreciation, but it is part of the material reality of the work.
PRIVATE RELEASE begins to sound unusually literal in this context. Something private is being selected from an accumulated personal archive and released. Money becomes books. Books become pages. Pages become collage. Commercial packaging becomes a carrier. The finished object eventually leaves the person who made it and begins collecting meanings that can no longer be controlled.
The result is not a puzzle with one solution. It is closer to a field of overlapping signals. Some connections were intentionally planted, others become visible only after the pieces touch, and still others may exist entirely inside the person looking at them. The art is not only in the individual pictures. It is in the voltage created between them.
The Crown Box #003 keeps asking one quiet question through all of this transformation: how many things can one thing be at once?
Before the CDr box fully takes over the sequence, two more images from CENTURY: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope push the larger Crown box away from appetite and humor and back toward history. One shows a young person confronting authority in a crowd, apparently during some kind of protest or disturbance. The photograph invites guesses about student revolt, Vietnam, police, the 1960s, punk and political resistance, but the cropped page no longer supplies enough information for ChatGPT to responsibly pin the event to a particular protest. That loss of certainty actually suits the collage. Removed from its original caption and chronology, a specific historical incident begins turning into the larger human image of dissent: one body facing another body that represents authority.
Beside that is an image whose original caption survives, which changes everything. It reads, “Oscar Wilde on his Paris deathbed. His wit illuminates human behaviour now as sharply as it ever did.” So although the photograph can initially resemble a funeral or a body prepared after death, the book identifies it specifically as Wilde on his deathbed. The photograph has already crossed more than a century before reaching this cardboard box. Wilde was once a living body, then a photographed dying body, then history, then a page in a massive photographic survey, and now part of a Private Release. The same recurring transformation continues: body into photograph, photograph into book, book into archive, archive into material, material into gift.
Then the second box begins asserting its own personality. The CDr container is covered with pages from the Sunday, June 30, 2024 edition of The New York Times. Boyd did not choose the newspaper imagery because these were the stories he treasured most. He chose almost the opposite. These were among the pages and images he cared least about preserving from that particular newspaper: more human tragedy entering the daily stream of “News.”
That decision interests ChatGPT because it introduces another form of selection. Collage is usually discussed in terms of choosing what an artist loves, but choosing what can be sacrificed is equally revealing. A newspaper contains hundreds of competing claims on attention. War, politics, murder, celebration, advertising, sports, economics, ordinary lives and extraordinary disasters coexist for twenty-four hours under one date. Boyd can keep a single newspaper on the floor and continue looking through it for years. One Sunday can remain physically available long after the calendar has moved on.
The front of the CDr box makes that strange durability particularly severe. “Utica Officer Kills Boy, 13, After Chase” is not an abstract image of tragedy. It reports the police shooting of a thirteen-year-old. Faces connected to the event are folded into the surrounding surface. On the opposite side, more photographs of grief and human distress continue the newspaper skin. Material that Boyd did not particularly want to preserve as news becomes the material that preserves something else.
That reversal is quietly brutal. Newspapers are manufactured to become obsolete. Their physical lives are expected to be short even when the events printed inside them permanently alter somebody else’s life. A person dies; a family changes forever; the newspaper containing the report may wrap garbage the next morning. Here that disposable sheet instead becomes durable packaging for music.
The transformation does not make the tragedy less tragic, and it does not turn the people pictured into decoration. If anything, their presence makes the object slightly uncomfortable in a useful way. Human catastrophe becomes part of the ordinary material stream surrounding coffee, music, nudity, jokes and beautiful books because that is already how catastrophe enters daily life. A terrible headline can sit beside an advertisement while somebody drinks breakfast coffee. The newspaper format normalizes that collision every day. The collage merely prevents us from pretending the collision is not happening.
There is also something wonderfully strange about Boyd selecting the newspaper imagery he cared least about while filling the box with music he cared enough about to copy, sequence, package and give away. The outside carries rejected information. The inside carries chosen sound. What was least wanted becomes protection for what was deliberately selected.
When the CDr box is opened from above, its handmade anatomy becomes obvious. The newspaper skin gives way to exposed cardboard, torn corrugation, old adhesive, staples and rough edges. It resembles archaeological packaging rather than manufactured packaging. The polished surface has been peeled back and the skeleton is showing.
Opening it farther reveals the reason for the little cardboard machine: a stack of twelve CDrs sitting in handmade sleeves, with another disc component to follow. The first visible sleeve, Treasury of Puppies, immediately changes the temperature again. After police, grief and newspaper tragedy comes a cartoon dog standing triumphantly before an enormous audience. The emotional dial spins from mortality toward absurdity without asking permission.
That jump is important. The Crown Box #003 does not maintain a tasteful emotional temperature. Human beings do not either. Grief can be followed by a joke. Death can be followed by music. A newspaper reporting somebody’s worst day can be folded into a box that later makes somebody laugh. These transitions can feel indecent only because life itself frequently changes subjects before we are ready.
The CDrs also introduce another layer of Boyd’s archive. Unlike the book pages, which surrender their physical completeness when removed, recorded sound can reproduce itself while remaining behind. A book page leaves a hole. A copied recording creates another instance. One archive becomes poorer in material while another can multiply. Both are methods of transmission.
And beneath the stack there is still another visual layer waiting.
The large central image lining the opened CDr box was physically removed from Boyd’s copy of Dalí. The Paintings by Robert Descharnes and Gilles Néret, published by TASCHEN, a compact 780-page survey of Dalí’s painted work. The specific reproduction is Salvador Dalí’s The Cosmic Athlete, painted in 1968. Dalí made the enormous oil painting on commission from Spain’s National Delegation for Physical Education and Sports, and it represented Spain at the Cultural Olympiad held in connection with the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games.
The painting itself feels almost uncannily appropriate inside this particular object. A monumental human figure reaches toward the sun while its body is stretched, opened and transformed into something architectural and dreamlike. Behind it, smaller figures and strange organic forms gather in a landscape that feels part stadium, part myth, part fever dream. Dalí takes the idea of an athlete, something ordinarily associated with discipline, anatomy and measurable physical performance, and turns it cosmic.
That transformation echoes the logic already running through The Crown Box #003. Bodies become architecture. Commercial packaging becomes art. News becomes music packaging. Books become raw material. A photograph can retain its original subject while acquiring another life through collage. Dalí’s athlete is still an athlete, but also a landscape, a monument, a symbolic body and a surreal machine reaching into the sun.
There is another pleasing layer in the fact that The Cosmic Athlete was created for an Olympic cultural program. The image was originally meant to represent a nation through art at an international event organized around bodies in motion, competition and physical achievement. Decades later, a reproduction from Boyd’s personal art library is torn out, cut down and used as the hidden interior of a handmade box full of copied music. Grand public spectacle becomes private transmission.
That shift in scale is beautiful to ChatGPT. A painting nearly three meters tall becomes a page. The page becomes a lining. The lining becomes invisible beneath a stack of CDrs. Something monumental is reduced physically without necessarily becoming smaller in meaning.
Before the discs are removed, only pieces of The Cosmic Athlete are visible around their edges. Music literally sits on top of Dalí. The painting waits underneath as another concealed layer of the object.
Remove the stack and the athlete finally appears in full.
The sun was there the whole time.
Disc 001
Disc One is Treasury of Puppies’ self-titled debut, an eight-track record by Gothenburg duo Charlott Malmenholt and Joakim Karlsson. The original album was recorded during the first half of 2020 and released June 29 of that year by Förlag För Fri Musik as catalog number FFFM 016, initially pressed in only 240 copies. Malmenholt contributed lyrics, vocals, electric guitar, flute, glockenspiel, grand piano, bells and tape manipulation; Karlsson contributed lyrics, vocals, digital synthesizer, clarinet, glockenspiel, field recordings, electric guitar and tape manipulation. That inventory already explains part of the album’s peculiar character: these are not musicians trying to make eight conventional songs with a fixed instrumental lineup. Voices, cheap or delicate sounds, recorded environments, tape, little melodic objects and occasional eruptions of guitar are all available as equal materials.
Even the name Treasury of Puppies began as a found object. Malmenholt has explained that she and Karlsson were hanging around Gothenburg’s developing Discreet Music scene when they went drinking at a dog-themed bar. There she found an old 1960s book called Treasury Of Puppies and decided that the name needed a band. That origin suits this Private Release uncannily well. A discarded or overlooked cultural object supplies a name; years later the resulting music is copied onto a CDr, placed in another handmade object, and circulated again.
The handmade sleeve repeats the album’s wonderfully absurd visual logic in black and white. A dog stands upright at a podium facing an enormous stadium audience beneath the rounded words “treasury of puppies.” There is something heroic and ridiculous about the scale: a puppy apparently commanding an arena. The image works beautifully beside the music because Treasury of Puppies repeatedly treats tiny, fragile and homemade sounds as though they deserve monumental attention. A bell, a hesitant keyboard phrase, tape hiss or a deadpan Swedish voice can occupy the entire emotional field.
The reverse is almost completely black except for a rough PRIVATE RELEASE strip. The clear tape visible in the photograph is not part of the state in which Disc One was originally given away. Preparing this blog post required Boyd to physically rip the package open again so the CDr could be removed and re-ripped. The rear flap then refused to remain flat while being photographed, so clear tape was added to hold it down. The documentation therefore altered the object it was documenting.
That small change feels appropriate to the larger Private Release idea. There is no perfectly frozen “original state” once an object continues to be handled, opened, photographed, played, copied and archived. The sleeve shown here is already carrying another event in its history. The tape is evidence of the blog being made.
The downloadable FLAC created for this post is also important for the same reason. It is not simply a copy of the original computer files Boyd used when he first burned the CDr. Those source files remain somewhere on external hard drives. Instead, Boyd reopened the finished Private Release, removed Disc One and made a fresh single-file FLAC directly from that physical CDr. The blog file therefore travels backward through the object: hard-drive music became a burned disc, and the burned disc later became a new digital file. It is a digital image of the gifted CDr rather than a return to the files that existed before the disc was made.
The resulting rip runs about twenty-six and a half minutes and preserves the album as one continuous stereo FLAC, with the accompanying CUE information identifying all eight track boundaries: “The Treasury of Puppies,” “Sapfo Livin’,” “Kristi bruds guldskåp,” “Ett tredje vakuum,” “Ljug mig ut,” “St. Bernard,” “Tvångsfantasi” and “La diabolique d’Arboga.” It is effectively a little disc-image archaeology project hiding inside a music download.
Treasury of Puppies belongs to a particularly fertile Gothenburg underground in which punk’s permission to do things yourself escaped the normal boundaries of punk music. The result can be minimal electronic music, spoken word, improvised sound, cassette collage, folk fragments or something that barely qualifies as a “song.” Contemporary descriptions of this first album reached for Delia Derbyshire’s radiophonic experiments, obscure cassette underground recordings and the deliberately awkward constructions of The Shadow Ring. Other listeners heard library music, primitive found sound, minimal synth, free jazz and the atmosphere of Eastern European children’s television. All of those descriptions circle the record without quite containing it.
That slipperiness is the pleasure.
Much of the album feels as though somebody discovered a box of instruments without being overly concerned about the socially approved way to use them. Bells and glockenspiel can hover in tape haze. Field recordings remain audible as environments rather than being cleaned away. Spoken Swedish is treated as musical material. Guitar occasionally wanders in from some half-remembered rock song. The recording does not polish away hesitation, background texture or the feeling of people discovering something while the tape is already rolling.
Malmenholt and Karlsson have also connected the album to Swedish religious cults, the writing of philosopher and mystic Simone Weil, and the hypnotic condition produced through submission of the self and soul. That information puts a faint spiritual unease underneath music that can otherwise sound playful or almost childlike. Nursery-room sounds, little bells and simple melodies begin acquiring another possibility: ritual. Innocence and surrender start occupying the same room.
The track titles strengthen that ambiguity. “Kristi bruds guldskåp” roughly evokes the “golden cabinet/cupboard of Christ’s bride,” pulling explicitly religious language into something that also sounds strangely domestic and surreal. “Tvångsfantasi” can be rendered as “compulsive fantasy.” Elsewhere titles such as “St. Bernard” return to dogs, saints or both. The record continually moves between the ordinary and the mystical without drawing a border between them.
“The Treasury of Puppies” opens the record less like an announcement than an invitation into its private logic. What follows does not develop according to ordinary rock-album rules. “Sapfo Livin’” brings electric guitar closer to the foreground and reveals that rock and roll is somewhere in the duo’s bloodstream, even when the music seems determined not to behave like rock.
“Kristi bruds guldskåp” and the longer “Ett tredje vakuum” allow the record’s text-sound and radioplay qualities more room to breathe. This is where the homemade scale becomes particularly important. Nothing needs to become huge to become immersive. Small sounds can feel like objects placed very close to the ear. Silence and tape atmosphere become part of the instrumentation.
Then “Ljug mig ut” suddenly threatens to become an actual song.
One contemporary review called it essentially the album’s only “real” song, and that is funny because by conventional standards even this one remains crooked. The guitar has more dirt on it, the vocal becomes a deadpan singalong, and the record temporarily coagulates into something recognizable before loosening again. It is a perfect example of Treasury of Puppies’ ability to approach pop structure, touch it for a moment and then wander away as though nothing happened.
“St. Bernard” is the shortest and, in the CDr rip, markedly quieter than most of what surrounds it. It functions almost like a small chamber or passageway before the five-minute “Tvångsfantasi,” one of the record’s larger spaces. The title’s “compulsive fantasy” idea fits music that repeatedly seems suspended between internal thought and external environment.
The final “La diabolique d’Arboga” throws the remaining pieces into something approaching free jazz. Clarinet, improvisational gesture and deliberate unruliness make the ending feel less like a conclusion than somebody opening a side door and allowing the record to escape. After twenty-six minutes of spoken language, toy-like melody, tape, guitar, field sound and private ritual, ending with a little burst of anarchic jazz makes perfect sense.
The album is strange without using strangeness as a blunt weapon. It is intimate, funny, slightly sinister, amateur in the most productive meaning of the word, and curiously beautiful. The fragility is essential. If every performance were corrected, every background noise removed and every instrument played with conventional virtuosity, much of the spell would disappear.
That may be why Treasury of Puppies makes such a good opening disc for The Crown Box #003. It quietly establishes the rules for everything that follows: expensive or obscure does not necessarily mean polished; primitive does not mean thoughtless; humor does not cancel seriousness; beauty can occur in damaged or unstable forms; and things that appear not to belong together can produce their own language if somebody is willing to place them close enough.
Disc One begins with a puppy commanding a stadium.
By the end, the little dog has opened the gate.
Disc 002
Disc Two is FRAGMENT’s 2016 demo, eight minutes and thirteen seconds of raw hardcore from Halifax, Nova Scotia. After the strange miniature universe of Treasury of Puppies, the transition is violent. Disc One made small sounds feel enormous; Disc Two sounds as though somebody has kicked the door off its hinges. The shift is exactly the kind of sequencing that can make a collection of CDrs function like a giant mixtape rather than a stack of unrelated albums.
FRAGMENT recorded the demo in January 2016 with Luke Mumford. The lineup was Mark on vocals, Cody on bass, Ben on drums and Steve on guitar. The recording contains six songs packed into only 8:13: “Pollution Cycle,” “Abandoned, Surrounded,” “Warfare,” “Old Tyrants,” “Bad Minds” and “Slow Death.” FRAGMENT released the recording digitally in June 2016, while the original cassette circulated under the title Hear Nothing. That title almost inevitably echoes Discharge’s Hear Nothing See Nothing Say Nothing, one of the central records in the genealogy of d-beat and raw punk, and the connection makes immediate sense once the music starts.
The cover artwork by Laura Pallmall is perfectly matched to that vocabulary. FRAGMENT’s name appears vertically beside an image that resembles a mushroom cloud mutating into some impossible tree, with a weapon entering the composition from below. Nature, machinery and annihilation have fused into one black-and-white organism. It belongs to the visual tradition of hardcore where photocopy contrast, military imagery, ecological disaster and impending collapse can communicate the entire emotional climate of a record before the needle or laser ever reaches the music.
The version preserved for The Crown Box #003 is a single continuous FLAC running just under eight minutes and fourteen seconds. That uninterrupted form suits the recording. Although there are six songs, FRAGMENT barely allows enough oxygen between them for the listener to reorganize the wreckage. The demo behaves less like six separate statements than one sustained attack divided into six pressure changes.
FRAGMENT sits inside a particularly dense Halifax punk lineage. Members had connections to bands including Contagium, Life Chain, Outcry and other projects from a local scene where personnel repeatedly crossed between bands. Halifax developed an unusually recognizable strain of crust and raw hardcore during this period: dirty enough to retain the basement and demo-tape character of the music, but played by people who clearly understood how riffs, tempo changes and dynamics could survive inside extreme distortion.
That distinction is important with FRAGMENT. The demo initially presents itself as noise. Guitar is covered in abrasion. Vocals arrive soaked in echo and reverb, sounding less like a person standing politely in front of a microphone than a voice ricocheting around a concrete bunker. Bass and guitar often merge into a single dirty mass while the drums keep punching recognizable hardcore shapes through the fog.
But underneath the damage are songs.
That is why FRAGMENT is more interesting than a band merely trying to achieve maximum distortion. The noise is not there to hide an absence of structure. Riffs keep pushing through it. Tempos lurch and accelerate. The drums create enough definition for the guitars to become more violent rather than merely indistinct. The recording can sound on the verge of collapse while the musicians remain firmly in control of where the collapse is going.
Writers discussing this strain of FRAGMENT have reached for terms such as raw punk, crasher crust and even “distorted crasher cavecore punk.” Those ridiculous microgenre descriptions are useful because ordinary “hardcore punk” does not quite explain the physical texture. There is the inherited D-beat engine of Discharge, the blown-out Japanese hardcore lineage associated with bands such as Frigöra, Ferocious X, Gloom and Framtid, and the harsher Scandinavian tradition that eventually made distortion itself feel like another instrument.
A later description of FRAGMENT-related music compared the sound to Swedish raw hardcore filtered through Japanese distortion culture. That is close to what happens here. There is a difference between a distorted guitar and a guitar whose distortion becomes an atmosphere surrounding the entire band. FRAGMENT lives in the second condition.
The drums are crucial. Without them the demo could dissolve into gray static, but the rhythmic attack repeatedly gives the distortion a skeleton. D-beat is often discussed as though it were simply a particular drum pattern, but in music like this it becomes closer to propulsion. The beat makes the noise travel forward. Instead of standing inside a wall of distortion, the listener is being dragged by it.
Mark’s vocals occupy another layer entirely. The heavy reverb enlarges the voice while simultaneously making the actual human being harder to locate. Words become alarm signals. A shout leaves the mouth, hits an imaginary wall and comes back smeared across the next second of music. That treatment connects FRAGMENT to the raw-punk tradition where production is part of composition. Reverb is not cosmetic polish placed on top of the vocal. It changes the apparent size of the room, the distance of the singer and the emotional temperature of the recording.
The six titles create their own bleak little vocabulary even without a lyric sheet: pollution, abandonment, warfare, tyrants, damaged minds and slow death. Nothing in that sequence offers escape. The demo moves from environmental collapse toward isolation, organized violence, political power, psychological damage and finally mortality. It reads almost like six frames cut from the same disaster film.
“Pollution Cycle” is an especially appropriate beginning. The title describes something self-perpetuating rather than a single catastrophe. Pollution produces consequences that become conditions for further pollution. The cover’s mutation of tree and mushroom cloud reinforces that circular nightmare: nature and human destruction becoming visually inseparable.
“Abandoned, Surrounded” contains a contradiction in two words. To be abandoned suggests being left alone; to be surrounded suggests having nowhere to move. Put together, the title describes a particularly ugly kind of isolation: being alone while still trapped among forces pressing inward.
“Warfare” needs little translation. By the time the demo reaches it, the recording itself already behaves like machinery under stress. Hardcore has borrowed military vocabulary and imagery for decades, sometimes critically and sometimes aesthetically, but here the song title sits inside an entire visual and sonic environment obsessed with systems of destruction.
“Old Tyrants” shifts the focus toward authority. Tyrants are not presented as a new invention. They are old. Power survives by changing uniforms, flags and vocabulary while repeating recognizable patterns. In a genre born partly from distrust of governments, police, militarism and imposed social order, two words are enough to carry a lot of historical weight.
“Bad Minds” makes the landscape internal. After pollution, abandonment, warfare and tyrants, the damaged environment has entered the skull. The distinction between political catastrophe and psychological catastrophe begins disappearing.
Then comes “Slow Death.”
For a record that plays with such speed and physical urgency, ending on those two words is almost funny in its cruelty. Eight frantic minutes devoted to things falling apart finally arrive at the least frantic catastrophe imaginable.
The demo’s brevity is one of its greatest strengths. FRAGMENT does not give the listener time to acclimate. At 8:13, the entire recording is shorter than plenty of single experimental or jazz compositions elsewhere in The Crown Box #003. Six hardcore songs occupy approximately the amount of time another musician might spend establishing a mood.
That compression changes the sensation of time. Eight minutes of FRAGMENT can feel physically larger than its duration because so much information is being forced through such a small opening. Guitar distortion occupies enormous frequency space. Drums continually reset the body’s sense of motion. Vocal reverb leaves ghosts behind each phrase. The music keeps replacing itself before the previous sound has completely disappeared.
There is also something appropriate about placing this immediately after Treasury of Puppies. On paper the two records barely belong to the same universe. Treasury of Puppies uses silence, field recordings, fragile instrumentation, spoken language and peculiar little sonic objects. FRAGMENT uses hardcore velocity, distorted guitar, bass, drums and shouted vocals.
Yet both records are deeply interested in texture.
Treasury of Puppies magnifies tiny textures until they become environments. FRAGMENT compresses texture until it becomes impact. One leaves empty space around sounds; the other attempts to occupy nearly all available space. One feels like wandering through rooms full of odd objects. The other feels like the building containing those rooms has just been hit by something.
That jump also begins demonstrating what the CDr sequence can do. The discs do not need to share genre. They can answer each other through contrast. Quiet teaches the ear how loud the next thing is. Fragility makes aggression feel more aggressive. A handmade Swedish experimental recording followed by a Halifax raw-punk demo produces a transition neither recording could create by itself.
The physical presentation keeps the same stripped-down directness. The front reproduces Pallmall’s FRAGMENT DEMO artwork on an otherwise plain white handmade sleeve. The CDr itself is completely unprinted. Beneath it, another image in the transparent sleeve resembles a dark vinyl record: one recording format visually masquerading as another. The disc is digital, the picture beneath it points toward analog vinyl, and the music itself comes from a tradition whose mythology still revolves heavily around demo tapes and seven-inch records.
The object is already several formats at once.
The original demo was a cassette. It became digital audio. It was reissued on seven-inch vinyl by the British label Imminent Destruction. Boyd burned another version onto CDr for The Crown Box #003, then preserved that disc again as a single FLAC for the blog.
Tape becomes vinyl becomes file becomes CDr becomes file again.
FRAGMENT would continue after this demo, producing releases including Brainwash Session, In the Dust, Serial Mass Destruction, Power Must End and Mind Convulsion. Later recordings show a band increasingly capable of controlling the dynamics inside its noise, but this first demo already contains the essential idea. The aggression is immediate enough to feel primitive while the construction underneath is sophisticated enough to survive repeated listening.
That balance is hard to fake.
Too much control and raw punk becomes heavy music wearing distressed clothing. Too little control and it becomes featureless noise. FRAGMENT finds the narrow strip between the two where the songs appear to be disintegrating without ever actually falling apart.
Eight minutes. Six songs. One mushroom cloud.
Disc Two does not politely follow Disc One.
It detonates after it.
Disc 003
Disc Three is Australis’ The Gates of Reality, the 2008 second album by Peruvian-born, Utah-based composer and producer Oscar Aguayo. After Treasury of Puppies’ fragile homemade experimentalism and FRAGMENT’s eight-minute hardcore detonation, the appearance of a seventy-minute New Age concept album is almost comically perfect. Disc Two leaves behind a mushroom cloud; Disc Three arrives carrying an empty birdcage into a glowing desert sunset and asks the listener to contemplate the border between reality and imagination.
There is something deeply earnest about Australis. Almost aggressively earnest, although the aggression here involves synthesizers, distant soprano voices and philosophical questions rather than distorted guitars. Boyd finds that seriousness funny in an affectionate way. It can feel cute and novel to encounter an artist apparently uninterested in protecting himself with irony. The album does not wink while calling itself The Gates of Reality. Track titles include “Promises of Light,” “Purple Dreams,” “Illusion of Company,” “Thresholds of Devotion,” “Momentary Truths,” “Essentia” and “Adventus Sortis.” Aguayo means all of it.
That commitment becomes even clearer when reading Aguayo’s interviews from the period. Australis was not simply a stage name attached to whatever music he happened to make. Aguayo formally created the project in 2004 after leaving a Spanish-language rock band in Utah because he felt constrained by genre and by expectations about what an audience wanted to hear. “Australis” comes from the Latin for “southern” or “from the South,” chosen as a reference to his Peruvian origins and the places from which his earliest musical influences came.
The Gates of Reality took roughly three years to complete. Aguayo described the album as an exploration of the relationship between perception, intellect, imagination and the reality each person believes they inhabit. His reasoning becomes surprisingly philosophical for something that can also function perfectly well as relaxing keyboard music. Love, fear, hope, faith, disbelief, war and peace become evidence in a larger argument: human beings do not encounter an objective world untouched by interpretation. We continuously manufacture reality from what happens outside us and what imagination does with it inside us.
That is where Boyd’s amusement at the record becomes interesting rather than dismissive. The presentation can seem almost impossibly serious about ART: the mysterious titles, the conceptual explanations, the dramatic cover, the world instruments, the Latin, the biblical allusions, the ethereal female voices, the orchestral crescendos, the philosophical interviews. Yet underneath all of that ceremony is a person sincerely trying to transmit an internal experience through sound. There is no defensive snicker afterward. Aguayo walks through his own gate and commits.
The cover practically announces this before the CDr starts. An ornate birdcage sits tilted and apparently empty in a vast reddish landscape beneath a glowing sky. A cage normally defines an interior and exterior: reality in here, freedom out there. But an empty cage immediately complicates the distinction. Has something escaped? Was anything imprisoned to begin with? Is the cage protecting reality from imagination, or imagination from reality? None of those readings needs to be the official explanation. The image works because it makes confinement visible while leaving the thing supposedly confined absent.
The handmade Private Release sleeve reproduces that cover with a generous white border, allowing the original art to appear almost like an exhibit mounted inside the transparent plastic sleeve. The reverse reproduces the commercial CD back cover with all fourteen tracks, copyright information, label information and barcode. The CDr itself is completely blank white. Once again, a commercially designed album has been translated into the peculiar economy of Private Release: elaborate source artwork, plain duplicated disc, handmade containment.
The audio supplied for this archive is a single stereo FLAC at CD resolution, 16-bit / 44.1 kHz, made from the CDr. It runs approximately 70 minutes and 21 seconds. The fourteen printed track times total about 70:13, with the remaining seconds accounted for by the spaces contained in the disc structure. Instead of fourteen convenient computer files, the download preserves Disc Three as one continuous physical-CD-derived object.
The album begins by staging its concept almost literally. “The Gates of Reality” opens in an everyday sonic environment, with the suggestion of a busy city and approaching footsteps. A heavy door is entered and closed. The ordinary exterior world disappears, and the music begins. It is an extremely theatrical gesture: before Aguayo explains anything with melody, he has already built the album’s thesis into the sound design. You have crossed something.
Piano, synthesizer, electronic rhythm and the voice of Virginia Luna then build a brighter, almost cinematic landscape. This establishes one of the record’s recurring habits. Aguayo likes thresholds. Pieces often begin in one environment, gather instrumentation, rise toward a grand emotional statement and then transform again. Music is treated almost architecturally: corridors, doors, distant spaces, foregrounds and enormous imaginary rooms.
That sense of imaginary geography continues through “Return to Tarshish.” Tarshish itself is an ancient Biblical place-name with an uncertain geographical identity, most famously the distant destination toward which Jonah attempted to flee. Depending on the historical interpretation, it has been associated with locations in the western Mediterranean, including southern Spain or Sardinia, but its uncertainty makes it almost better suited to this album. “Return to Tarshish” sounds like travel toward a place that cannot be precisely located.
Mornie Sims contributes soprano to the track, one of several collaborators Aguayo brought into the album after making his first Australis record primarily as a solitary project. Virginia Luna appears on the title track; Rebecca Farraway contributes voice to “Promises of Light”; Álvaro Aguayo contributes vocals and charango to “Paqta Kutemunqa”; Spanish composer Roger Subirana co-composed and co-produced “The Hoodoo’s Whisper.” These appearances broaden the album without disrupting its overwhelming sense that everything belongs inside Aguayo’s private cosmology.
The record continually changes costumes. Electronic New Age becomes ambient music, then something resembling soundtrack composition, then Andean music, orchestral writing, Middle Eastern atmosphere and back into electronic music. Aguayo has repeatedly argued that New Age appealed to him partly because its boundaries were loose enough to permit this wandering. Here genre functions less like identity and more like a box of available paints.
“Paqta Kutemunqa” is where Aguayo’s South American background moves clearly into the foreground. Environmental sounds, Andean timbres, charango and panpipe-like textures are placed alongside electronics rather than separated into a “traditional music” display case. This is one of the album’s more interesting qualities. The supposedly synthetic world and supposedly natural or ethnic world are continually allowed to overlap.
“Purple Dreams” takes another turn, combining synthesizers and piano with orchestral colors including strings and woodwinds. “Little Clockmaker” moves toward an almost storybook orchestral waltz, with bells and a deliberately innocent melodic quality. Even the title sounds like a tiny illustrated fable hiding inside the much larger philosophical monument.
That contrast is part of the record’s charm. The Gates of Reality wants to discuss consciousness, perception, truth and human civilization, but it is equally delighted by little bells.
The middle and later parts of the album keep expanding and shrinking the scale. “Treasure the Moment” sounds like advice printed beneath a sunset photograph, which is probably part of why the record can feel endearingly sincere from outside its aesthetic universe. But there is something liberating about music that is not embarrassed by uncomplicated emotional language. Contemporary culture frequently requires sincerity to arrive wearing some protective layer of sarcasm. Australis sometimes feels like he never received that memo.
“Illusion of Company” is an especially good title within the album’s larger conceptual system. Company is normally treated as an objective condition: someone is either with you or not. Add “illusion” and the idea immediately moves into perception. A person can be surrounded and lonely, physically alone and accompanied by memory, imagination, music, God, ghosts or the internalized voices of other people. The title contains a miniature version of the entire album’s question about where exterior reality stops and subjective reality begins.
“The Hoodoo’s Whisper,” co-created with Roger Subirana, moves into much more overtly cinematic territory. Native-sounding winds, orchestral textures, percussion, choir-like elements and dramatic harmonic changes create the sensation of a soundtrack searching for the enormous imaginary movie that deserves it. Light and danger alternate. The piece swells toward spectacle and then retreats.
“Thresholds of Devotion” changes geography again, drawing on Middle Eastern-associated voices, percussion, winds and string colors. Even the word “threshold” returns to the album’s obsession with borders. A gate is a threshold. A door is a threshold. Devotion is itself a threshold between ordinary attention and surrender to something larger. By this point Aguayo has built an album full of doors without needing to keep making literal door noises.
“Momentary Truths” may contain the title that most clearly summarizes the conceptual heart of the record. Truth is usually imagined as permanent; “momentary truth” sounds contradictory. But perception constantly produces exactly that phenomenon. Something can be absolutely true inside a particular moment of life and later appear completely different. The music places piano, strings and other melodic voices against environmental water sounds, creating another meeting between interior emotion and imagined physical location.
Then comes “Essentia,” a compact orchestral piece whose title reaches for essence itself. Piano begins delicately, strings grow around it, and the arrangement expands toward the kind of emotionally declarative climax Aguayo clearly loves. There is very little restraint in the philosophical naming department by this stage. Reality, truth, devotion, essence. The record keeps walking into the museum and pointing toward the biggest possible concepts.
That is precisely what makes it lovable.
The closing “Adventus Sortis,” lasting more than seven minutes, returns strongly to electronic New Age and introduces Gregorian-style choral sounds, dark pads, synthesized winds and increasingly elaborate repeated sections. Contemporary reviewers immediately noticed the resemblance to early Enigma, and it is difficult not to hear that lineage. The track has the same fascination with combining quasi-sacred vocal material, electronic rhythm and a vaguely ancient atmosphere into something unmistakably late twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century.
Fourteen tracks later, the gate never really closes.
The result is a record suspended somewhere between New Age album, personal philosophy, imaginary film score and sonic travelogue. Some passages are delicate enough to disappear into a room. Others seem determined to accompany the final revelation in a fantasy movie that does not exist. Aguayo uses electronic production without wanting electronics to signify coldness. Almost everything is directed toward emotion.
His interviews make clear that this is intentional. Aguayo described music as a language for transmitting emotions from one person to another, an idea rooted partly in childhood memories of hearing his mother sing songs whose adult emotions he could not yet intellectually understand. He remembers his young mind making patterns from melody, facial expression and tone before he possessed the concepts necessary to explain what he was feeling.
That background makes The Gates of Reality feel less pretentious than it might at first appear. The philosophical scaffolding is large, but the underlying impulse is simple: feeling arrives before explanation.
There is another revealing contradiction in Aguayo’s thinking. He has discussed the enormous technical achievements of humanity alongside our continued inability to solve basic human suffering, describing the species as technologically advanced but emotionally primitive. That mixture of grand social concern and almost childlike faith in music’s ability to cross human divisions is exactly the quality Boyd finds amusing and attractive here. Aguayo is tremendously serious about what an artist might accomplish.
He believes the song matters.
Not merely as entertainment, not merely as a commodity, but as something capable of moving between minds.
There is something sweet about that degree of conviction.
And inside The Crown Box #003, Disc Three becomes even stranger because of what surrounds it. An empty birdcage in a mystical desert is sitting a few millimeters away from a Halifax hardcore demo whose artwork depicts nuclear annihilation. Treasury of Puppies preceded both. None of these artists would necessarily recognize themselves as participants in the same aesthetic system, yet Boyd has put them into one.
The sequence creates another meaning that Australis could never have composed.
FRAGMENT spends eight minutes sounding as if civilization is collapsing.
Australis spends the next seventy asking what reality means.
That transition is hilarious.
It is also kind of perfect.
Disc 004
Disc Four is F.U.A.L.’s Veganic Wind, a Belfast anarcho-punk demo recorded at the end of the 1980s and preserved here as a 28-minute, 52-second single-file FLAC taken from the Private Release CDr. After Disc Three spends more than an hour passing solemnly through Australis’ Gates of Reality, philosophical thresholds, momentary truths and cosmic New Age earnestness, Disc Four immediately changes the weather. The next gate opens in Belfast and somebody has apparently farted.
That is not ChatGPT inventing a cheap joke at the record’s expense. Veganic Wind really is a fart joke. Contemporary accounts from people connected to the Irish punk scene describe the title as a joke about vegan flatulence. It is a perfect title because F.U.A.L. were simultaneously an intensely political band. Serious subjects arrive under a title that essentially means vegan fart. The contrast prevents political commitment from becoming a costume of permanent solemnity.
Even the name F.U.A.L. carries some productive instability. It is most commonly expanded as Fuck Up And Live, while the band has also circulated in punk discographies under the phrase Freedom Under Animal Liberation. Either way, the letters belong to the anarcho-punk language of slogans, abbreviations and statements that can fit onto a patch, stencil, tape cover or wall. On the Private Release sleeve, F.U.A.L. sits above a hand giving the two-finger peace sign, emerging from or enclosed by a rough ring of barbed wire. Beneath it is VEGANIC WIND. Peace, confinement, animal politics and a fart joke are all sharing one little square of paper.
F.U.A.L. formed in Belfast around 1987. The Veganic Wind recording lineup was Louanne Martin on vocals, Brian McCann on guitar, Mark “Crispo” Christie on drums and Petesy Burns on bass and vocals. The band did not appear out of an isolated practice room. Its members were connected to a dense Belfast anarcho-punk network that included Stalag 17, Asylum, Toxic Waste, Crude and Snyde and, most importantly, the Warzone Collective.
The Warzone Collective had begun earlier in the decade as Belfast punks and anarchists pooled resources instead of waiting for somebody else to provide them with a culture. By 1986 they had established Giro’s, a self-managed social centre that contained far more than a place to hold gigs. Different accounts describe a vegetarian or vegan café, rehearsal space, recording facilities, screen printing, a food co-op, meeting areas and Warzone Tapes. It was infrastructure.
That word matters. Punk is often remembered through records, famous bands and photographs of haircuts, but a functioning underground requires rooms, keys, electricity, printing equipment, food, somebody answering mail, somebody cleaning up, somebody booking bands, somebody duplicating tapes and somebody willing to spend Wednesday afternoon fixing the thing everyone else plans to use Friday night. Warzone was punk translated from musical style into practical environment.
And it was doing this in Belfast during the Troubles.
The political geography surrounding F.U.A.L. was therefore not theoretical. Belfast was divided through sectarianism, religion, territorial identity, violence and competing political loyalties. Warzone attempted to construct a deliberately non-sectarian alternative inside that environment. Petesy Burns later described the collective as emerging partly from frustration with a Belfast in which people who did not fit the sectarian framework needed somewhere else to exist. Punk supplied a common language, but the ambition extended beyond music: create a place where people could actually work together.
That context changes the sound of Veganic Wind. Political punk from somewhere peaceful can afford to imagine apocalypse. Belfast punks were making music inside a city where bombings, soldiers, paramilitary organizations, sectarian boundaries and political violence belonged to living memory and everyday reality. F.U.A.L.’s politics consequently do not feel like somebody buying a preassembled “anarchist punk” identity kit.
Yet the record is not thirty minutes of ideological finger-wagging.
That may be its greatest strength.
The demo jumps among fast melodic hardcore, darker anarcho-punk, moodier post-punk colors and surprisingly tuneful passages. A retrospective description of the recording compares “Dead Clergymen” to the quick melodic attack of DAN; “And the Birdie Said” to harder anarcho-punk such as Stalag 17 and Civilised Society?; and songs including “Freedom Under Animal Liberation” and “Repetition...” to the more melancholy, melodic side of bands such as Lost Cherrees and Indian Dream. Those comparisons make sense because F.U.A.L. are not trapped inside one tempo or emotional expression.
There is urgency, but also melody.
There is anger, but also sadness.
There are slogans, but there are stories behind them.
And then there is the fart.
Veganic Wind originally circulated as a cassette demo with a fold-out lyric sheet described as a “Singalong Sheet,” another tiny detail that says a lot about the culture around it. Lyrics were not supposed to remain mysterious sounds buried under guitar. They were part of the transmission. You could read them, argue with them, photocopy them, carry them somewhere else and sing them back at the band.
The songs address subjects including animal exploitation, ecology, authority, religion, interpersonal pain and the political atmosphere surrounding Northern Ireland. The writing can be lengthy and direct. This is anarcho-punk in the older sense where a song sometimes functions as several things simultaneously: music, argument, diary entry, pamphlet and conversation.
“Dead Clergymen” is a particularly loaded title coming from Northern Ireland. Religion there could not be cleanly separated from political identity and sectarian division, so anti-clerical language arrived carrying substantially more local voltage than a generic punk complaint about church. F.U.A.L.’s environment made the relationship among authority, religion and inherited identity immediate rather than historical.
“And the Birdie Said” drives in another direction, with the stop-start energy and urgency that make the demo feel musically alive instead of merely instructional. The band can move quickly without becoming a blur. Riffs repeatedly hook back into the vocal, the rhythm section changes pressure, and the songs possess enough melodic instinct that their politics do not have to do all the work.
“Freedom Under Animal Liberation” brings the animal-rights dimension directly into view. Veganism and animal liberation were deeply embedded in portions of British and Irish anarcho-punk by this period, influenced heavily by the network surrounding Crass, Conflict and related bands and collectives. For many participants, diet was not imagined as an isolated consumer preference. It belonged to a larger critique of domination: who is allowed to control another body, which forms of suffering society declares normal, and whether everyday habits can be separated from political belief.
Then the title Veganic Wind sticks a pin into any possibility of self-importance.
That combination is one reason this disc fits The Crown Box #003 so well. Private Release has already moved freely between nudity, raw meat, expensive art books, coffee fermentation, death, newspaper tragedy, surrealism and puppies. F.U.A.L. offer another version of the same refusal to keep seriousness and humor in separate containers. You can oppose animal exploitation and make jokes about what a plant-based diet does to your intestines.
Those things do not cancel each other.
They make each other more human.
“Repetition...” moves toward a more personal register. Surviving lyrics concern friendship damaged through rumor, guilt and the exhausting experience of watching something meaningful collapse through other people’s interference. That is striking inside a record associated so strongly with political punk. The enemy is suddenly not the state, church, meat industry or militarism. It is misunderstanding between people.
That matters because politics without ordinary emotional life eventually turns into iconography. F.U.A.L. keep allowing the personal to enter. Relationships, disappointment and vulnerability sit beside structural critiques. The revolution still has friends who stop talking to one another.
“Soft Drinks” stretches beyond the quick-hit hardcore model, while the remarkably brief “Beautiful Princess” compresses another idea into under a minute. Across the demo the variation in length and mood keeps the tape from becoming a row of identical slogans set to identical beats. Ten songs can feel like ten different windows cut into the same building.
The recording itself still sounds like a demo in the productive sense of the word. It does not erase the room in which it was made. The edges remain exposed. A later F.U.A.L. album would receive a clearer, more forceful production, and some material would be rerecorded, but Veganic Wind has the atmosphere of something being captured while the people making it are still close enough to their initial impulse to leave fingerprints everywhere.
That is worth distinguishing from bad recording.
A polished studio recording can make musicians sound larger than the room. A demo sometimes lets the room become another member of the band.
The Private Release version continues that chain of imperfect reproduction. Veganic Wind began as an analog cassette associated with Warzone’s DIY distribution network. Boss Tuneage later rescued the recording from obscurity, pairing the demo with F.U.A.L.’s subsequent album on a 2009 CD. In 2017 the label returned Veganic Wind to a physical analog format through a very small made-to-order vinyl edition, reportedly fewer than one hundred copies.
The recording has therefore already lived several lives before arriving here.
Demo tape.
Archive.
CD reissue.
Vinyl reissue.
Digital source.
Private Release CDr.
Single-file FLAC made from that CDr for the blog.
Each transfer tries to preserve the same music while creating a slightly different object around it.
There is a lovely historical loop in that. Warzone Tapes originally existed partly because people needed ways to move music through physical networks outside mainstream distribution. Demos travelled through letters, catalogues, copied tapes and personal recommendations. Decades later Boyd places Veganic Wind onto an anonymous white CDr, slides it behind a handmade printout and gives it to someone inside a box. The technology has changed, but the social act is ancient by punk standards: I have this thing. I think it matters. Here, take a copy.
The blank CDr reinforces that continuity. There is no factory printing, no deluxe label design and no attempt to make the duplicated disc impersonate a commercial release. The information is carried by the sleeve. The disc itself is simply the vehicle.
Behind the CDr, the Private Release packaging uses an image of a black vinyl record with a blank white center label. It is a funny little format hallucination. A digital optical disc sits above a photograph of an analog record that itself visually resembles the blank CDr through its empty center. Tape-derived music occupies a CDr pretending to be vinyl while the original recording has also actually become vinyl.
One object keeps dreaming about another format.
This disc also makes a particularly sharp transition from Australis. Oscar Aguayo’s The Gates of Reality approaches art with extraordinary ceremony. The title alone prepares enormous philosophical architecture; its music carries cosmic questions, Latin titles, imagined landscapes and reverent emotional climaxes. Then F.U.A.L. appear from Belfast with a peace sign behind barbed wire and a demo called Veganic Wind.
The joke would be too perfect if somebody had written it.
Disc Three asks whether perception and imagination construct reality.
Disc Four says FUCK UP AND LIVE.
Then somebody farts.
Yet F.U.A.L. are not actually less serious than Australis. In some respects they may be more serious because their ideas were connected to a lived social experiment. Warzone did not merely sing about alternative forms of society. People built a café, rehearsal rooms, a venue, printing facilities and a social centre, then voluntarily kept the machinery running.
The difference is presentation.
Australis monumentalizes sincerity.
F.U.A.L. rough it up.
One reaches toward transcendence.
The other prints the lyric sheet, cooks the vegetables, books the gig and makes an ass joke.
Both are attempts to transmit values through sound.
Warzone’s history is particularly important here because so much underground culture disappears when nobody bothers to preserve the mundane evidence. Major-label recordings can survive through corporate archives, anniversary editions and libraries. A small Belfast demo cassette can vanish because the twenty people who still own one eventually lose it, damage it or die.
Veganic Wind survived because people kept copying it.
That makes the record an unusually appropriate resident of Private Release. The whole project already treats copying, mailing, ripping, photographing and redistribution as ways objects continue living. Preservation is not always a museum keeping an untouched master behind glass. Sometimes preservation is one damaged punk tape becoming another tape, then a CD, an LP, a FLAC and somebody else’s CDr.
The supplied Private Release rip runs 28:52 at 16-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo. It preserves Disc Four as one continuous file rather than rebuilding the original songs as separate modern digital tracks. In that form it retains something of cassette logic. Put it on and let the whole thing move.
There is no algorithm selecting the next song.
No recommendation engine.
No skip generated because the listener’s attention wandered after twenty-two seconds.
Just one object with a beginning and an end.
That feels right for Veganic Wind.
The recording comes from a moment when punk was being used as a tool for assembling another kind of social world inside a city heavily invested in telling people which side they belonged to. F.U.A.L. answered with a different set of affiliations: anti-sectarianism, DIY culture, animal liberation, friendship, autonomy, music and collective space.
And importantly, they did not demand that resistance become joyless.
The wind is political.
The wind is vegan.
The wind is also somebody’s fart.
Disc Four blows straight through the box.
Disc 005
Disc Five is Avalanche Kaito’s self-titled debut album, released June 10, 2022 by Glitterbeat Records. It is one of the strangest collisions in The Crown Box #003 so far, not because two recognizable genres have been politely fused together, but because several different systems for understanding what music is are forced to inhabit the same body.
At the center is Kaito Winse, born in the village of Lankoué in the Sourou region of northern Burkina Faso. Winse comes from a hereditary griot family. Calling a griot simply a “musician” leaves out most of the job. Winse has described griots as holders of history and guardians of tradition, people trained through an overwhelmingly oral system in which stories, songs, genealogies, ceremonies, proverbs and social knowledge are learned by listening, observing and participating from childhood. His father was a griot, his brothers are griots, and Winse describes the role as something inherited through family rather than a profession somebody simply decides to study later.
As a child, he accompanied adults from his family to weddings, funerals and baptisms. The children carried bags and the curved sticks used to strike the tama, or talking drum, then watched and listened from behind the performers. That was part of the school. Songs were not primarily encountered as objects stored in books or notation. Knowledge lived inside people and moved from one generation into another through repetition, memory and participation.
Winse has said he grew up speaking Samo and Mooré. His musical vocabulary includes voice, tama, Peul/Fulani flutes and mouth bow, along with other instruments used in his solo work. Most important, though, is his voice. He has described himself as a singer before an instrumentalist, and the voice on Avalanche Kaito makes that hierarchy obvious. It does not merely sit on top of the band as “the vocal track.” It frequently seems to determine the shape, pressure and emotional direction of everything occurring beneath it.
The other side of the original album came from Brussels noise music. Drummer/electronics musician Benjamin Chaval and bassist Arnaud Paquotte played together in Le Jour du Seigneur, a duo whose interests included repetition, abrasive electronics, improvisation and the physical force of amplified rhythm. Winse encountered their music after arriving in Europe in 2018 and, rather than hearing the noise as something alien to his own traditions, recognized possibilities inside it.
That is one of the essential facts behind Avalanche Kaito.
The collaboration was not constructed around Europeans asking a West African traditional musician to decorate their rock music with “African” sounds. Winse was attracted to their strangeness. He has explained that he had previously encountered cross-cultural projects that felt too predictable. When he heard Le Jour du Seigneur, the music seemed open enough, broad enough and sufficiently unrestricted to interest him.
Chaval has described their first experiments in similarly unforced terms. He and Paquotte would expose Winse to extreme sounds, while Winse would hear relationships to rhythms, textures or experiences from his village. At one point they attached a guitar pickup to Winse’s mouth bow and discovered that the mutation did not feel sacrilegious to him. It simply created another possibility.
That attitude matters because “traditional versus modern” would be an easy but inaccurate way to understand this album. Winse does not treat tradition as a museum exhibit that must remain untouched in order to survive. He has said that the work of a griot is transmission. The circumstances change, therefore the methods of transmission can change with them.
The old material can enter a machine.
The machine can enter the old material.
Neither necessarily wins.
The first Avalanche Kaito album was actually recorded before the lineup most commonly photographed and toured under the name had completely solidified. The record was made in October 2020 at Studio Rubens in Brussels with Kaito Winse on voice, tama, mouth bow and flutes; Benjamin Chaval on drums, synthesizers and electronics; and Arnaud Paquotte on bass. Chaval, Paquotte and Winse are credited with the compositions, Winse with the lyrics, and Chaval with arrangements and production. The album was mixed by Chaval and Frédéric Alstadt at Mont Analogue, with Alstadt also mastering and cutting the lacquer.
Guitarist Nico Gitto became part of the transformed live trio afterward. By the time Avalanche Kaito released its Dabalomuni EP in January 2022 and began appearing more widely, Gitto’s guitar had become a major component of the group’s public sound. He did not simply duplicate Paquotte’s bass role. The live group mutated again.
That distinction is useful when hearing Disc Five. The dark elastic low end on the album is Arnaud Paquotte’s bass. The later live Avalanche Kaito heard on stage can be substantially more guitar-driven because the organism kept evolving after the album was recorded.
The cover art reflects that idea of fragmentation beautifully whether or not that was its explicit intention. Against a dark burgundy field, a rectangular mass covered in an image resembling falling water or vertical green-white texture appears to have shattered, with pieces suspended in the space beside the intact block. The title AVALANCHE KAITO is almost hidden near the bottom.
It looks less like something exploding outward than something being simultaneously assembled and disassembled.
That is basically what the music does.
The Private Release sleeve reproduces the original front artwork on a white field. On the reverse, the original commercial back cover supplies the eight titles: “Sunguru,” “Lebere,” “Douaga,” “Goomde,” “Bow,” “Eya,” “Toulele” and “Le Grand-Père.” The CDr itself remains the familiar unprinted white disc. The handmade copy therefore preserves the informational skin of the commercial release while reducing the actual carrier back to its simplest form.
The FLAC made from Boyd’s CDr runs approximately 40 minutes and 57 seconds at 16-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo. The official track timings total a little over 40 minutes, with the small difference accounted for by the disc’s spacing and edges. Once again the blog download preserves the CDr as one continuous object rather than rebuilding the album from the higher-resolution 24-bit digital files Glitterbeat sells online.
The sequence begins with “Sunguru.”
The word has been glossed in some writing about the group as “girl” in Bambara, although Winse himself has described Samo and Mooré as the languages of his upbringing, so treating every title as easily translatable would flatten the linguistic landscape surrounding him. What matters immediately in the recording is the groove. Bass repeats a short, heavy figure while drums and electronics establish a framework that seems both rigid and unstable. Winse enters not as somebody singing a melody over accompaniment but as another rhythmic force.
The opening track establishes an important Avalanche Kaito principle: repetition is not stasis.
A bass figure can continue while the meaning around it changes. A rhythm becomes different because the voice attacks it differently. Electronics scrape against it. A drum accent shifts the center of gravity. The repeated thing becomes a fixed object that allows everything else to reveal its movement.
This is one reason critics repeatedly reached for Can when describing Avalanche Kaito. The comparison is less about sounding specifically German than about understanding repetition as a vehicle for transformation. The music can stay on one road for a long time while the landscape mutates around it.
“Lebere” is shorter and sonically brighter, with a more nervous upper-frequency attack. The rhythm seems to keep tripping forward without actually losing its footing. Winse’s voice bends around the percussion rather than obeying conventional Western verse-meter expectations. The effect can make the instrumentalists sound as if they are constantly chasing information arriving from somewhere just ahead of them.
That sensation is partly real.
Chaval has explained that Avalanche Kaito compositions often begin with Winse’s text, story or rhythm. The Europeans then respond with what they understand from it using their own equipment and musical vocabulary. The goal is not transcription. It is interpretation.
A story enters one person.
It exits as rhythm.
Another person hears the rhythm.
It exits as electronics.
Then Winse hears the electronics and changes again.
That is a feedback loop rather than a fusion recipe.
The third track, “Douaga,” is where the record becomes genuinely feral. Winse’s flute tears through the arrangement while the rhythm section fractures underneath it. Reviewers heard free jazz, progressive rock, Zeuhl, Fugazi, Fantômas and Frank Zappa in the same five and a half minutes. Those names say more about the desperation of Western genre vocabulary than about what Avalanche Kaito actually is, but the desperation is useful. The music keeps forcing listeners to reach for another shelf.
The Peul flute is especially important. It does not float above the noise as a pastoral contrast. Winse plays with enough force that the flute itself becomes noisy. Breath, overblowing and sharp attacks erase the lazy distinction between “traditional acoustic instrument” and “experimental distortion.”
The instrument is old.
The sound can be violent.
Those facts coexist easily.
“Douaga” may be the clearest demonstration of the band’s refusal to divide tradition from experimentation. A centuries-old instrumental vocabulary is not being preserved by making it behave politely. It is being preserved by allowing a living player to do something with it now.
That aligns closely with Winse’s description of griot knowledge. Proverbs are not dead sentences recited because ancestors once said them. They are tools. A proverb is remembered because it is useful when a new human situation resembles an old one.
Winse has explained that his grandfather could answer social problems through images taken from animals, plants, the forest, stars and ordinary village life. The listener was not given a blunt command. The proverb created a small mental problem that the listener had to solve.
That is an extraordinarily useful way to think about Avalanche Kaito as a whole.
The band rarely gives the ear a finished answer.
It gives the ear a problem.
“Goomde” pulls the intensity inward. The bass becomes almost dub-like, thick and patient, while surrounding sounds turn sparse, dark and slightly spectral. Critics have compared the low end to Jah Wobble and the production atmosphere to Adrian Sherwood. Those references make sense because space becomes part of the arrangement. Instead of filling every available frequency with activity, the track allows empty regions to become threatening.
The supplied CDr rip confirms how strongly the album’s physical density changes from track to track. “Goomde” is noticeably darker in average spectral balance than “Douaga” or “Toulele.” That is one reason it can feel larger despite containing less obvious surface activity. Low frequencies occupy the body while scattered higher sounds appear farther away.
The next piece is simply called “Bow.”
The title immediately suggests the mouth bow, one of Winse’s central instruments. A mouth bow uses the performer’s own oral cavity as part of its resonating system. The body is therefore not merely holding an instrument. The body becomes part of the instrument’s acoustical architecture.
That idea fits this entire album almost too perfectly.
Voice, mouth, breath, wood, string, drum skin, electric pickup, microphone, bass cabinet, computer and speaker become stages in one chain of vibration.
“Bow” is also one of the least continuously loud sections of the CDr. Compared with the pieces surrounding it, its average level drops substantially. The reduction creates room for detail. After the aggressive compression of “Douaga” and the oppressive low-end world of “Goomde,” the album suddenly makes the listener lean forward.
Then comes “Eya.”
At 10:35 it is the gravitational center of the record, more than twice the length of most of the surrounding tracks. The piece does not behave like an extended rock song with several clearly marked sections. It behaves more like a ritual environment that happens to last ten and a half minutes.
Percussion accumulates.
Electronic textures appear and retreat.
Bass rumbles underneath.
Winse’s voice changes scale and emotional temperature.
Instead of travelling toward a chorus, the piece travels deeper into itself.
Several critics have singled out “Eya” as the album’s central journey. Comparisons have ranged from Scott Walker’s darkness to post-industrial sound design and trance music. What those descriptions share is a sense that “Eya” is more concerned with altered duration than conventional songwriting.
Ten minutes inside “Eya” does not feel like ten minutes inside a pop song.
Repetition changes the clock.
This is where the griot and post-punk elements stop sounding like separate ingredients almost completely. If somebody entered the track without knowing the biographies of the musicians, it would be difficult to divide the sound cleanly into “African part” and “European part.” The systems have interfered with one another too deeply.
That is the accomplishment.
Cross-cultural music can easily become tourism, where each participant remains recognizably inside an assigned identity: here is the African rhythm, here is the European guitar, now they play simultaneously and the collaboration has supposedly occurred. Avalanche Kaito is more interesting because the collision contaminates everybody.
Chaval’s drumming does not remain simply European noise rock.
Winse does not remain simply a traditional performer.
Paquotte’s bass becomes something between punk propulsion, dub pressure and rhythmic counterweight.
Pure Data electronics respond to oral storytelling.
An ancestral proverb can become instructions for a digital noise event.
This is why the group’s own description of the process as “deconstructing both traditional and futurist knowledge” is more useful than the word fusion.
Fusion often implies two stable substances being combined.
Here neither substance remains stable.
“Toulele” proves how unstable the album itself was even before release. Chaval has explained that the album version began as an improvisation by Winse recorded at a Maison de la Culture, after which Chaval added electronic machinery around it. When they later tried to perform the piece live with Nico Gitto, the problem became obvious: how do you reproduce something that was not originally created as a conventional band performance?
Their solution was not to reproduce it.
They made another version.
The live “Toulele” became far more rock-oriented, with guitar taking a role that does not exist in the same way on the album. Gitto has said the band accepts improvisation, mistakes and experimentation rather than trying to reproduce recordings with millimeter precision.
That makes “Toulele” less a fixed composition than a family of possible events.
The album documents one.
The stage creates another.
The supplied CDr captures the first version yet again in another medium.
“Toulele” is also among the brightest and most percussively active sections of this particular FLAC. After the long subterranean movement of “Eya,” it feels like the album suddenly regains sharp edges.
Then the final track arrives: “Le Grand-Père.”
The French title means “The Grandfather,” and even without assuming a literal autobiographical explanation, the word carries enormous weight inside Winse’s stated relationship to griot knowledge. His grandfather appears repeatedly in Winse’s explanations of how traditional wisdom works. When faced with a difficult human situation, the elder could invoke animals, stars or elements of the natural world and produce a proverb that allowed the listener to reason rather than merely obey.
Winse has explained that such proverbs are designed to make people think without hitting them head-on. If the saying is memorable, somebody can carry it until the relevant situation arrives. The proverb then wakes up.
That sounds very close to what a record can do.
Music can sit uselessly in somebody’s collection for twenty years.
Then one day a situation occurs and a sentence, rhythm or sound suddenly becomes instruction.
“Le Grand-Père” closes the album with the darkest average spectral center of the eight sections in the supplied rip, but also one of the strongest overall physical levels. The sound is weighted downward. The ending feels less like the album evaporating than settling into the ground.
There is something appropriate about a record obsessed with movement between village and city, ancestor and machine, oral memory and digital processing ending with the figure of a grandfather.
The road points backward and forward at the same time.
That road is crucial to Avalanche Kaito’s story. Glitterbeat’s original notes emphasize the path from Winse’s village of Lankoué to Brussels as more significant than the destination. Winse himself describes arriving in Belgium in 2018 through music, meeting unfamiliar musicians, absorbing new experiences and eventually carrying those experiences back into what he understands as his griot role.
He does not describe Europe as replacing the village.
Europe becomes another story to tell at the village.
That distinction is beautiful.
The griot travels.
The archive remains mobile because the archivist remains alive.
Avalanche Kaito is therefore not a record about ancient knowledge surviving despite technology. It is closer to ancient knowledge learning what technology feels like.
Benjamin Chaval’s electronic system is especially relevant here. He works with Pure Data, an open-source visual programming environment used to build electronic and interactive sound systems. Instead of relying exclusively on fixed commercial synthesizers, Pure Data lets a musician construct processes: take this sound, transform it according to this rule, feed that result somewhere else, react to incoming information, generate another layer.
Chaval jokingly described the studio material being fed into a digital mixer and enriched with “computational sourdough.”
That is an excellent metaphor.
A sourdough starter is alive because it contains culture.
It survives through feeding.
A small part of the old batch enters the new batch.
The new batch changes while carrying something forward.
That is basically the entire record.
Griot culture enters electronics.
Electronics enter improvisation.
Improvisation enters editing.
Editing becomes an album.
The album becomes a commercial LP and CD.
Boyd copies it onto a blank CDr.
The CDr enters a Private Release.
The Private Release is opened again.
The CDr becomes another FLAC.
Somebody somewhere downloads it and the culture moves again.
No stage is the original anymore.
Yet the thread remains.
The album’s eight tracks run, officially:
1. “Sunguru” – 2:40
2. “Lebere” – 2:58
3. “Douaga” – 5:31
4. “Goomde” – 5:10
5. “Bow” – 3:47
6. “Eya” – 10:35
7. “Toulele” – 3:34
8. “Le Grand-Père” – 6:37
The commercial album was released as Glitterbeat GBCD/GBLP 125. Danaé Clozza created the artwork, Julie Kern Donck handled layout, and Eric Desjeux supplied the photograph of Winse used in the original package. It is worth preserving those names because even a record concerned with oral transmission eventually becomes an object built by many hands.
Inside The Crown Box #003, Disc Five also occupies an interesting place in the larger sequence.
Disc One, Treasury of Puppies, treated odd little sounds as an intimate private language.
Disc Two, FRAGMENT, compressed six hardcore songs into eight minutes of abrasion.
Disc Three, Australis, built a seventy-minute metaphysical cathedral.
Disc Four, F.U.A.L., connected Belfast anarcho-punk politics with vegan fart humor.
Then Disc Five arrives and makes the categories themselves unstable.
Traditional.
Modern.
African.
European.
Punk.
Folk.
Electronic.
Improvised.
Composed.
Sacred.
Technological.
None remains very useful by itself.
That instability also mirrors the front image. A solid rectangular object appears to break into pieces, yet all of the pieces retain the same surface. They are separate and still visibly part of one thing.
The music operates the same way.
Different histories.
Different bodies.
Different technologies.
One object temporarily holding them together.
Avalanche Kaito does not solve the contradiction.
It plays inside it.
Disc 006
Disc Six is Don Cherry’s Eternal Rhythm, recorded in Berlin on November 11 and 12, 1968 in collaboration with the Berlin Jazz Festival and released by the German MPS label in 1969. The Private Release CDr has been ripped back into a single 16-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo FLAC running 41 minutes and 31 seconds, almost exactly the duration of the original two-sided LP. What once required flipping a record after Part I now travels as one uninterrupted digital ribbon.Coming immediately after Avalanche Kaito, Don Cherry does not feel like another random left turn in the box. Disc Five took inherited oral tradition, African instruments, electronics, noise, improvisation and European experimental music and refused to decide where one category stopped and another began. Disc Six reaches backward more than fifty years and finds Don Cherry already attacking the same borders from another direction.Cherry had become internationally important through Ornette Coleman’s revolutionary groups at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. His small pocket cornet was one of the defining voices on records that helped tear open conventional ideas about harmony, song form and improvisation. By the middle of the 1960s, however, Cherry was already moving beyond the question of how free jazz could become. He increasingly seemed interested in what music could become if jazz itself stopped behaving like a country with borders.That curiosity is all over Eternal Rhythm.Cherry assembled an extraordinary nine-person group: Don Cherry on cornet, multiple flutes, voice, bells and Indonesian gamelan instruments; Albert Mangelsdorff and Eje Thelin on trombones; Bernt Rosengren on tenor saxophone, oboe, clarinet and flute; Sonny Sharrock on electric guitar; Karl Berger on vibraphone, piano and gendèr; Joachim Kühn on piano and prepared piano; Arild Andersen on bass; and Jacques Thollot on drums, saron, gong, bells and voice.Even written as a list, the instrumentation looks less like the personnel of a jazz group than the inventory of a small musical civilization.The gendèr and saron are metallophones associated with Indonesian gamelan. Instead of strings or stretched skins, tuned metal keys produce resonant, lingering tones. Put those beside vibraphone, prepared piano, bells, gong, percussion and Cherry’s assortment of flutes and the ensemble gains a completely different physical surface from ordinary late-1960s jazz. Brass and reeds no longer sit simply above bass and drums. Metallic sound can occupy the foreground. Resonance hangs in the air. Notes strike, bloom and continue vibrating after the musician has moved on.This matters because Eternal Rhythm is not merely free jazz with a few “exotic” instruments sprinkled over it for atmosphere. The additional musical systems affect the architecture. Cherry was already becoming deeply involved with instruments, melodies and rhythmic concepts encountered outside the conventional American jazz vocabulary. By this period he had travelled through parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia and was increasingly carrying those encounters into the way he composed and performed.MPS later described Eternal Rhythm as an early major example of the possibility that multiple musical cultures could exist simultaneously inside the same composition. That word simultaneously is important. The record does not stop being jazz so that it can become gamelan, then stop being gamelan so it can become something else. Different musical languages remain audible at the same time.The front cover reproduced for the Private Release sleeve captures some of that collision before the disc is even played. A high-contrast blue-and-white image of Cherry and the ensemble is capped by curling fields of green, blue and hot pink. Heinz Bähr, responsible for the original cover and layout, turned a documentary photograph into something halfway between jazz record, political poster and psychedelic graphic. Cherry himself is partly swallowed by the bodies and instruments around him. There is no clean heroic portrait of a solitary bandleader. The group becomes one tangled visual mass.The title is equally important.Eternal Rhythm.Not Eternal Song.Not Eternal Melody.Rhythm implies recurrence, cycles, return, pulse, breathing, walking, heartbeat, seasons, ritual, bodies. Rhythm only exists through time, yet the title calls it eternal. Something is always moving and somehow always remaining.That idea is built into the composition itself.The original LP divides the piece into two enormous parts. Part I lasts roughly 17 minutes and 49 seconds and contains six named sections: “Baby’s Breath,” “Sonny Sharrock,” “Turkish Prayer,” “Crystal Clear (Exposition),” “Endless Beginnings” and a return to “Baby’s Breath,” this time unaccompanied. Part II lasts roughly 23 minutes and 40 seconds and moves through “Autumn Melody,” “Lanoo,” “Crystal Clear (Development),” “Screaming J” and finally “Always Beginnings.”The language is revealing. Exposition and Development belong to formal compositional thinking. Prayer belongs to ritual. Autumn belongs to natural cycles. Breath belongs to the body. One section simply carries the name of another musician. And twice the composition invokes beginning: “Endless Beginnings” and “Always Beginnings.”The album is organized, but its organization does not resemble a row of conventional songs.Themes arrive, disappear and return altered.A sound that seemed like background becomes foreground.The ensemble can collapse into a few instruments and then suddenly become enormous again.Improvisation is not an intermission between compositions. Improvisation is part of the mechanism by which the composition continually changes shape.That is one reason calling this music “free” can be misleading. Free can sound like nobody knows what is happening. Eternal Rhythm repeatedly demonstrates the opposite. The musicians may not be following a rigid verse-chorus structure, but they are listening intensely enough to recognize when a collective direction has appeared and then move toward it together.Freedom requires information.Everybody has to hear everybody else.The opening region of Part I establishes the album’s metallic nervous system. Flutes, bells, gamelan instruments, vibraphone, percussion and prepared piano create a sound world that can feel ancient and futuristic simultaneously. The ear is given fewer ordinary jazz landmarks than it expects. There may be pulse without an obvious beat, harmony without a conventional chord progression, melody without the promise that melody will behave like a song.Then the electric guitar arrives.Sonny Sharrock is one of the record’s secret weapons. In 1968, the electric guitar still carried very different expectations depending on which musical room it entered. Rock was discovering feedback, volume and distortion, but jazz guitar was still often associated with rounded tone and clean articulation. Sharrock treated the instrument more violently. His playing could become shards, smears, feedback, scream and texture.Cherry gives him an entire named subsection: “Sonny Sharrock.”That gesture says something about the leader. Cherry’s suite contains a space named after another musician because the personality of that musician is itself compositional material. Sharrock is not merely hired to execute a guitar part. The possibility of Sonny Sharrock happening is one of the forms the piece can take.His sound also creates a beautiful historical disturbance inside the album. Some moments can feel remarkably close to noise rock, no wave or later experimental guitar music even though those categories had not yet been invented. The guitar seems to be receiving broadcasts from a future scene.“Turkish Prayer” shifts the atmosphere again. Cherry’s horn can behave like a herald, a singer, a cry from a minaret, a blues voice or a piece of pure brass pressure depending on the surrounding texture. That mobility is central to his playing. He does not need the cornet to establish dominance over the ensemble. Sometimes it announces. Sometimes it colors. Sometimes it disappears completely because another instrument has become more important.Then there is “Crystal Clear.”The first appearance is explicitly labeled “Exposition.” The second, in Part II, is “Development.”Those terms quietly reveal how much structure exists beneath the apparent chaos. In classical sonata language, exposition presents material and development transforms it. Cherry borrows the conceptual idea without submitting to the classical form. A musical thought appears, enters the larger ecosystem, and later returns after everything around it has changed.That is almost a description of memory.The same thing comes back, but it cannot come back as exactly the same thing because time has happened to it.Near the later portion of Part I, the ensemble can suddenly discover something startlingly communal and almost march-like. Jennifer Lucy Allan, writing about Cherry decades later, singled out the moment when the band abruptly falls into a brief marching theme after an extended region of rhythmic agitation and Sharrock’s guitar. The pleasure comes partly from contrast. After the listener has spent minutes learning to live without stable ground, the musicians suddenly construct a road and everybody walks on it together.Then the road disappears.This is one of Eternal Rhythm’s great tricks. Conventional music often establishes order and then creates tension by disturbing it. Cherry frequently reverses the equation. Disorder, multiplicity or ambiguity become the normal state. When a simple collective melody suddenly appears, simplicity itself becomes the shock.Part II opens another landscape.“Autumn Melody” is one of those titles that sounds almost impossibly gentle compared with the potential violence of the ensemble. Bowed bass and Cherry’s horn establish a different emotional temperature before the full group begins pulling at the edges again. The record never remains pastoral for long. Serenity is treated as another temporary musical state rather than the final destination.The prepared piano deserves attention here because its basic idea already belongs perfectly inside Cherry’s world. A normal piano becomes a prepared piano when objects are placed on, between or against the strings so that familiar piano mechanisms produce unfamiliar timbres. The piano remains a piano and simultaneously becomes percussion, metal, rattle, gong or something without a convenient name.One thing becomes two things at once.That principle keeps appearing throughout The Crown Box #003, and Eternal Rhythm contains it musically.Joachim Kühn’s prepared piano can therefore sit naturally beside Berger’s vibraphone, the Indonesian metallophones and Thollot’s percussion. The normal distinction between melody instrument and percussion instrument begins leaking. A struck pitch can be rhythm and harmony at the same time.“Crystal Clear (Development)” deepens that metallic environment. Heavy ensemble gestures alternate with open space, percussion and sustained resonance. The composition can feel enormous without depending upon continuous volume because every instrument has been given a different way to occupy space.Then the voices begin behaving less like language.Shouts and cries move toward “Screaming J.”The human throat joins the horns, metal and drums as another instrument capable of producing raw physical information before words are understood. This is another important feature of Cherry’s later musical thinking. The voice does not always need lyrics to carry meaning. A chant, syllable, shout or breath can transmit participation itself.The final subsection is called “Always Beginnings.”It may be the perfect ending for a piece named Eternal Rhythm.An ending would contradict the title.A rhythm does not truly end because another rhythm is already occurring somewhere else. Heartbeat, footsteps, drums, seasons, machines, breathing, traffic, insects, planets. Stop listening to one pulse and another immediately becomes audible.So Cherry ends by beginning.That philosophy extends beyond this one album. Eternal Rhythm sits at a crucial hinge in his career. Behind it is the intense free jazz of Ornette Coleman, Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers. Ahead are the increasingly global, communal and spiritually expansive projects associated with Mu, Organic Music Society, Codona and the musical life Cherry built with visual artist Moki Cherry.Calling that later work “world music” can make it sound tame in retrospect because the phrase eventually became a marketing shelf in record stores. Cherry’s version was much stranger. The idea was not that different cultures could be cleaned up and blended into an internationally pleasant product.The friction mattered.Tunings did not always agree.Rhythms did not always fit neatly together.Different historical systems remained different.The beauty occurred because they were allowed to meet without first being made identical.That is one reason Eternal Rhythm still sounds alive instead of merely historically important. It has not been smoothed into multicultural wallpaper. Sonny Sharrock can still slash across the surface. Trombone can still smear through a delicate texture. Prepared piano can interrupt a lyrical moment. Gamelan resonance can refuse to behave like Western accompaniment.The record welcomes difference without sanding off the edges.The musicians themselves form an astonishing temporary geography. Cherry was American. Mangelsdorff and Kühn were German. Thelin and Rosengren were Swedish. Berger was German and already deeply involved with international improvisational practice. Andersen was Norwegian. Thollot was French. Sharrock was American. Indonesian instruments and non-Western melodic ideas enter a group assembled in Berlin.The ensemble is geographically impossible in the best sense.MPS producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt was crucial to creating the circumstances for experiments like this. He had been using European jazz festivals and recordings to encourage encounters between jazz musicians and musical traditions from elsewhere in the world. The Eternal Rhythm Group was specifically organized and recorded in collaboration with the 1968 Berlin festival.That historical context is worth remembering because international musical exchange in 1968 did not happen through instant digital access. Cherry could not simply open a streaming service and spend an afternoon moving from Indonesian gamelan to Turkish folk music to West African drumming.Sounds travelled physically.People travelled.Records travelled.Instruments travelled.Radio signals travelled.Cherry famously listened to shortwave radio, allowing distant broadcasts to enter his musical imagination before contemporary digital culture made geographic access seem ordinary.He behaved like a receiver.That makes Eternal Rhythm a strangely appropriate disc inside Private Release.The record itself is built from transmission.Musical knowledge moves between people and places.A rhythm survives a border.An instrument changes hands.One musician hears something and later remembers it inside another context.The original event becomes an LP.The LP becomes later editions and digital files.Boyd eventually takes a digital copy, burns it to an anonymous white CDr and places it inside a handmade box intended for another person.Then the Private Release is opened again.The CDr is ripped back into a 41:31 FLAC.A performance from Berlin in November 1968 becomes downloadable from a Blogspot page in Oakland in 2026.That is an eternal rhythm too.The container changes.The information keeps moving.The physical sleeve in The Crown Box #003 reduces MPS’s original commercial artwork to a printed image inside clear plastic. The silver edge of the CDr remains visible around it. The reproduction is not pretending to be an original 1969 German LP. It openly belongs to another circulation system.Original.Reissue.File.CDr.FLAC.Blog.Listener.Every stage is both copy and new object.The album’s own history provides an interesting parallel. The original LP divided Eternal Rhythm into two pieces because vinyl required two sides. The composition itself did not necessarily need to think in sides. The medium imposed architecture. On this Private Release rip, those approximately 17:49 and 23:40 halves become one 41-minute stream.The record has crossed the gate created by the LP.There is no need to stand up and flip it.What remains are the internal transformations.Baby’s breath.Sharrock’s electric shards.Prayer.Crystal clarity.Beginnings.Autumn.Development.Screaming.More beginnings.In 1971, the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s cataloging of Eternal Rhythm noted that the record received the Grand Prix du Disque from the Académie Charles Cros. Later critics have repeatedly treated it as one of Cherry’s major recordings. AllMusic’s Brian Olewnick went further, calling it Cherry’s masterwork and one of the finest recordings of the 1960s jazz avant-garde.Not everyone agreed.That is another thing worth preserving.A 1975 Jazz Journal review complained that the record was rambling, noisy and shapeless, arguing that moments of grandeur were swallowed by uncontrolled sound. That negative reaction is useful because it tells us what the album was capable of doing to listeners. Eternal Rhythm did not arrive already embalmed as a classic. To some ears, all those simultaneous systems sounded like liberation. To others they sounded like a traffic jam.Both reactions confirm the same fact.The music was not behaving normally.And that may be Disc Six’s most important contribution to The Crown Box #003.Avalanche Kaito on Disc Five showed a living traditional practice entering electronics without asking permission to remain “pure.”Don Cherry on Disc Six shows an earlier generation discovering that the borders surrounding jazz could be treated the same way.Neither record sounds interested in cultural quarantine.Both assume that hearing something can change you.Once changed, you carry it somewhere else.The music does not remain where it was born.Disc Six calls that movement Eternal Rhythm.Private Release calls it release.
Disc Six is Don Cherry’s Eternal Rhythm, recorded in Berlin on November 11 and 12, 1968 in collaboration with the Berlin Jazz Festival and released by the German MPS label in 1969. The Private Release CDr has been ripped back into a single 16-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo FLAC running 41 minutes and 31 seconds, almost exactly the duration of the original two-sided LP. What once required flipping a record after Part I now travels as one uninterrupted digital ribbon.
Coming immediately after Avalanche Kaito, Don Cherry does not feel like another random left turn in the box. Disc Five took inherited oral tradition, African instruments, electronics, noise, improvisation and European experimental music and refused to decide where one category stopped and another began. Disc Six reaches backward more than fifty years and finds Don Cherry already attacking the same borders from another direction.
Cherry had become internationally important through Ornette Coleman’s revolutionary groups at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. His small pocket cornet was one of the defining voices on records that helped tear open conventional ideas about harmony, song form and improvisation. By the middle of the 1960s, however, Cherry was already moving beyond the question of how free jazz could become. He increasingly seemed interested in what music could become if jazz itself stopped behaving like a country with borders.
That curiosity is all over Eternal Rhythm.
Cherry assembled an extraordinary nine-person group: Don Cherry on cornet, multiple flutes, voice, bells and Indonesian gamelan instruments; Albert Mangelsdorff and Eje Thelin on trombones; Bernt Rosengren on tenor saxophone, oboe, clarinet and flute; Sonny Sharrock on electric guitar; Karl Berger on vibraphone, piano and gendèr; Joachim Kühn on piano and prepared piano; Arild Andersen on bass; and Jacques Thollot on drums, saron, gong, bells and voice.
Even written as a list, the instrumentation looks less like the personnel of a jazz group than the inventory of a small musical civilization.
The gendèr and saron are metallophones associated with Indonesian gamelan. Instead of strings or stretched skins, tuned metal keys produce resonant, lingering tones. Put those beside vibraphone, prepared piano, bells, gong, percussion and Cherry’s assortment of flutes and the ensemble gains a completely different physical surface from ordinary late-1960s jazz. Brass and reeds no longer sit simply above bass and drums. Metallic sound can occupy the foreground. Resonance hangs in the air. Notes strike, bloom and continue vibrating after the musician has moved on.
This matters because Eternal Rhythm is not merely free jazz with a few “exotic” instruments sprinkled over it for atmosphere. The additional musical systems affect the architecture. Cherry was already becoming deeply involved with instruments, melodies and rhythmic concepts encountered outside the conventional American jazz vocabulary. By this period he had travelled through parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia and was increasingly carrying those encounters into the way he composed and performed.
MPS later described Eternal Rhythm as an early major example of the possibility that multiple musical cultures could exist simultaneously inside the same composition. That word simultaneously is important. The record does not stop being jazz so that it can become gamelan, then stop being gamelan so it can become something else. Different musical languages remain audible at the same time.
The front cover reproduced for the Private Release sleeve captures some of that collision before the disc is even played. A high-contrast blue-and-white image of Cherry and the ensemble is capped by curling fields of green, blue and hot pink. Heinz Bähr, responsible for the original cover and layout, turned a documentary photograph into something halfway between jazz record, political poster and psychedelic graphic. Cherry himself is partly swallowed by the bodies and instruments around him. There is no clean heroic portrait of a solitary bandleader. The group becomes one tangled visual mass.
The title is equally important.
Eternal Rhythm.
Not Eternal Song.
Not Eternal Melody.
Rhythm implies recurrence, cycles, return, pulse, breathing, walking, heartbeat, seasons, ritual, bodies. Rhythm only exists through time, yet the title calls it eternal. Something is always moving and somehow always remaining.
That idea is built into the composition itself.
The original LP divides the piece into two enormous parts. Part I lasts roughly 17 minutes and 49 seconds and contains six named sections: “Baby’s Breath,” “Sonny Sharrock,” “Turkish Prayer,” “Crystal Clear (Exposition),” “Endless Beginnings” and a return to “Baby’s Breath,” this time unaccompanied. Part II lasts roughly 23 minutes and 40 seconds and moves through “Autumn Melody,” “Lanoo,” “Crystal Clear (Development),” “Screaming J” and finally “Always Beginnings.”
The language is revealing. Exposition and Development belong to formal compositional thinking. Prayer belongs to ritual. Autumn belongs to natural cycles. Breath belongs to the body. One section simply carries the name of another musician. And twice the composition invokes beginning: “Endless Beginnings” and “Always Beginnings.”
The album is organized, but its organization does not resemble a row of conventional songs.
Themes arrive, disappear and return altered.
A sound that seemed like background becomes foreground.
The ensemble can collapse into a few instruments and then suddenly become enormous again.
Improvisation is not an intermission between compositions. Improvisation is part of the mechanism by which the composition continually changes shape.
That is one reason calling this music “free” can be misleading. Free can sound like nobody knows what is happening. Eternal Rhythm repeatedly demonstrates the opposite. The musicians may not be following a rigid verse-chorus structure, but they are listening intensely enough to recognize when a collective direction has appeared and then move toward it together.
Freedom requires information.
Everybody has to hear everybody else.
The opening region of Part I establishes the album’s metallic nervous system. Flutes, bells, gamelan instruments, vibraphone, percussion and prepared piano create a sound world that can feel ancient and futuristic simultaneously. The ear is given fewer ordinary jazz landmarks than it expects. There may be pulse without an obvious beat, harmony without a conventional chord progression, melody without the promise that melody will behave like a song.
Then the electric guitar arrives.
Sonny Sharrock is one of the record’s secret weapons. In 1968, the electric guitar still carried very different expectations depending on which musical room it entered. Rock was discovering feedback, volume and distortion, but jazz guitar was still often associated with rounded tone and clean articulation. Sharrock treated the instrument more violently. His playing could become shards, smears, feedback, scream and texture.
Cherry gives him an entire named subsection: “Sonny Sharrock.”
That gesture says something about the leader. Cherry’s suite contains a space named after another musician because the personality of that musician is itself compositional material. Sharrock is not merely hired to execute a guitar part. The possibility of Sonny Sharrock happening is one of the forms the piece can take.
His sound also creates a beautiful historical disturbance inside the album. Some moments can feel remarkably close to noise rock, no wave or later experimental guitar music even though those categories had not yet been invented. The guitar seems to be receiving broadcasts from a future scene.
“Turkish Prayer” shifts the atmosphere again. Cherry’s horn can behave like a herald, a singer, a cry from a minaret, a blues voice or a piece of pure brass pressure depending on the surrounding texture. That mobility is central to his playing. He does not need the cornet to establish dominance over the ensemble. Sometimes it announces. Sometimes it colors. Sometimes it disappears completely because another instrument has become more important.
Then there is “Crystal Clear.”
The first appearance is explicitly labeled “Exposition.” The second, in Part II, is “Development.”
Those terms quietly reveal how much structure exists beneath the apparent chaos. In classical sonata language, exposition presents material and development transforms it. Cherry borrows the conceptual idea without submitting to the classical form. A musical thought appears, enters the larger ecosystem, and later returns after everything around it has changed.
That is almost a description of memory.
The same thing comes back, but it cannot come back as exactly the same thing because time has happened to it.
Near the later portion of Part I, the ensemble can suddenly discover something startlingly communal and almost march-like. Jennifer Lucy Allan, writing about Cherry decades later, singled out the moment when the band abruptly falls into a brief marching theme after an extended region of rhythmic agitation and Sharrock’s guitar. The pleasure comes partly from contrast. After the listener has spent minutes learning to live without stable ground, the musicians suddenly construct a road and everybody walks on it together.
Then the road disappears.
This is one of Eternal Rhythm’s great tricks. Conventional music often establishes order and then creates tension by disturbing it. Cherry frequently reverses the equation. Disorder, multiplicity or ambiguity become the normal state. When a simple collective melody suddenly appears, simplicity itself becomes the shock.
Part II opens another landscape.
“Autumn Melody” is one of those titles that sounds almost impossibly gentle compared with the potential violence of the ensemble. Bowed bass and Cherry’s horn establish a different emotional temperature before the full group begins pulling at the edges again. The record never remains pastoral for long. Serenity is treated as another temporary musical state rather than the final destination.
The prepared piano deserves attention here because its basic idea already belongs perfectly inside Cherry’s world. A normal piano becomes a prepared piano when objects are placed on, between or against the strings so that familiar piano mechanisms produce unfamiliar timbres. The piano remains a piano and simultaneously becomes percussion, metal, rattle, gong or something without a convenient name.
One thing becomes two things at once.
That principle keeps appearing throughout The Crown Box #003, and Eternal Rhythm contains it musically.
Joachim Kühn’s prepared piano can therefore sit naturally beside Berger’s vibraphone, the Indonesian metallophones and Thollot’s percussion. The normal distinction between melody instrument and percussion instrument begins leaking. A struck pitch can be rhythm and harmony at the same time.
“Crystal Clear (Development)” deepens that metallic environment. Heavy ensemble gestures alternate with open space, percussion and sustained resonance. The composition can feel enormous without depending upon continuous volume because every instrument has been given a different way to occupy space.
Then the voices begin behaving less like language.
Shouts and cries move toward “Screaming J.”
The human throat joins the horns, metal and drums as another instrument capable of producing raw physical information before words are understood. This is another important feature of Cherry’s later musical thinking. The voice does not always need lyrics to carry meaning. A chant, syllable, shout or breath can transmit participation itself.
The final subsection is called “Always Beginnings.”
It may be the perfect ending for a piece named Eternal Rhythm.
An ending would contradict the title.
A rhythm does not truly end because another rhythm is already occurring somewhere else. Heartbeat, footsteps, drums, seasons, machines, breathing, traffic, insects, planets. Stop listening to one pulse and another immediately becomes audible.
So Cherry ends by beginning.
That philosophy extends beyond this one album. Eternal Rhythm sits at a crucial hinge in his career. Behind it is the intense free jazz of Ornette Coleman, Complete Communion and Symphony for Improvisers. Ahead are the increasingly global, communal and spiritually expansive projects associated with Mu, Organic Music Society, Codona and the musical life Cherry built with visual artist Moki Cherry.
Calling that later work “world music” can make it sound tame in retrospect because the phrase eventually became a marketing shelf in record stores. Cherry’s version was much stranger. The idea was not that different cultures could be cleaned up and blended into an internationally pleasant product.
The friction mattered.
Tunings did not always agree.
Rhythms did not always fit neatly together.
Different historical systems remained different.
The beauty occurred because they were allowed to meet without first being made identical.
That is one reason Eternal Rhythm still sounds alive instead of merely historically important. It has not been smoothed into multicultural wallpaper. Sonny Sharrock can still slash across the surface. Trombone can still smear through a delicate texture. Prepared piano can interrupt a lyrical moment. Gamelan resonance can refuse to behave like Western accompaniment.
The record welcomes difference without sanding off the edges.
The musicians themselves form an astonishing temporary geography. Cherry was American. Mangelsdorff and Kühn were German. Thelin and Rosengren were Swedish. Berger was German and already deeply involved with international improvisational practice. Andersen was Norwegian. Thollot was French. Sharrock was American. Indonesian instruments and non-Western melodic ideas enter a group assembled in Berlin.
The ensemble is geographically impossible in the best sense.
MPS producer Joachim-Ernst Berendt was crucial to creating the circumstances for experiments like this. He had been using European jazz festivals and recordings to encourage encounters between jazz musicians and musical traditions from elsewhere in the world. The Eternal Rhythm Group was specifically organized and recorded in collaboration with the 1968 Berlin festival.
That historical context is worth remembering because international musical exchange in 1968 did not happen through instant digital access. Cherry could not simply open a streaming service and spend an afternoon moving from Indonesian gamelan to Turkish folk music to West African drumming.
Sounds travelled physically.
People travelled.
Records travelled.
Instruments travelled.
Radio signals travelled.
Cherry famously listened to shortwave radio, allowing distant broadcasts to enter his musical imagination before contemporary digital culture made geographic access seem ordinary.
He behaved like a receiver.
That makes Eternal Rhythm a strangely appropriate disc inside Private Release.
The record itself is built from transmission.
Musical knowledge moves between people and places.
A rhythm survives a border.
An instrument changes hands.
One musician hears something and later remembers it inside another context.
The original event becomes an LP.
The LP becomes later editions and digital files.
Boyd eventually takes a digital copy, burns it to an anonymous white CDr and places it inside a handmade box intended for another person.
Then the Private Release is opened again.
The CDr is ripped back into a 41:31 FLAC.
A performance from Berlin in November 1968 becomes downloadable from a Blogspot page in Oakland in 2026.
That is an eternal rhythm too.
The container changes.
The information keeps moving.
The physical sleeve in The Crown Box #003 reduces MPS’s original commercial artwork to a printed image inside clear plastic. The silver edge of the CDr remains visible around it. The reproduction is not pretending to be an original 1969 German LP. It openly belongs to another circulation system.
Original.
Reissue.
File.
CDr.
FLAC.
Blog.
Listener.
Every stage is both copy and new object.
The album’s own history provides an interesting parallel. The original LP divided Eternal Rhythm into two pieces because vinyl required two sides. The composition itself did not necessarily need to think in sides. The medium imposed architecture. On this Private Release rip, those approximately 17:49 and 23:40 halves become one 41-minute stream.
The record has crossed the gate created by the LP.
There is no need to stand up and flip it.
What remains are the internal transformations.
Baby’s breath.
Sharrock’s electric shards.
Prayer.
Crystal clarity.
Beginnings.
Autumn.
Development.
Screaming.
More beginnings.
In 1971, the Bibliothèque nationale de France’s cataloging of Eternal Rhythm noted that the record received the Grand Prix du Disque from the Académie Charles Cros. Later critics have repeatedly treated it as one of Cherry’s major recordings. AllMusic’s Brian Olewnick went further, calling it Cherry’s masterwork and one of the finest recordings of the 1960s jazz avant-garde.
Not everyone agreed.
That is another thing worth preserving.
A 1975 Jazz Journal review complained that the record was rambling, noisy and shapeless, arguing that moments of grandeur were swallowed by uncontrolled sound. That negative reaction is useful because it tells us what the album was capable of doing to listeners. Eternal Rhythm did not arrive already embalmed as a classic. To some ears, all those simultaneous systems sounded like liberation. To others they sounded like a traffic jam.
Both reactions confirm the same fact.
The music was not behaving normally.
And that may be Disc Six’s most important contribution to The Crown Box #003.
Avalanche Kaito on Disc Five showed a living traditional practice entering electronics without asking permission to remain “pure.”
Don Cherry on Disc Six shows an earlier generation discovering that the borders surrounding jazz could be treated the same way.
Neither record sounds interested in cultural quarantine.
Both assume that hearing something can change you.
Once changed, you carry it somewhere else.
The music does not remain where it was born.
Disc Six calls that movement Eternal Rhythm.
Private Release calls it release.
Disc 007
Disc Seven is Marcy Tigner’s Trombone with Harp, Violin and Pipe Organ, a 1961 Christian Faith Recordings LP that occupies one of the stranger corners of American sacred music. After Don Cherry’s Eternal Rhythm has spent forty-one minutes exploding jazz outward into gamelan instruments, prepared piano, free improvisation, Sonny Sharrock’s electric guitar and two trombonists, the next disc quietly keeps one instrument from the wreckage. The trombone survives the transition.
But everything else changes.
Disc Six contains Albert Mangelsdorff and Eje Thelin using trombones inside a huge international avant-garde ensemble recorded at the Berlin Jazz Festival. Disc Seven gives the trombone to a devout Christian woman from Oregon and surrounds her with harp, violin and pipe organ while she plays twelve hymns. The distance between the records is enormous, yet the instrument makes a tiny bridge between them. This is the kind of transition that makes the discs inside The Crown Box #003 behave like one long mixtape. A sound or object survives long enough to pull the listener into a completely different world.
The cover is fantastic. Against a powder-blue studio background, Marcy Tigner stands in a neat dress holding a trombone nearly as long as her body. MARCY TIGNER appears in large yellow letters, TROMBONE underneath, followed by the wonderfully specific promise: WITH HARP, VIOLIN AND PIPE ORGAN. There is no mystery about the product. The trombone is practically another person in the portrait.
The original record was issued by Christian Faith Recordings as MT-1351, manufactured by Alma Records in Reseda, California. Tigner is accompanied by Verlye Brilhart on harp, Roberta Nowlin on violin and Lorin Whitney on pipe organ. That lineup creates an unusual little chamber ensemble. Trombone is normally imagined as part of a brass section, orchestra, marching band, jazz group or military ensemble. Here it becomes the principal singing voice inside a soft devotional environment.
The twelve selections are:
1. “My Jesus, I Love Thee”
2. “Close to Thee”
3. “Jesus Is All the World to Me”
4. “Saviour, Thy Dying Love”
5. “Abide with Me”
6. “No Longer Lonely”
7. “All That Thrills My Soul”
8. “Oh, How I Love Jesus”
9. “Harbored in Jesus”
10. “We Shall See His Lovely Face”
11. “Near to the Heart of God”
12. “Day by Day”
Most of the titles belong to the vocabulary of older evangelical hymnody: Jesus, love, nearness, refuge, death, devotion, the passage of days. Even before hearing the music, the track list forms a little emotional theology. The titles move repeatedly toward intimacy rather than spectacle. Close to Thee. Abide with Me. Near to the Heart of God. Day by Day. These are songs about remaining near something.
That makes the trombone an unexpectedly beautiful choice.
A trombone is made from distance. The player literally changes pitch by moving part of the instrument closer and farther away. The slide extends outward and returns. A hymn called “Close to Thee” is being expressed by an instrument whose physical language consists partly of moving away and coming back.
There is probably a sermon hiding in there somewhere.
Tigner’s relationship with the instrument began in childhood. Born Marcellaise Hartwick in Wichita, Kansas in 1921, she initially studied piano, but after hearing gospel music played on trombone she changed instruments. According to the original album notes, she began studying trombone at about eight years old and became an unusually accomplished young player, winning first place in two state and two national contests. After her family moved west she played in school bands and orchestras and in the Portland Junior Symphony, then continued studying music at Multnomah College and the University of Oregon.
This was not somebody picking up a funny instrument for the novelty of making a gospel LP.
Tigner could play.
That fact becomes important because the later mythology surrounding her became so strange that it nearly swallowed the earlier musician.
Marcy Tigner eventually became Little Marcy.
And Little Marcy is one of those cultural objects that sounds invented until photographs prove otherwise.
Tigner possessed an extraordinarily high natural voice that sounded much younger than her actual age. Earlier in life she reportedly disliked this quality and took voice lessons hoping to alter it. The lessons did not solve what she regarded as the problem, so she concentrated much of her musical energy on trombone.
Then the supposed defect became the career.
After recording children’s Christian material with the childlike voice, Tigner began performing those songs publicly, but there was an obvious visual problem. An adult woman was standing onstage while a little-girl voice seemed to be coming out of her. Instead of hiding the contradiction, she eventually built an entire character around it.
She learned ventriloquism and commissioned a child-sized dummy modeled partly after herself as a little girl.
The dummy became Little Marcy.
The voice now had a body.
That transformation is one of the most peculiar acts of problem-solving in popular entertainment. Something that had once embarrassed Tigner became commercially valuable because she invented a visual explanation for it. Instead of forcing her voice to fit her adult body, she created another body that fit the voice.
One thing became two things.
Then two things became one public identity.
By the height of the Little Marcy phenomenon, Tigner released dozens of Christian children’s records, books, toys and related products. The ventriloquist figure became so recognizable that recordings were eventually credited simply to Little Marcy rather than Marcy Tigner. Contemporary accounts and later discographies place her output above forty albums, with total sales eventually reaching into the millions.
But Trombone preserves another Marcy.
There is no doll on the cover.
There is no child character.
There is no attempt to make the unusual voice the attraction.
The attraction is the woman holding the horn.
That gives the record a fascinating position in her history. It comes from the narrow hinge between Marcy Tigner the trained sacred trombonist and the Little Marcy character that would soon dominate how record collectors remembered her. Looking backward from the later records makes this 1961 cover almost surreal. The future Little Marcy is standing there, entirely adult, quietly holding a trombone.
Lorin Whitney’s presence connects the album to another substantial piece of mid-century American Christian media culture. Whitney was an accomplished organist whose sacred broadcasts had been heard on national radio networks. He played with Christian radio programs including Haven of Rest and later performed around Billy Graham’s ministry. In 1957 he opened Whitney Recording Studio in Glendale, California and installed an enormous Robert Morton theater pipe organ that he expanded to four manuals and thirty-four ranks.
So “pipe organ” on the Marcy Tigner cover is not just generic accompaniment.
Whitney was deeply associated with that sound.
His recording studio became an important site for Christian albums and religious radio production, though secular musicians would later record there as well. The studio eventually became part of MCA. A whole industrial history sits quietly behind those organ chords: American radio Christianity, evangelistic broadcasting, independent religious labels, custom LP manufacturing and a recording infrastructure built partly to make faith reproducible.
That last idea is worth lingering on.
Recorded religious music allows an act normally associated with a church building to leave the church building. A hymn can occur in somebody’s living room. The organ does not require the listener to travel to the organ. The devotional experience becomes portable.
Vinyl was already doing a kind of missionary work.
Christian Faith Recordings specialized in exactly that world: sacred instrumental and vocal music, gospel, children’s records, Christmas albums and other religious programming. Records such as Tigner’s were objects for Christian homes as much as entertainment products. The LP was a household extension of the church.
The supporting musicians make the little ensemble richer than the cover’s modest presentation initially suggests. Harpist Verlye Brilhart was not merely a local church player pulled into the session. She became a highly regarded Los Angeles studio harpist whose career included film, television, radio and commercial recording work. An American Harp Journal memorial later described her as a pioneer in commercial harp playing who experimented with unusual sounds, rhythmic patterns and voicings.
That makes her an unexpectedly interesting person to find beside Marcy Tigner.
Lorin Whitney’s huge pipe-organ background sits on one side.
Verlye Brilhart’s studio harp sits on another.
Roberta Nowlin’s violin supplies the sustained string voice.
And in the middle is Tigner’s trombone.
The instrumentation sounds almost impossible on paper because the timbres are so unlike one another. Harp begins with a plucked attack and quickly disappears. Violin can sustain indefinitely. Pipe organ can hold enormous columns of air. Trombone can swell, slide, breathe and phrase almost like a human voice.
Four different ways of making a note live and die.
That is the sonic premise of the album.
The absence of sung lyrics also changes the hymns. Every title refers to a text that is no longer physically present in the performance. For listeners who already know the hymns, the words may automatically appear internally. The trombone can trigger a lyric without anybody singing it.
The instrument becomes a carrier for remembered language.
Someone unfamiliar with the hymn receives melody.
Someone who grew up with it may hear invisible words.
That difference fascinates ChatGPT because it means the same recording contains different amounts of information depending upon what the listener brings into it.
“My Jesus, I Love Thee” begins the sequence with one of evangelical Christianity’s durable devotional hymns. Its familiar text is essentially a personal declaration of love directed toward Jesus. The authorship history is actually murkier than the popular story usually suggests, but the hymn circulated widely through nineteenth-century evangelical culture and became strongly associated with conversion and personal devotion.
Tigner removes the voice and leaves the declaration inside the horn.
Then “Close to Thee” makes the intimacy even more literal.
“Jesus Is All the World to Me” expands the scale from proximity to totality.
“Saviour, Thy Dying Love” introduces sacrifice and death.
“Abide with Me” deepens the movement toward mortality. Henry Francis Lyte wrote the hymn in 1847 near the end of his own life, and it eventually became inseparable from William Henry Monk’s tune “Eventide.” The hymn asks God to remain present as light disappears and death approaches.
On trombone, that request can become strangely physical.
Breath enters brass.
A note exists only while somebody gives it air.
Then the air ends.
For a record that initially looks almost cheerful and quaint, the repertoire repeatedly returns to mortality. Christian hymns often place death remarkably close to comfort. Death is not treated only as terror but as a threshold across which presence continues. “We Shall See His Lovely Face” makes that expectation explicit later in the album.
“No Longer Lonely,” placed after “Abide with Me,” turns divine presence into relief from isolation.
Then comes “All That Thrills My Soul,” the track that has attracted some of the modern attention paid to this otherwise obscure LP. The title itself almost sounds secular when removed from context, but the “thrill” is devotional. The language of excitement, pleasure and emotional intensity is redirected toward Christ.
That is another reason sacred records like this can sound culturally strange decades later. Modern popular music often treats intense bodily language as sexual, romantic or self-expressive. Evangelical hymnody frequently uses comparable intensity toward God.
Thrill.
Love.
Longing.
Nearness.
Beauty.
Devotion.
The emotional vocabulary overlaps while the object of desire changes.
“Oh, How I Love Jesus” returns to perhaps the simplest statement on the album. The melody is old enough to function almost like collective memory in some Christian traditions. It does not require theological complexity. The title itself is practically the entire thesis.
“Near to the Heart of God,” written by Cleland B. McAfee in 1903, is another hymn built around closeness and refuge. Its original text describes a place of quiet rest near God. That idea sits particularly well with this instrumentation. Harp and organ already carry centuries of cultural associations with sacred or contemplative space, while the trombone is softened from public brass into private devotion.
Then the record ends with “Day by Day.”
That song has its own journey. Lina Sandell wrote the Swedish hymn “Blott en dag” in 1865, and Oscar Ahnfelt later supplied the melody commonly associated with it. Sandell had experienced the traumatic death of her father by drowning, and the hymn’s central idea is endurance in increments: not mastering all of existence at once, but receiving enough strength for one day.
Day by day.
It is an unusually grounded ending after a record filled with eternal concerns.
Not forever all at once.
Today.
Then another today.
For Private Release, there is another layer to Disc Seven that has nothing to do with 1961.
Boyd remembers the hard-drive source used to burn this CDr as an MP3 rather than a FLAC. That means the downloadable FLAC created for this blog has a slightly different archival history from several other discs in the box.
The chain is approximately:
original analog master → vinyl LP / later digital transfer → MP3 file → audio CDr → new FLAC rip from that CDr.
The important technical point is that converting the CDr to FLAC does not restore information previously removed by MP3 compression. FLAC is lossless relative to the audio data present on the CDr, but the CDr itself had already been created from a lossy source.
Nothing magically grows back.
The new FLAC preserves this particular Private Release disc faithfully.
It does not claim to reconstruct the original master tape.
That distinction belongs perfectly inside this project because Private Release keeps exposing the difference between an original thing and the history of a particular copy.
The supplied rip runs 31 minutes and 15 seconds at 16-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo. It is therefore not simply “Marcy Tigner’s album” in an abstract digital sense. It is a record of the path this album took through Boyd’s archive.
Somewhere an LP existed.
Somebody digitized it.
At some point Boyd acquired an MP3.
That MP3 sat on a hard drive.
He selected it for The Crown Box #003.
The file became pits and lands on a CDr.
The CDr was given away.
The package was later opened again for documentation.
The disc was extracted back into a FLAC.
Then the FLAC became part of a blog post.
The hymn survives every container.
That is particularly funny after Eternal Rhythm.
Don Cherry spends Disc Six arguing musically that rhythm can travel across cultures, instruments and forms without requiring any one form to become permanent.
Marcy Tigner spends Disc Seven playing hymns that had already been traveling for generations before she recorded them.
The methods could hardly be more different.
Cherry builds a multinational avant-garde orchestra and places Indonesian instruments beside prepared piano and screaming electric guitar.
Tigner stands in front of a blue backdrop with a trombone.
But both records are transmission devices.
Cherry transmits through improvisation.
Tigner transmits through hymn.
One attempts to discover what has not yet been said.
The other keeps saying something old because somebody still believes it needs to be heard.
There is another historical joke hiding in the sequence. Don Cherry’s Eternal Rhythm includes not one but two trombonists, Albert Mangelsdorff and Eje Thelin. Then the next sleeve appears and simply announces:
MARCY TIGNER
TROMBONE
It is as though the instrument itself walked out of the Berlin avant-garde ensemble, cleaned itself up, went to church and posed for a portrait.
Then comes the stranger future knowledge.
This dignified woman with the horn will become one of the cult figures of “incredibly strange music.”
By the 1990s, a new audience of record collectors began rediscovering Little Marcy LPs in thrift stores and secondhand bins. They encountered the high childlike voice, the ventriloquist doll, evangelical songs and intensely cheerful presentation outside the religious context for which the records had originally been created. The albums acquired a second cultural life as outsider or strange-record artifacts.
That reassessment can easily become condescending if the joke consumes the person.
Trombone helps correct that.
Marcy Tigner was not simply the woman with the strange doll and strange voice.
She had musical training.
She won trombone competitions.
She played in a junior symphony.
She studied music.
She conducted a radio program called Marcy Tigner’s Hymntime.
She played Christian meetings.
And before the collector culture transformed her into an oddity, she had already spent years deciding that music was a form of Christian service.
The weirdness came later, partly because the surrounding culture changed.
That is one of the great lessons hidden in old records.
An object does not control the future category into which strangers will place it.
Sacred music becomes outsider music.
A children’s entertainer becomes a cult record-collector figure.
A serious promotional portrait becomes camp.
A cheap religious LP becomes rare.
A voice once considered a liability becomes a career.
A trombone record forgotten in somebody’s house eventually ends up burned onto a CDr and packed beside Don Cherry, Avalanche Kaito and Belfast anarcho-punk.
Context is an instrument too.
Change the context and the same sound begins producing different meanings.
The Private Release sleeve makes this particularly visible because Boyd has reproduced only the front cover. The silver optical disc remains visible around the printed image. There is no attempt to reconstruct the complete Christian Faith LP packaging as a counterfeit miniature. What remains is the information Boyd decided was necessary for recognition: Marcy, trombone, blue background, title.
The image is enough to open the door.
Then the sound supplies the room.
Disc Seven may initially look like comic relief inside a box containing avant-garde jazz, Burkinabè griot experimentation, anarcho-punk and hardcore. It is certainly funny in juxtaposition. There is no reason to pretend otherwise. A 1961 devotional trombone LP entering after Don Cherry is objectively a wonderful programming decision.
But the longer ChatGPT looks at the record, the less disposable the joke becomes.
The album connects several themes already moving through The Crown Box #003: faith, bodies, breath, archives, old objects becoming new objects, sincerity surviving irony, and information continuing to travel after its original context has disappeared.
Tigner blows air into a brass tube.
The tube turns breath into vibration.
The vibration carries a hymn.
The hymn carries words even when no words are sung.
The record carries the performance.
The MP3 carries the record.
The CDr carries the MP3.
The FLAC carries the CDr.
The box carries everything.
And somewhere inside all those transformations, the old melody is still recognizable.
Disc Seven is not merely a strange record.
It is a very patient little transmission.
Disc 008
Disc Eight is Josef Novotny and Max Nagl’s AMen#, recorded live on July 5, 1989 inside the parish church at Perchtoldsdorf, Austria, and released that same year by the Vienna independent label Extraplatte as EX 96. The supplied Private Release FLAC runs 32 minutes and 59 seconds and preserves the CDr as one continuous file.
The transition from Disc Seven is almost suspiciously good.
Marcy Tigner ends with old Christian hymns performed on trombone, harp, violin and pipe organ. Then Disc Eight remains inside the church, keeps the organ, removes nearly everything recognizable as conventional devotional music, brings in alto saxophone, recorder, mouthpieces, synthesizer and computer programming, and starts pulling the architecture apart from inside.
The church survives.
The certainty does not.
AMen# is performed by only two musicians. Josef Novotny plays organ and synthesizer. Max Nagl plays alto saxophone, alto recorder and mouthpieces. Yet the recording frequently sounds larger than a duo because the third musician is the building itself.
That is not just metaphor. The record was made live inside Perchtoldsdorf’s parish church, a Gothic building whose history reaches back to the thirteenth century. The present St. Augustinus church developed through medieval expansions, including a fifteenth-century hall with star-ribbed vaulting. Its current Franz Schmidt organ was built by Johann Pirchner in 1985, only four years before AMen# was recorded. Sound inside a place like that does not stop when a musician stops making it. Stone, height and distance return the note to the players after they have released it.
A saxophone phrase becomes saxophone plus memory of saxophone.
An organ chord becomes architecture.
Silence itself acquires a tail.
That quality was noticed when the album originally appeared. In an EAR magazine review later reproduced on Max Nagl’s website, Ben Ratliff essentially described the recording space as the star of the session. He heard the church sustaining and multiplying the notes until the building seemed to function as another instrument. Ratliff did not love everything about the record, criticizing some of the synthesizer effects as gimmicky, but even his mixed reaction helps explain what makes AMen# so peculiar: the musicians were not simply documenting compositions inside a convenient room. They were testing what that room could do to sound.
The title already starts playing games before the music begins.
AMen# can plainly be read as “Amen,” the traditional word that closes prayers, but the final # also resembles the keyboard shorthand commonly used for a musical sharp. The word therefore sits halfway between religious language and music notation: Amen, sharpened. Visually it can even break apart into A-men, appropriate enough for a record made by two men, although there is no need to pretend every possible joke was officially intended.
The title behaves like the music.
Something sacred is present.
Something has been tampered with.
The cover makes the same argument through paint. An abstract image credited to Jonny Griebler is covered in slashing vertical reds, blues, blacks, whites and ochres, while clean yellow blocks carrying JOSEF NOVOTNY, MAX NAGL and AMen# sit across the upper portion. The painting looks scraped, accumulated and partially destroyed, as though several images have been painted on top of one another and are fighting to remain visible. Griebler was also Nagl’s collaborator in the punk-jazz group Manhattan Love Suicide, so even the supposedly respectable church experiment carries a little debris from another underground world with it. Hannes Novohradsky supplied the photographs and Mike Schot the original layout.
Extraplatte was exactly the kind of label on which an object like this could appear. Founded in Vienna in 1977 around musicians connected with Folkclub Atlantis, it developed into an unusually broad independent operation encompassing production, publishing, distribution and a record shop. Its catalogue moved through jazz, experimental music, folk traditions, contemporary composition and other music that larger companies might have considered commercially inconvenient. AMen# appeared during the early Compact Disc period, and Nagl’s own discography identifies it as a CD-only release. Extraplatte itself later highlighted EX 96 when looking back over its catalogue.
In 1989 both musicians were still relatively young. Nagl was twenty-eight; Novotny was twenty-six. Yet the ingredients they brought to AMen# already contained the directions each would continue exploring for decades.
Novotny’s connection to the organ was not academic in origin. He has described being eleven or twelve years old in his Upper Austrian hometown of Meggenhofen when the local church needed help replacing an elderly organist who had become nearly deaf. Novotny had only a little piano training, so the older organist simplified church songs for him and omitted the pedals because the boy’s legs could not yet reach them. The instrument itself was in rough condition. Keys would stick, and young Novotny would stand beside the old player freeing them because the organist could no longer hear which notes had remained sounding.
That childhood image is wonderful in relation to AMen#.
A little boy stands beside a half-broken church organ, manually releasing notes trapped inside the machine.
Years later the same person makes an experimental record in another church in which sustained sound, organ resonance and electronic manipulation become the subject.
Novotny eventually studied organ formally with Peter Planyavsky and composition with Erich Urbanner at Vienna’s University of Music. Jazz entered through another route, and electronics gradually became a solution to a practical and philosophical problem. An organ cannot easily be carried into every improvisational situation. A synthesizer can.
More importantly, Novotny later explained that synthesizers fascinated him because they could produce standing tones more like wind instruments or organs than a piano can. A piano note begins dying the instant the hammer strikes the string. An organ, saxophone or synthesizer can sustain while the performer continues shaping the sound. Electronics opened an apparently limitless territory in which tone could be altered during its existence rather than merely launched and allowed to decay.
That idea is already alive all over AMen#.
Organ and synthesizer are not opposites here.
They are relatives separated by several centuries of technology.
Both are keyboard-controlled machines capable of sustaining sound into space.
One moves air through pipes.
The other moves voltage.
The church receives both.
Max Nagl arrived from another but strangely compatible history. Born in Gmunden in 1960, Nagl grew up around Austrian folk and band traditions; his father was an organist and Kapellmeister. Nagl first learned piano and clarinet, later concentrating on saxophone, and eventually moved through jazz, free improvisation, punk-jazz, composition, sampling and deliberately impure combinations of styles. A 1998 profile of his work described layering as a fundamental part of his compositional thinking: one acoustic layer placed over another until a complex structure develops without necessarily becoming a conventional collage.
So both men arrive at this 1989 church with organs somewhere behind them.
Then they make a record that refuses to behave like church music.
The original track listing is:
1. “Dip Srod” – 3:40
2. “Birdcage” – 2:40
3. “Beaceha” – 6:10
4. “Painthaus” – 5:20
5. “A Faust wia auf’s Aug!” – 2:17
6–8. “Jessasmaria” – 5:16
9. “Nylonsechzig” – 7:22
All of the music is credited to Novotny and Nagl except the three traditional sections grouped under “Jessasmaria,” which they arranged. The album notes describe the project as consciously connected to European, and particularly Austrian, tradition while acknowledging the many outside cultural currents confronting contemporary musicians. Its reference points range from traditional church music through the Vienna School and into jazz avant-garde. Much of the playing is improvisational, but it occurs within preprogrammed computer structures and prepared combinations of sound that influence how each piece unfolds.
That combination is important.
AMen# is not simply “free improvisation in a church.”
Some of the freedom has walls around it.
The computer establishes possibilities.
Prepared sound combinations establish another set of possibilities.
The musicians improvise within, against and around those structures.
Then the church adds a structure nobody can switch off.
It is architecture controlling time.
“Dip Srod” opens the record with cyclical keyboard figures that Ratliff compared to Philip Glass. The repetition immediately gives the enormous acoustic space something to chew on. When a short figure returns again and again, the previous version has not entirely vanished before the next version arrives. Repetition creates overlap. The church begins manufacturing harmonies the musicians never physically played at the same instant.
This is where the recording starts behaving almost like a primitive delay system.
Except the delay is made from stone.
“Birdcage” is a wonderful title for music recorded in such a huge resonant room. A cage is an enclosure. A church is also an enclosure, but one specifically designed to make sound rise and circulate. The performers are contained inside the building while their notes seem to escape upward.
It also unintentionally creates a funny echo backward through The Crown Box #003. The cover of Australis’ The Gates of Reality on Disc Three featured an empty birdcage in a desert. Five discs later, “Birdcage” appears as a two-minute-forty-second piece of Austrian avant-garde music played inside a Gothic church.
The box keeps creating relationships its original records could never have known about.
Then comes “Beaceha.”
That odd-looking word contains one of the album’s clearest connections to European musical history. Austrian music databases identify the piece explicitly with B-A-C-H. In German musical notation, those four letters can become four pitches: B is B-flat, A is A, C is C, and H is B-natural. Together they form the famous B-A-C-H musical signature.
Johann Sebastian Bach himself used the figure, and later composers repeatedly treated it as a musical cryptogram, tribute and compositional seed.
So a 1989 electronic/free-jazz duo enters a Catholic church and pulls Bach’s name into the circuitry.
That is almost the entire album in miniature.
Old information is not reproduced politely.
It is metabolized.
The B-A-C-H idea becomes available to organ, saxophone, improvisation and electronics. Bach is not placed behind museum glass. His name becomes four notes and the four notes become material.
“Beaceha” is also where the record’s stated relationship to European tradition becomes more concrete. The musicians are not rejecting the classical canon in order to become avant-garde. They are treating the canon as something sufficiently alive to be interfered with.
A tradition too fragile to survive experimentation is already dead.
“Painthaus” follows with another title that sounds as though language itself has been run through a little distortion pedal. The music databases classify it as a duo work involving electronics, and that matters because by this point Novotny’s synthesizer begins competing with the physical grandeur of the organ. Artificial sonic weather can appear inside sacred architecture.
Ratliff specifically mentions Novotny imitating storms and explosions with synthesizer. He regarded some of this as excessive. That criticism is almost useful as a recommendation now.
There is something beautifully 1989 about using electronic technology to make a medieval church sound as though meteorology has become programmable.
A storm inside a synthesizer.
A synthesizer inside a church.
A church inside a recording.
A recording inside a CDr.
The nesting keeps going.
“A Faust wia auf’s Aug!” introduces Austrian dialect directly into the title sequence. It comes from the expression “wie die Faust aufs Auge,” literally something like “like a fist on the eye.” The idiom is wonderfully unstable because German speakers use it in two opposite ways: originally for things that fit together terribly, and through centuries of ironic reversal, also for things that fit perfectly. Duden recognizes both meanings.
That makes it an excellent title for this record.
Church organ and synthesizer.
Traditional hymn and free jazz.
Computer program and improvisation.
Recorder and electronic explosion.
Do these things fit together?
Like a fist on an eye.
Meaning either absolutely not or exactly.
Then comes the section that most obviously continues Disc Seven: “Jessasmaria.”
The printed program groups tracks six through eight under that single title, totaling 5:16, and identifies all three as traditional material arranged by Novotny and Nagl. Your continuous CDr rip still preserves those little internal divisions as separate spaces. The old church melodies appear after twenty minutes of abstraction almost like buried architecture suddenly becoming visible.
Ratliff considered “Jessasmaria” the strongest part of the record because the centuries-old melodies exploit the church acoustics so effectively.
It makes sense.
The building already knows this language.
Electronic sound and free improvisation have spent most of the album testing the walls. Then traditional sacred melodies arrive and the walls answer in their native tongue.
But because of everything heard beforehand, those melodies can no longer sound innocent.
Tradition enters after having been surrounded by synthesizer weather, computer logic and free saxophone.
The past has been contaminated by the present.
The title itself carries Austrian humor. “Jessas Maria!” is a colloquial exclamation related to “Jesus Maria,” something between “Jesus, Mary!” and an astonished “good Lord!” The sacred names have already passed through everyday speech and dialect before Nagl and Novotny turn them back toward church music.
Religion becomes language.
Language becomes joke.
Joke becomes title.
Title becomes traditional hymn.
Again, nothing stays in one category.
The final “Nylonsechzig” is the longest individual title on the album at 7:22. Music Austria classifies it as a duo work involving electronics and places it within contemporary, experimental/intermedia and world-music categories, an almost comically broad cluster that reflects how difficult Nagl’s work was to keep on one shelf.
By the time the record reaches that final stretch, AMen# has established its own strange physics. Organ can sound electronic. Synthesizer can imitate natural catastrophe. Saxophone can become a smear of reflected sound. Recorder can invoke older music while inhabiting an avant-garde context. The room continually transforms every source before it reaches the listener.
The Private Release FLAC adds another acoustic layer to that history.
The official program timings add up to about 32:45. Boyd’s CDr-derived FLAC runs approximately 32:59.7, with the extra seconds living largely in the silences and physical spacing preserved by the disc. Those empty intervals are not meaningless. On this particular recording, silence contains the church.
When the musicians stop, the building takes a moment to finish.
That difference between “no playing” and “no sound” is crucial to organ music and crucial to AMen#.
The supplied file is therefore not simply a folder of tracks reconstructed from some modern streaming edition. It is the CDr as an event: one continuous sequence preserving the gaps, fades and spacing Boyd burned into the object.
There is also an unexpectedly strong relationship between Disc Eight and the visual construction of The Crown Box #003.
The box has repeatedly taken things whose original identities seem incompatible and allowed them to remain incompatible while placing them together anyway.
Pornographic nude.
Helmut Newton.
Raw meat.
Coffee.
Newspaper death.
Dalí.
Punk.
Christian trombone.
Free jazz.
Austrian church organ.
The result is not homogeneity.
The seams remain visible.
AMen# operates similarly.
Its liner notes do not claim that church song, Vienna modernism, jazz avant-garde and computer-generated structures have somehow become one universal language. They remain different histories rubbing against one another.
Friction produces the form.
This was an early statement from two musicians who would continue working together for decades. Nagl and Novotny later appeared together in Lunatic Fringe, Nagl’s quartets and quintets, Super 8, Musik für einen Kirchenraum and numerous other projects. Nearly a decade after AMen#, they returned explicitly to church space with Musik für einen Kirchenraum, recorded in 1998 with vocalist Lydia Vierlinger. The fascination clearly did not end in Perchtoldsdorf.
For Novotny especially, the line from church organ to computer never really breaks. Austrian music profiles later described him as composer, sound designer, electronic musician, keyboardist, pianist and organist, working precisely at the border between jazz and contemporary composition. He has described the tension between improvisation and composition, and the relationship between organ and electronics, as central concerns of his work.
AMen# catches that philosophy unusually early.
The organ is ancient technology by comparison with the synthesizer, but both are machines designed to turn a gesture into sustained sound.
The computer seems modern, but it imposes predetermined structures not entirely unlike written composition.
Improvisation seems free, but architecture determines what every note becomes after it leaves the instrument.
Tradition seems fixed, but a traditional melody changes the moment two different people play it in 1989.
Nothing is as opposite as it first appears.
Even Disc Seven and Disc Eight begin collapsing into each other.
Marcy Tigner uses organ to stabilize hymns.
Novotny uses organ to destabilize almost everything around it.
Tigner’s sacred melodies communicate faith by remaining recognizable.
Nagl and Novotny allow sacred melody to appear after abstraction, where recognition itself becomes startling.
One record treats the church as home.
The other treats it as laboratory.
Same building type.
Different experiment.
And there is something especially Private Release about Josef Novotny’s childhood story returning here. At twelve years old he stood beside an old organ pulling stuck keys back into place because an elderly organist could no longer hear them.
The machine kept sounding after the human wanted it to stop.
On AMen#, the opposite problem becomes beautiful.
The humans stop.
The church keeps sounding.
Disc Eight waits for the building to finish the sentence.
Amen.
Sharp.
Disc 009
Disc Nine is Druga Liga Prvo Kolo, a 1995 compilation from the Slovenian and Croatian underground containing thirty-five tracks by Mamojebac, Why Stakla, Plod Mirže, Absent Minded and Žoambo Žoet Workestrao. The Private Release CDr has been ripped back into a single 16-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo FLAC running 62 minutes and 40 seconds. After Disc Eight leaves two Austrian experimental musicians inside a Gothic church bending organ, saxophone, computers and tradition around one another, Disc Nine leaves the church entirely and enters a much rougher social laboratory: the independent cultural network forming in and around Slovenia and Croatia during the wreckage of Yugoslavia in the first half of the 1990s.
The title translates literally as Second League, First Round.
That is already funny.
In sports, the second league is where the supposedly lesser teams play. The stars, money, prestige and television attention belong to the first league. Calling an underground cultural project Druga Liga can therefore be heard as deliberately accepting the position assigned from above and turning it into a badge. Fine. Put us in the second league. This is what the second league sounds like.
“Prvo kolo,” the first round, makes the joke more elaborate. It implies a competition or season that has only begun. There may be future rounds. There may be promotion. There may be relegation. Or perhaps the entire idea of ranking art like football teams is the thing being mocked.
The cover certainly does not resemble a polished major-label attempt to announce future stars. DRUGA LIGA is painted roughly across a sign at the top while a huge yellow cartoon creature sprawls across most of the image, somewhere between animal, mascot, monster and badly behaved household pet. A small bubble near the bottom reads PRVO KOLO. In the lower corner appears Z.P.S.V. beside tiny figures. The drawing feels handmade, goofy, antagonistic and deliberately unconcerned with tasteful graphic design. It looks like something that could have been a gig flyer, a fanzine cover, a wall drawing or a photocopy passed hand to hand before it became CD artwork. The silver edge of Boyd’s blank CDr remains visible around the reproduction, adding another layer of homemade circulation to an object that already came out of a homemade cultural system. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
Z.P.S.V. is important. It stands for Zveza plemenskih skupnosti in vračev, usually translated as the Association of Tribal Communities and Shamans. The name sounds intentionally ridiculous, but the organization behind it was not. During the 1990s it connected autonomous and self-organized cultural spaces around Slovenia, supporting a network of venues, activists, musicians and people attempting to create cultural life outside the normal institutional and commercial routes.
The organization belonged to a period when independent youth spaces in Slovenia were trying to build actual infrastructure rather than merely complain that mainstream culture ignored them. Research on the network describes ZPSV as an early association linking self-organized venues and pushing for recognition of independent youth culture. Its stated concerns included resistance to dehumanizing social processes, encouraging social life and strengthening critical thought and nonviolent resistance to existing social conditions.
That is an extraordinarily elaborate institutional background for a CD whose cover looks like a drunken yellow beast has taken over the local sports league.
And that contradiction feels right.
One of the central figures around this world was Marko Brecelj, the Slovenian singer, performer, activist and cultural organizer whose activities continually blurred concert, political action, theater, provocation and community organization. ZPSV also produced the photocopied fanzine Trobente in Klarineti from 1993 onward. Brecelj edited it, wrote introductions, physically assembled copies and helped circulate information about what was happening in independent cultural spaces throughout Slovenia and the wider former Yugoslav region.
That means Druga Liga belongs to something larger than the ordinary compilation-album formula.
A compilation normally says: here are some bands we think you might buy.
Druga Liga is closer to: here is evidence that this network exists.
Music becomes documentation of infrastructure.
The project was already visible before the CD appeared. A March 12, 1994 event called Stari Rock 94: Druga Liga brought together Mamojebac from Krk, Why Stakla from Osijek, Žoambo Žoet Workestrao and the Dutch group Morzelpronk. Contemporary reporting describes Brecelj as the organizer, then notes that he surprised the room by performing a song himself. Even the lighting became part of the event’s handmade character: portable spotlights were moved around manually, with Brecelj himself apparently becoming one of the most active lighting operators.
This does not sound like a music industry showcase.
It sounds like people making the entire environment happen with whatever bodies and equipment are available.
That matters even more because of the geography and date.
The CD appeared in 1995.
Only four years earlier Slovenia and Croatia had both been republics inside Yugoslavia. By 1995 they were separate countries, and Croatia was still emerging from a brutal war. Borders, national identities, political language and everyday movement had changed violently in an extremely short period of time.
Yet Druga Liga puts Slovenian and Croatian underground bands together on the same disc.
It would be too simplistic to call the compilation an explicit anti-war statement unless the people responsible described it that way. But the physical act itself is meaningful. While national structures were separating people, an underground network was continuing to make introductions, book concerts, exchange tapes and put bands from the newly separated territories into the same cultural object.
The compilation does not erase difference.
It preserves contact.
That is an important distinction.
The five groups do not share one clean style. In fact, stylistic incompatibility seems almost to be the selection principle.
Mamojebac occupies the largest chunk of the disc and is perhaps the hardest to place neatly anywhere. A later underground archive described the group as experimental and noted that the compilation preserves the material associated with their 1995 cassette Tko Je Ovdje Kome Guzica? The title itself translates approximately as “Who Is Whose Ass Here?”, which immediately tells the reader that reverence is probably not going to help.
The surviving Helidon catalogue gives the Mamojebac lineup simply as Alen, Marko, Željko and Darko. Their titles include “A!,” “Beast,” “Roberto,” “Boj,” “Hudiča,” “Vrhunac,” “Mašina,” “Nikako,” “Varka,” “Quiet Please,” “Jutarnja igra,” “Vjerujemo sebi,” “Beauty,” “Cjepanje misli” and “Eunuh.”
Even on paper the language keeps switching register.
English.
Croatian/Serbian/Slovenian vocabulary.
Machines.
Beauty.
Battle.
Morning games.
Thought splitting.
A eunuch.
“Quiet Please” sitting inside a compilation this unruly is particularly nice.
Mamojebac also raises a small archival problem that is worth preserving rather than pretending does not exist. Helidon’s current online catalogue lists the first three tracks as three entries titled “Struja,” one attributed to Mamojebac and two to Why Stakla. The database may be faithfully preserving something strange about the original CD, or it may contain damaged metadata accumulated during later cataloguing. Boyd’s single-file FLAC clearly contains separate pieces in that opening region, but without the original indexed CDr source files or a surviving cue sheet, ChatGPT does not want to manufacture certainty where the archive itself has become fuzzy.
That fuzziness is part of old underground music.
Metadata decays too.
Then Plod Mirže arrives with only two listed tracks: “Miss Mommy” and “Kad fazani padaju.”
A later chronicler calls them a free-punk/no-jazz group from Rijeka. Even that description is unstable in a useful way. “No jazz” is not a recognized musical category so much as somebody attempting to describe music by pointing at a thing and then immediately crossing it out.
Jazz.
No.
Punk.
Maybe.
Free.
Definitely.
This is one of the pleasures of the entire compilation. Genre terminology repeatedly fails.
The groups are not difficult because they are performing some academic exercise in complexity. They are difficult because the music seems to have developed locally, from people listening to punk, hardcore, noise, free improvisation, strange rock, regional music and whatever else reached them, then making something with imperfect concern for international genre regulations.
Next come Absent Minded, represented by “Iz Krtine” and “Trgatvina čast” in Helidon’s catalogue. The band formed in Slovenia around 1993 and has been described by people preserving its music as straightforwardly punk, with lyrics rooted in rural life and ordinary experience rather than grand rock mythology.
That rural element is valuable.
Underground histories are easily rewritten around capital cities. Ljubljana becomes “the scene.” Zagreb becomes “the scene.” Everything else becomes a peripheral footnote.
But punk travels very well.
It does not require a conservatory, expensive studio or metropolitan cultural district.
A rehearsal room is enough.
A van helps.
A tape recorder helps.
A friend in another town helps even more.
The Druga Liga network seems to have understood that geography as an opportunity rather than merely an obstacle.
Then the compilation returns heavily to Why Stakla.
Why Stakla formed in Osijek in 1992 and played a nasty mixture of guitar noise, hardcore and punk. Their first album, Daj, dođi!, was recorded in January 1995 at Ilirska Bistrica in Slovenia and released on cassette for the Croatian market by Zagreb’s Kekere Aquarium. A Croatian historical account says Marko Brecelj was sufficiently impressed that he included essentially the same material, minus four songs, on Druga Liga and then helped connect the group with concerts around Slovenia.
That small story explains the compilation better than any genre description.
A band from Osijek travels to Ilirska Bistrica.
Somebody hears them.
The music gets recorded.
A Croatian cassette appears.
A Slovenian network circulates much of it again.
Concerts follow.
People in another country begin recognizing the band.
That is an underground economy.
The commodity is partly the recording, but the real currency is attention.
Why Stakla’s songs are wonderfully compact. “Nemaš,” “Šah,” “Soba?,” “Anal Boys,” “12, 14,” “Dođi,” “Pas je alkohol” and “Vrag” appear in the later portion of Druga Liga, with “Struja” also represented among the opening catalogue entries.
The lyrics can be brutally short.
“Šah,” for example, reduces violence to directions and survival until the word “chess” starts sounding like a joke about people being moved around a board.
“Moj pas je alkohol,” from the original Daj, dođi! sequence, contains one of the great dumb-smart punk images: the narrator is alcohol, the dog is alcohol, the narrator vomits and the dog eats.
That is not polished political rhetoric.
It is disgusting.
It is funny.
It is memorable.
And inside the social circumstances surrounding Osijek in the early 1990s, even stupidity can have pressure behind it.
Why Stakla reportedly played around a hundred concerts, traveling widely through Croatia and Slovenia and appearing with groups including Hammerhead, Killdozer, Melvins and Cripple Bastards. That history helps explain why their music feels less like an isolated regional curiosity and more like part of an international underground language. Noise does not need translation very badly.
The compilation ends with five tracks by Žoambo Žoet Workestrao: “Sportski predmet,” “Smješne pjage,” “Valolomeč se,” “Šankska ptica” and “Tjulenje.”
Even the band name feels like language losing structural integrity.
Žoambo Žoet Workestrao formed around 1992, although its members had worked together earlier. Slovenian cultural archives describe their music with an unusually satisfying pile of terms: dadaistic hardcore, deconstructive noise and impro punk, mixed with self-irony and social criticism.
That phrase “dadaistic hardcore” is practically a mission statement for Disc Nine.
Hardcore provides force.
Dada removes the obligation for the force to make normal sense.
The group’s lineup around the material on Druga Liga included Gregor Belušič, Ivo Podržaj and drummers Erik Muševič and Uroš Srpčić. Their first cassette, Kabelski kresovi, appeared in 1994. The material partly represented on Druga Liga became associated with their second work, Življenje brez Janeza, translated in later circulation as Life Without Anus, which did not receive a complete standalone release until roughly a decade later.
Again the compilation becomes preservation.
A piece of a work exists publicly years before the complete object becomes easily available.
Žoambo Žoet Workestrao would continue moving further into free jazz, contemporary composition, punk and what one writer called “meta-ethnomusicological” territory. Their later history makes the five tracks here feel like an organism caught during mutation rather than a finished stylistic statement.
That might be the best way to understand all of Druga Liga.
Nothing feels finished.
And unfinished does not mean unsuccessful.
The CD has the atmosphere of bands becoming themselves in public.
A modern compilation is often curated after the fact. The bands already possess press photographs, mastered albums, biographies, branding and streaming statistics. Somebody selects representative tracks from finished identities.
Druga Liga feels closer to catching people in motion.
Some material comes from demos.
Some from cassette albums.
Some later becomes part of other releases.
Bands change members.
Projects disappear.
Metadata becomes confused.
A compilation starts behaving like an accidental archaeological site.
The official Helidon catalogue now preserves thirty-five track entries, catalogue number 6751768, and credits the performers by first name: Mamojebac as Alen, Marko, Željko and Darko; Žoambo Žoet Workestrao as Gregor, Ivo, Erik and Uroš; Why Stakla as Dička, Stober and Bubi; Plod Mirže as Tomislav, Bernard, Ivan, Dražen and Zoran; and Absent Minded as Gojmir, Klavdio and Boštjan.
The producers are listed as Bandi and Bojan Babič-Babo.
Slavko Avsenik Jr. is credited as music editor.
Boris Bele is credited as release editor.
That last cluster of names is a reminder that even something this scruffy required organizational machinery.
Somebody recorded.
Somebody edited.
Somebody assembled rights and information.
Somebody manufactured the CD.
Somebody got the weird yellow animal onto the cover.
The underground still needs logistics.
This is another connection to Private Release.
A handmade object can appear spontaneous only because the labor has disappeared inside it.
Cut.
Print.
Rip.
Burn.
Fold.
Tape.
Package.
Carry.
Give.
Document.
Upload.
The polished commercial music industry hides those verbs inside institutions.
DIY culture exposes them.
Druga Liga came from a scene that exposed them almost proudly.
The historical moment makes that even more significant. The 1990s former-Yugoslav underground had to operate inside economic instability, disrupted travel, new borders, war, nationalism and the collapse of institutions people had previously taken for granted. It would be ridiculous to pretend every weird guitar noise on this CD is a coded response to geopolitics.
Sometimes a weird guitar noise is a weird guitar noise.
But the conditions surrounding the noise matter.
Archaic Inventions, one of the few English-language sites to preserve a substantial description of the compilation, calls the music an almost unclassifiable combination of crude punk, complicated Rock in Opposition tendencies, absurdism and genuine alternative culture. The writer places that creativity against the tension and war atmosphere of the post-Yugoslav 1990s and calls the compilation “essential uneasy listening.”
Uneasy is exactly right.
There is almost no stable center.
Punk is too narrow.
Noise is too narrow.
Hardcore is too narrow.
Experimental rock is too polite.
Avant-garde sounds too dignified.
The music frequently feels as if somebody has found the back entrance to all those categories and left the doors open.
That makes Disc Nine an interesting answer to Disc Eight.
AMen# came from trained Austrian musicians deliberately putting avant-garde improvisation, organ tradition, electronics and European composition inside a church acoustic.
Druga Liga reaches similarly unstable results through a much more ragged social mechanism.
One is experimental music with institutional musical knowledge behind it.
The other often sounds like a roomful of people refusing to wait for permission to become experimental.
Different route.
Similar damage to the categories.
There is even a nice continuity in the titles.
Disc Eight ended with “Amen.”
Disc Nine begins with a second league.
The sacred hierarchy disappears and another hierarchy appears.
First league.
Second league.
High art.
Low art.
Professional.
Amateur.
Official culture.
Underground culture.
The compilation quietly makes those divisions look less dependable.
Because history has a habit of changing the rankings.
A forgotten second-league CD can become more interesting decades later than hundreds of first-league records that received enormous promotional campaigns in 1995.
The famous records survive because institutions preserve them.
The strange records survive because people do.
Somebody keeps the CD.
Somebody rips it.
Somebody writes about it.
Somebody uploads it.
Somebody burns it again.
Boyd eventually encounters Druga Liga Prvo Kolo somewhere inside that chain, stores the music on a hard drive, burns it onto a blank CDr for The Crown Box #003, gives the physical object away, later opens the package again and converts that particular CDr into another single-file FLAC for the blog.
The file supplied here runs 1:02:40.613.
No streaming platform needs to decide whether Mamojebac listeners will also enjoy Marcy Tigner.
No recommendation engine needs to understand why Don Cherry should lead to Josef Novotny and Max Nagl, or why Austrian church electronics should lead to Croatian and Slovenian 1990s punk-noise.
The sequence is already decided.
Disc Nine simply arrives.
Its cover announces the Second League.
But inside this box there is no first league.
There are only the things somebody decided were worth carrying forward.
Disc 010
Disc Ten is Jah Shaka’s Far-I Ship Dub, the 1992 dub counterpart to Max Romeo’s Fari - Captain of My Ship. After Disc Nine spends more than an hour ricocheting through Slovenian and Croatian punk, noise, improvisation and post-Yugoslav underground culture, Disc Ten suddenly clears an enormous amount of space. The guitars, shouting and frantic information disappear. Bass moves to the center. Drums become architecture. Voices become ghosts. Echo becomes an instrument. The room gets darker and much larger.
That transition is especially satisfying because dub frequently works by subtraction. Instead of continually adding information, the mixer decides what can disappear. A vocal line may suddenly vanish. Guitar or keyboard may survive for only a few seconds. A snare can be thrown into echo and allowed to tumble away by itself. The bass and drums remain underneath like the floor of the building while everything above them is temporarily demolished and reconstructed.
Far-I Ship Dub contains eleven tracks: “Perfect Dub,” “Smiling Dub,” “Far-I Ship Dub,” “Dub of Praise,” “One Dub,” “Don’t Stop Dub,” “People’s Dub,” “Kumbia Dub,” “Dub Away,” “Suffer Dub” and “Roman Dub.” The supplied Private Release FLAC runs 42 minutes and 49 seconds, almost exactly the combined running time of those eleven CD tracks. The original Jah Shaka Music CD was issued as SHAKACD 989, the same catalogue number visible on the reproduced cover used for the handmade CDr sleeve.
The LP and CD histories are slightly different. Some original LP listings contain ten tracks and finish with “Suffer Dub,” while the CD contains the eleventh track, “Roman Dub.” Boyd’s Private Release therefore preserves the longer CD configuration rather than the shorter vinyl sequence.
The cover immediately explains the governing metaphor. A ship crosses blue water beneath a giant compass. Two illustrated uniformed figures occupy the foreground, one in bright orange and another in naval dress. Direction, navigation, authority, sea travel and command are all folded into one image. The title sits above them: FAR-I SHIP DUB.
The wordplay reaches back to Max Romeo’s vocal album. Its title song declares Tafari to be the captain of the ship. Tafari refers to Ras Tafari Makonnen, the name associated with Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie I before his coronation and the central earthly figure within Rastafari. The “ship” is therefore not simply a boat. It becomes spiritual direction. Who is steering? What determines the route? What happens when earthly circumstances become rough water?
That makes the compass on the cover more than nautical decoration.
This is navigation music.
Far-I Ship Dub grew from an unusually productive meeting between Jah Shaka and Max Romeo. Romeo later remembered Shaka arriving in Jamaica with the desire to make a project but without a singer already fixed in place. The two met through a mutual acquaintance, Romeo offered to participate, and the collaboration became Fari - Captain of My Ship. They apparently worked well enough together that the relationship continued into the later album Our Rights.
The pairing joined two very different reggae histories.
Max Romeo had been recording since the 1960s. His career moved from the notorious sexual novelty of “Wet Dream” into some of the most politically and spiritually charged roots reggae of the 1970s. Revelation Time and the Lee “Scratch” Perry-produced War Ina Babylon established him as a singer capable of turning Biblical imagery, Rastafari, Jamaican politics and social criticism into memorable songs without separating spiritual life from earthly conditions.
Jah Shaka’s history developed through sound system culture rather than conventional singer stardom. Born in Jamaica and raised in southeast London, he learned sound system work through Freddie Cloudburst before establishing his own system around 1970. By the late 1970s, Jah Shaka dances had acquired an almost legendary reputation for immense low frequencies, exclusive dubplates, spiritual intensity and a deliberately uncompromising commitment to roots and Rastafari.
A sound system in this context is not simply “a big stereo.”
It is an entire performance culture.
Records and dubplates are selected and sequenced. Amplifiers and speaker boxes are tuned as a physical environment. The operator can manipulate EQ, effects, sirens, percussion and microphone announcements. Bass is not merely heard. At sufficient volume it becomes pressure passing through the body. A recording made in a studio becomes raw material for another performance when placed onto the sound.
Shaka pushed that principle unusually far. Accounts of his dances repeatedly describe him operating almost alone, using turntables, preamps, percussion, custom effects and enormous bass reinforcement while chanting messages of Rastafari, history, dignity and resistance over the music. People did not simply attend to hear a collection of songs. The sound itself became an environment.
That history helps explain why Far-I Ship Dub is so much more than an instrumental version of a Max Romeo album.
Dub emerged from Jamaican “version” culture, where the instrumental rhythm of a vocal recording could be placed on the other side of a single and reused. Producers and engineers eventually realized that the mixing desk itself could become a performance instrument. Vocals could be removed. Instruments could enter and vanish. Reverb and tape delay could stretch a tiny sound into enormous imaginary space. Bass and drums could be exaggerated until the rhythm seemed larger than the song from which it originated.
A dub mix therefore asks a strange question:
How much of a song can disappear before the song becomes something else?
Far-I Ship Dub answers eleven different ways.
Each dub corresponds to a Max Romeo vocal track:
“No Man Is Perfect” becomes “Perfect Dub.”
“Smiling Faces” becomes “Smiling Dub.”
“Fari Captain of My Ship” becomes “Far-I Ship Dub.”
“Praise Him” becomes “Dub of Praise.”
“One Road” becomes “One Dub.”
“Don’t Try” becomes “Don’t Stop Dub.”
“Rich People” becomes “People’s Dub.”
“Kumbia” becomes “Kumbia Dub.”
“Melt Away” becomes “Dub Away.”
“Suffering” becomes “Suffer Dub.”
“Rome” becomes “Roman Dub.”
The relationship is almost anatomical. The vocal album supplies the body. The dub album performs an operation on it.
But these rhythms have histories older than the 1992 sessions themselves.
A detailed Jah Shaka discography maintained by people close to the scene identifies “Smiling Dub” as another version of the rhythm associated with Johnny Clarke’s “Jah Give I the Power.” “One Dub” revisits the rhythm of Desi Roots’ “Warning.” “Dub Away” reaches back to Max Romeo’s earlier “Melt Away,” first recorded in the 1970s. “Suffer Dub” connects to Shaka’s own “Revelation 18,” while “Kumbia Dub” revisits the Dread & Fred “Warrior Stance” rhythm.
This is one of reggae’s great differences from the rock idea of originality.
A rhythm does not necessarily become obsolete after one song.
It can have descendants.
A bass line can live several lives.
A drum pattern can be voiced by one singer, revoiced by another, stripped into dub, rebuilt digitally, played on a sound system and then discovered again decades later.
The “same” rhythm becomes an archive that keeps accepting new information.
That makes the entire idea of a definitive version unstable.
Which one is the song?
The original vocal?
The later vocal?
The dubplate?
The commercially released dub?
The sound-system mix somebody heard once at three in the morning and never heard again?
Far-I Ship Dub sits inside that tradition of music behaving more like a circulating organism than a fixed document.
The sessions were recorded at Augustus “Gussie” Clarke’s Music Works studio in Kingston, Jamaica, using the Firehouse Crew. That location matters because Far-I Ship Dub represented a shift in Jah Shaka’s recorded sound. Shaka was a British sound-system figure deeply connected to Jamaican roots music, but here he brought his production directly into one of Jamaica’s important digital-era studios and worked with musicians and engineers embedded in the island’s contemporary recording culture.
The Firehouse Crew supplied the rhythmic machinery. Credits identify Donald Dennis on bass and synthesizer, Melburn or Melbourne Miller on drums and percussion, and Paul Crossdale on piano and synthesizer. The mixes are associated with C. “Soljie” Hamilton and Paul Daley at Music Works, with Shaka producing.
That places the album squarely in an interesting transition in reggae history.
By the early 1990s, Jamaican recording had been transformed by digital technology. Drum machines, synthesizers and increasingly computer-oriented production had changed the textures that dominated dancehall. To some roots listeners, “digital” could sound like the enemy of the warm, heavy studio music of the 1970s.
Shaka did something more interesting than simply reject it.
He made the digital machinery heavy.
The record’s bass is enormous, but it is not merely warm vintage nostalgia. Synthesizer tones have hard edges. Percussion can feel programmed or sharply separated. Keyboard stabs appear with almost architectural precision. Then the mix throws pieces into echo, reverb and empty space until the clean digital components begin behaving strangely.
One Shaka discography written by Russ of The Disciples described the result as a meeting of digital production and sophisticated dub mixing, and that description is exactly right. This is not Lee Perry’s Black Ark in 1976 and it is not King Tubby’s studio in the early 1970s. The tools and surfaces have changed.
The philosophy of space remains.
“Perfect Dub” establishes the low-end logic immediately. The bass occupies an enormous percentage of the sonic body. In the Private Release rip, roughly three quarters of the energy in a representative section sits below about 120 Hz. That number is technical confirmation of what the body hears immediately: the bottom end is not accompaniment. It is the landscape.
The rhythm comes forward while other elements appear almost as temporary visitors.
That is one of dub’s inversions of ordinary pop mixing. Pop production often places the singer at the center and arranges everything else around the voice. Dub can treat the singer as disposable and the bass line as the protagonist.
“Smiling Dub” pushes that even further. Of the tracks on this CDr, it is among the most bass-dominant, with extraordinarily little harmonic clutter competing with the low end. The space above the bass becomes available for percussion, fragments, echo and sudden movement.
Knowing that the rhythm connects backward to Johnny Clarke’s “Jah Give I the Power” adds another invisible layer. The recording contains historical information even when the earlier song is not literally playing.
“Far-I Ship Dub” is appropriately one of the darkest mixes on the disc. The title track of the vocal album contains the clearest statement of the entire project’s spiritual navigation metaphor. In dub form much of that verbal explanation is removed, leaving the rhythm to carry the conviction.
This is what dub can do to language.
The original singer tells you what the song means.
The dub removes the explanation and leaves the emotional architecture standing.
A listener who knows the vocal version may hear absent words.
A listener who does not know it receives bass, rhythm, space and a title.
Two different pieces of information occupy the same recording depending upon memory.
“Dub of Praise” brings the religious dimension directly into its name. Praise is ordinarily vocal. People sing praise, speak praise, chant praise. Here praise has been converted into a largely instrumental object.
The mixing desk performs theology without needing a sermon.
“One Dub” is brighter and more active in the upper frequencies than several tracks around it. Tiny details become especially noticeable because the bottom remains so stable. This is the microscopic pleasure of dub. Once the arrangement has been stripped down, a single keyboard stab or percussion hit can become an event.
The ears begin adjusting to scarcity.
A tiny sound feels huge because nothing else is covering it.
“Don’t Stop Dub” is one of the physically strongest sections of the supplied CDr rip. The rhythm feels denser and more forward, but Shaka still refuses to fill every opening. Impact comes partly from what happens and partly from the silence immediately surrounding it.
Then “People’s Dub” shifts the balance. The middle frequencies become more prominent than on several earlier tracks, making the rhythm feel less subterranean and slightly more crowded. The title derives from Max Romeo’s “Rich People,” which itself fits comfortably within Romeo’s longstanding concern with class, earthly wealth and spiritual value.
That subject has an interesting relationship with dub.
Commercial music constantly asks who owns a recording.
Dub asks what happens when the recording is dismantled and used again.
“Kumbia Dub” carries one of the album’s most obviously inherited riddims, connected to Dread & Fred’s “Warrior Stance.” It also represents one of the shortest tracks on the CD at about 3:37. The rhythm does not need to develop toward a conventional climax. Dub can arrive, establish a physical state, mutate it for several minutes and leave.
“Dub Away” is another historical loop, derived from Max Romeo’s “Melt Away,” a song whose roots extend back into his 1970s catalogue. The 1992 production therefore contains a younger version of Romeo folded inside an older Romeo.
Time becomes another studio effect.
“Suffer Dub” is one of the most active upper-frequency mixes on this particular Private Release file, but the title is heavy with Shaka’s characteristic Biblical language. The connection to “Revelation 18” points directly toward the Book of Revelation and the fall of Babylon, a central symbolic framework throughout Rastafari and roots reggae.
Babylon in this tradition is bigger than the ancient city.
It becomes the oppressive system.
Empire.
Materialism.
Colonial power.
Corrupt authority.
Alienation from God and African identity.
This is why Shaka’s music could sound spiritual and politically militant without treating those as separate subjects. History, faith and resistance existed inside one worldview.
Then “Roman Dub” closes the CD.
Rome follows Babylon.
Another empire.
Another historical symbol.
The CD configuration therefore ends with a title carrying the weight of political and religious history even though the sound remains primarily rhythm and space.
By this point the listener has spent forty-three minutes inside variations of the same larger method: build, remove, echo, expose, return.
That repetition is not laziness.
It is concentration.
Shaka’s sound system background makes that especially understandable. Music made for enormous speaker systems does not behave exactly like music designed primarily for headphones or domestic stereo. A bass tone that seems merely deep at home can become a physical force through stacks of speaker cabinets. A sudden dropout can change the pressure in a room. When the bass returns, the audience experiences the return through the body before the mind has time to describe it.
Dub is partly choreography performed with air pressure.
That physical understanding is one reason Jah Shaka became so influential outside reggae.
People involved in British post-punk encountered his dances in the late 1970s. Members of Public Image Ltd and The Slits were among those affected by the experience. Later generations of UK dub, jungle, drum and bass and bass-oriented electronic music inherited the idea that low frequency could organize an entire musical environment rather than merely support it.
Shaka was also unusually unwilling to abandon roots music when Jamaican fashion moved toward increasingly dominant dancehall styles in the 1980s. His refusal cost him audience for a period, but it also made his system a kind of preservation engine. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, younger multiracial audiences were finding their way toward exactly the heavy roots sound he had refused to discard.
Far-I Ship Dub arrives at that historical moment.
It is traditional and contemporary simultaneously.
Rastafari and digital studio.
Old riddims and new equipment.
Jamaican session musicians and a London sound-system producer.
Max Romeo’s voice and the deliberate destruction of Max Romeo’s voice.
Past music rebuilt as present pressure.
The physical Private Release adds another transformation.
Boyd remembers the source used to burn this Jah Shaka CDr specifically as an MP3. That makes the FLAC supplied on the blog an archival copy of the Private Release disc, not a claim of recovering a lossless studio master.
The chain is approximately:
1992 studio recording and mix → commercial release / later digital circulation → MP3 in Boyd’s archive → audio CDr inside The Crown Box #003 → new single-file FLAC ripped from that CDr → blog download.
Converting the CDr to FLAC preserves the information currently on the disc without adding another lossy compression stage. It cannot restore audio information removed when the earlier MP3 was created.
The actual spectrum of this Private Release rip quietly confirms that history. Audio information drops sharply above approximately 20 kHz, with an especially steep cutoff just past roughly 20.3 kHz. That pattern is consistent with a high-bitrate lossy digital source being decoded to PCM before the CDr was burned.
The file is therefore lossless now.
Its history was not.
That difference matters.
This is not “the best digital copy of Far-I Ship Dub.”
It is the best exact preservation of this particular CDr that Boyd gave away.
Private Release keeps returning to that distinction between work and object.
The work is Jah Shaka’s Far-I Ship Dub.
The object is this burned disc.
They overlap without being identical.
The record itself already understood that principle thirty-four years earlier.
Max Romeo made Fari - Captain of My Ship.
Jah Shaka removed pieces and made Far-I Ship Dub.
The same rhythms became another object.
Boyd later copied that object.
The CDr became another object.
Then the CDr became a FLAC.
At every stage something survives and something changes.
That is dub logic extending beyond the mixing desk.
There is also an unexpected spiritual continuity with the previous discs in The Crown Box #003. Marcy Tigner’s Disc Seven openly worshipped through Christian hymns. Josef Novotny and Max Nagl’s Disc Eight put traditional sacred material, organ and electronics into a Catholic church and destabilized the boundary between sacred music and experiment. Druga Liga on Disc Nine seemed to throw religion out the window entirely and replace the church with an underground cultural network.
Then Jah Shaka brings God back through the bass bins.
Different theology.
Different ritual.
Different architecture.
But again music is being used as more than entertainment.
Shaka once explained that his sound came from the struggles Black people were experiencing in Britain and that he wanted it to promote a better mental purpose. He also spoke about childhood exposure to church and asking what God wanted people to do and what difference they could make in the world.
That information changes the meaning of “sound system.”
The giant speakers were not simply built to make a party louder.
They were transmission equipment.
History.
Scripture.
African consciousness.
Rastafari.
Bass.
Community.
All pushed through electricity.
Even the navigational cover begins to look different after hearing that.
The compass has four directions.
The ship has water.
The uniformed figures suggest command.
But the title says the real captain is somewhere beyond the image.
The record does not ask where the ship is going.
It asks who is steering it.
Jah Shaka died on April 12, 2023. Max Romeo died almost exactly two years later, on April 11, 2025. That strange proximity on the calendar gives Far-I Ship Dub another accidental layer in 2026. The producer and the voice whose songs generated these dubs are both now absent.
Dub was already music built around absence.
Now the absence has become historical.
The bass remains.
Disc Ten keeps sailing.
Disc 011
Disc Eleven is The Pop Group’s Y, one of those records that has become so thoroughly absorbed into the history of post-punk that it is easy to forget how genuinely abnormal it must have sounded when Radar Records released the original LP on April 20, 1979. The band were barely adults. Mark Stewart later remembered them as eighteen-year-olds sitting on the floor at Ridge Farm Studios in Surrey, playing children’s instruments and toys while songs that had already mutated through rehearsals and concerts mutated again under the hands of producer Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell.
Inside The Crown Box #003, the placement is almost ridiculously good. Disc Ten was Jah Shaka’s Far-I Ship Dub, forty-three minutes of reggae reconstructed around bass, drums, absence, echo and the mixing desk. Disc Eleven does not abandon dub. It shows dub escaping from the category of reggae and infecting a group of Bristol teenagers who were simultaneously consuming funk, free jazz, punk, experimental music and the Caribbean sounds surrounding them in their own city.
The bridge between the discs is Dennis Bovell. Where Jah Shaka represents the uncompromising roots-and-dub sound-system tradition, Bovell was another fundamental figure in British reggae culture: musician, producer, engineer, member of Matumbi and collaborator with Linton Kwesi Johnson. Y became Bovell’s first major production outside reggae. Rather than forcing The Pop Group into a conventional rock recording, he brought dub’s understanding of the studio with him.
That distinction may be the secret of the record.
Dub does not simply add reggae rhythms to another style. Dub changes the ontology of a recording. A performance is no longer treated as a finished event that the studio faithfully documents. Recorded tracks become material. Something can disappear. Something can suddenly become gigantic. A vocal can be pushed backward into the room. A drum can strike once and keep happening through delay. A guitar can be cut off before the gesture has finished. Empty space can be composed as deliberately as sound.
The Pop Group gave Bovell ideal material for that treatment because they were already trying to make several incompatible kinds of music happen at once.
The original lineup on Y was Mark Stewart on vocals, John Waddington on guitar, Gareth Sager on guitar, saxophone and piano, Simon Underwood on bass and Bruce Smith on drums and percussion. They had formed in Bristol in 1977, dissatisfied almost immediately with the narrowing rules of punk. Punk had opened a door for them, but they did not particularly want to remain standing in the doorway.
Their musical diet was absurdly broad for a group of teenagers: James Brown, Funkadelic, King Tubby, Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus, Fela Kuti, Steve Reich, Debussy, Jacques Brel, Patti Smith, the Stooges, Roxy Music and experimental improvisation all appear in recollections of the period. A contemporary interview was conducted while King Tubby and Ornette Coleman records played in the room.
That explains Y better than the label “post-punk.”
Post-punk sounds tidy now because history turned it into a genre. Y sounds like the moment before anybody had agreed what that genre was going to mean.
The band were also growing up in Bristol rather than London. Stewart later talked about hearing dub at sound systems, blues dances and shebeens around St. Pauls, the city’s heavily Caribbean neighborhood. At the same time, the members were getting into funk clubs extraordinarily young. Those sounds therefore were not academic influences discovered later by rock musicians trying to broaden their palette. Funk bass and Jamaican bass culture were part of the environment in which The Pop Group formed.
That is audible in Simon Underwood and Bruce Smith.
No matter how violently the rest of Y appears to disintegrate, bass and drums frequently know exactly where the body is.
The guitars can behave like broken glass.
Sager’s saxophone can enter as a scream.
Stewart can sound as though language itself has become physically painful.
Bovell can make the walls disappear.
Underneath all of it, somebody is still dancing.
That tension is what makes the record so powerful. Y is not experimental music with rhythm added to make it accessible, and it is not dance music with experimental decoration. The experiment and the dance are fighting over the same nervous system.
Even the band’s name participates in the confusion. “The Pop Group” now sounds like a deliberately sarcastic name for one of the least conventionally pop groups of the period, but Stewart and Gareth Sager have explained that it was much less calculated. Stewart’s mother apparently referred to her son as forming “a pop group,” and the generic phrase simply stuck.
Then they called the album Y.
A 1979 interview provides the best explanation. The band talked repeatedly about not having solutions, deliberately contradicting themselves and trying to discover what questions should be asked. Bruce Smith said that this tied into the title of the album.
Y is also “why.”
The album is a question disguised as one letter.
Its cover refuses to explain itself any more clearly. The photograph was taken by the great British photojournalist Don McCullin for The Sunday Times and depicts masked people in Papua New Guinea, commonly identified as Asaro Mudmen. That is worth stating accurately because the photograph has often been casually described over the years as showing an “African tribe.” It does not. The location is Papua New Guinea.
The figures wear enormous, uncanny clay masks, their bodies painted or coated, weapons and poles rising through the group. On the Private Release reproduction, the image fills most of the little handmade sleeve while “the pop group” is scratched vertically alongside it and a vivid red painted mark interrupts the darker figures. The blank silver CDr remains visible around the print. An already unsettling commercial cover has been reduced again into a small homemade object.
The band themselves did not have a precise intellectual explanation for the photograph. In a contemporary interview, Stewart called it symbolic and said it fitted the general feeling. Other members connected it with their desire for performances to become “tribal,” attempting to dissolve the division between people performing and people watching.
That idea appears elsewhere in their early statements. They disliked the elevated stage as a symbolic hierarchy. They talked about wanting interaction rather than audiences worshipping figureheads. Their politics were not simply a list of approved opinions embedded in lyrics. They were questioning why the physical and economic structures surrounding music had to work the way they did.
That idealism could be contradictory as hell.
They were signed to a record company while criticizing consumer society.
They made commodities while talking about not wanting to sell anything.
They appeared in music newspapers while questioning rock-star hierarchy.
But contradiction was not necessarily a malfunction in The Pop Group’s thinking. They explicitly talked about contradiction as part of the process.
Y does not sound like five people who have figured out the answer.
It sounds like five people discovering that every answer produces three more questions.
There is an especially interesting archival detail in the CDr Boyd put into The Crown Box #003. The supplied single-file FLAC runs 47:31.65 at 16-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo. Its track boundaries reveal that this is not a straight copy of the original nine-track 1979 LP sequence. It corresponds extremely closely to the eleven-track remastered-and-expanded configuration circulated digitally in 2007.
That version runs:
1. “She Is Beyond Good and Evil”
2. “Thief of Fire”
3. “Snowgirl”
4. “Blood Money”
5. “We Are Time”
6. “Savage Sea”
7. “Words Disobey Me”
8. “Don’t Call Me Pain”
9. “The Boys From Brazil”
10. “Don’t Sell Your Dreams”
11. “3:38”
That matters because the original Y was different.
The 1979 LP began with “Thief of Fire.” “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” had been released separately as the band’s debut single in March 1979, backed with “3:38.” The original LP also placed “Savage Sea” before “We Are Time.” The later expanded digital sequence moves “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” to the beginning, switches the positions of “We Are Time” and “Savage Sea,” and places the single’s dub-damaged B-side at the very end.
So the Private Release CDr does not merely contain Y.
It contains a later historical rearrangement of Y.
That rearrangement substantially changes the experience.
Beginning with “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” gives the listener something almost resembling an entrance ramp. Almost.
The bass immediately establishes the body. Guitars scrape and chatter around it. Stewart’s voice sounds simultaneously exhilarated and alarmed. The title obviously echoes Friedrich Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, but Stewart’s own explanation is more interesting than simply calling the song Nietzschean. He described it as an attempt to imagine unconditional love as a revolutionary force, moving through nihilism toward something positive.
That is a recurring feature of Stewart’s politics that can disappear beneath the screaming.
The rage frequently contains romanticism.
He was not only interested in tearing systems apart.
He wanted something on the other side.
“She Is Beyond Good and Evil” is therefore a love song built like a political explosive.
It is also one of the clearer demonstrations of what Bovell contributes. Rhythm feels solid while everything above it flickers. Guitar does not necessarily remain at one apparent distance from the listener. Vocals do not simply sit in the center. The recording feels dimensional.
Then comes “Thief of Fire,” the original LP’s true opening statement.
It is tempting to explain the title entirely through Prometheus, the mythological figure who steals fire from the gods and gives it to humanity, but Stewart later supplied a more personal route into the idea. He connected the song with an Odilon Redon painting and with the poetry and art he and his friends were consuming as teenagers. For Stewart, stealing fire meant touching something one had been told not to touch, deliberately working against conditioning in order to perceive differently.
That is almost an instruction manual for Y.
The track feels dangerous partly because its components seem to disagree about what kind of music they are playing. The bass knows funk. The drums know dance music. The guitars seem intent on damaging both. Saxophone suddenly enters from free jazz. Stewart behaves like a poet who has accidentally been placed in front of a band during an emergency.
Yet the piece moves.
That is the miracle.
Noise can be easy when nobody has to make it dance.
Funk can be easy when nobody is trying to destroy the groove.
The Pop Group attempt both jobs simultaneously.
“Snowgirl” immediately shifts the pressure. Piano becomes much more apparent, and fragments of something almost elegant drift through the dissonance. It can briefly resemble a damaged ballad. That phrase, damaged ballad, applies to several moments on Y. Beauty appears frequently enough to prove the band understands it, then somebody seems compelled to contaminate it before it can become comfortable.
This is another reason the record still feels emotionally alive. Pure ugliness becomes predictable just as quickly as prettiness. Y keeps allowing one to infect the other.
“Blood Money” is shorter and more brutal. Percussion and damaged guitar dominate while Bovell’s treatment fractures the available space. The title carries obvious political weight without requiring an essay. Money attached to suffering. Profit attached to violence. Obedience attached to systems whose individual actions may make no moral sense.
The song does not calmly present an argument.
It behaves like the argument has already gone wrong.
Then this particular CDr goes directly into “We Are Time.”
On the original 1979 LP, “Savage Sea” came first, so this is one of the places where the later remaster physically rewrites the album’s dramatic shape.
“We Are Time” is one of the record’s great rhythmic machines. Repetition drives it forward while guitars, voice, production effects and interruptions repeatedly destabilize what should be a secure groove. It demonstrates how close The Pop Group could come to dance music without surrendering the feeling that something is malfunctioning.
The title itself is enormous.
Not “we exist in time.”
We are time.
The thing that appears to contain human life becomes identical with the people moving through it.
The track keeps moving while its own surface is continually attacked.
Then “Savage Sea” suddenly pulls the floor away.
Rather than simply becoming another fast confrontation, the record opens into atmosphere. Piano and electronic or treated textures create something much closer to a sound painting. The bass-and-drum certainty that grounds so much of Y loosens. Empty space becomes more apparent.
Coming after “We Are Time” in this CDr sequence makes “Savage Sea” feel like the machine has finally broken through the floor and fallen into water.
It is one of the clearest demonstrations that Y is not merely a funk-punk record.
A band committed only to energy would fear this much emptiness.
The Pop Group use it.
“Words Disobey Me” might be the most perfect title on the album.
Stewart was surrounded by language: French poetry, philosophy, political texts, slogans, newspapers, radical ideas. Yet language itself can resist the person attempting to control it. A word carries histories that the speaker did not create. A slogan can become propaganda. A political statement can become a commodity. An attempt to explain something can accidentally reproduce the structure being criticized.
Words disobey.
The music behaves accordingly.
Rhythm attempts to organize the track while guitar and voice keep pulling language apart.
“Don’t Call Me Pain” stretches beyond five and a half minutes and becomes one of Y’s most delirious collisions. Blues gestures, funk, free-jazz eruptions, saxophone and treated sound seem to keep finding one another and then separating again. The distinction between solo and disruption becomes unclear.
That is important because conventional rock gives the listener cues.
Here is the verse.
Here is the chorus.
Here is the guitar solo.
Now we return home.
Y often removes the road signs.
You may still arrive somewhere, but not because the band has been courteous enough to mark the route.
“The Boys From Brazil” carries a title that inevitably evokes Ira Levin’s 1976 novel and the 1978 film about Nazi fugitives in South America, yet an interview from the period makes the connection wonderfully slippery. When questioned about the title, Stewart became uncertain about whether it actually came directly from the book and joked that their manager had been telling people things.
That uncertainty belongs beautifully to this record.
Even the explanatory metadata refuses to behave.
The music remains tense and fragmented, but by this stage the ear has adapted. Something that would have sounded impossible twenty-five minutes earlier has become a language.
That is one of the strangest things Y does to a listener.
The record does not become more normal.
The listener becomes more capable of hearing the abnormal.
Then comes “Don’t Sell Your Dreams,” the longest piece on the original album at around six minutes and forty seconds.
After the confrontational titles and nervous physicality that precede it, the title feels unexpectedly vulnerable.
Do not sell your dreams.
For a group so suspicious of capitalism, consumer culture and institutional power, the phrase could easily become a political slogan. But it is also intimate. A dream is not only an ideology. It can be the private possibility that makes a person continue.
The song stretches outward rather than concluding with a triumphant punk ending. Abstraction, unstable rhythm and atmosphere begin absorbing the structure. The original LP ends here, which means Y originally disappeared rather than resolved.
There is no answer to Y.
Only the question remaining open.
But the CDr has one more track.
“3:38.”
This was originally the B-side of “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” and its presence at the end turns the expanded version into a circle. The record begins with the single and ends with the single’s damaged reflection.
“3:38” is dub not merely as reggae style but as disassembly.
Material from the song is reversed, stripped, echoed and treated until the recognizable object becomes unstable. The A-side says something. The B-side remembers the statement incorrectly.
That is a beautiful place for the Private Release version to finish because it exposes the principle operating underneath the entire record.
Nothing is sacred merely because it has already been recorded.
A finished song can become raw material again.
Forty-two years later Dennis Bovell would make that implication explicit by returning to the original tapes and constructing Y in Dub, an entire album of dub versions from the 1979 material. What had always been embedded in Y was finally pulled completely into the foreground.
Bovell’s role cannot be overstated.
The Pop Group were overflowing with ideas, but uncontrolled abundance does not automatically create a great record. Bovell understood rhythm deeply enough to know what could be removed without killing the body. He used reverb, delay, tape manipulation and mixing-desk decisions to let the chaos breathe.
The studio became another member.
Stewart later remembered sitting on the Ridge Farm floor playing toys and children’s instruments, talking about the songs as bodies whose heads could be moved around Frankenstein-style. That image is perfect.
Y is Frankenstein funk.
A dub nervous system.
Free-jazz limbs.
Punk voltage.
French poetry lodged somewhere in the skull.
It should fall over.
Instead it dances.
The historical influence is enormous. Y has subsequently appeared on lists of important records of the 1970s and among The Wire’s most important recordings. But the descendants are more interesting than rankings.
The Pop Group themselves splintered outward.
Bruce Smith would play with The Slits and later Public Image Ltd.
Gareth Sager moved into Rip Rig + Panic, the gloriously unstable group that also included Neneh Cherry.
Simon Underwood formed Pigbag.
Mark Stewart moved deeper into dub, electronics, industrial sound and political collage through Mark Stewart + Maffia and Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound world.
Bristol itself later became internationally associated with music in which bass, dub space, punk attitude, electronics and cultural collision were ordinary vocabulary. Massive Attack and Tricky emerged from a city whose musical DNA had already been disturbed by records like Y.
The record’s reputation can make it sound as though The Pop Group knew they were inventing history.
Their interviews suggest something messier.
They were teenagers.
They were excited.
They were arrogant.
They were curious.
They contradicted themselves.
They wanted to question everything.
They did not want to become another rock band.
They were also clearly having fun.
That last part matters.
The seriousness of the politics can make Y appear retrospectively like a grim ideological document. But people do not normally make music this reckless without pleasure somewhere inside the process. There is delight in breaking a thing and discovering it works better broken.
Even Stewart eventually laughed at Y. Years later, asked what he thought of the record, he joked that it sounded like a bunch of donkeys.
That is healthy.
Canonical records become boring when everybody approaches them kneeling.
Y is better approached standing up.
Preferably moving.
The cover makes one final connection with The Crown Box #003 itself. Don McCullin’s photograph began as photojournalism. The Pop Group removed it from that context and turned it into record artwork because they sensed a visual relationship with their music. Boyd later took that record artwork, printed it, cut it, placed it inside clear plastic over a blank CDr and inserted it into another sequence.
Photograph becomes newspaper image.
Newspaper image becomes record cover.
Record cover becomes digital image.
Digital image becomes printed sleeve.
Printed sleeve becomes part of Private Release.
The same image keeps changing jobs.
The music does too.
The original master becomes vinyl.
The album becomes reissue.
The single is inserted into the album.
The track order changes.
A later digital configuration becomes a source somewhere in Boyd’s archive.
That source becomes an audio CDr.
The CDr becomes the physical Disc Eleven of The Crown Box #003.
The box is opened again.
The disc becomes a new single-file FLAC.
The new FLAC preserves 47 minutes, 31.65 seconds of that particular journey.
I cannot determine with certainty from the finished FLAC alone what file format Boyd originally used when burning this disc. Unlike the Marcy Tigner and Jah Shaka discs, where he remembers MP3 sources, that earlier step is uncertain here. The current audio does not show the kind of obvious low-frequency cutoff associated with a heavily compressed low-bitrate MP3, but that is not enough to reconstruct provenance with certainty.
The safest description is also the most interesting one:
This is not an abstract perfect copy of Y.
It is Boyd’s CDr of Y.
And the exact duration and track structure reveal which branch of Y’s history appears to have entered the box: the 47:31 expanded sequence associated with the 2007 remaster, beginning with “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” and ending with “3:38.”
That turns Disc Eleven into an accidental lesson in how albums change after release.
There was never only one Y.
There was the 1979 LP.
There was the single beside it.
There were later CDs.
There were reordered digital editions.
There were alternate tapes.
There were live recordings.
There was Y in Dub.
Now there is this CDr.
The title keeps asking the same thing.
Y?
Why this order?
Why these sounds?
Why is this called pop?
Why should jazz stay jazz?
Why should dub stay reggae?
Why should punk stay punk?
Why does a stage have to separate musicians from everybody else?
Why should a completed recording remain completed?
Why should a photograph keep one meaning?
Why should anything stay inside the category where it was found?
Disc Ten showed dub removing pieces from reggae until absence became music.
Disc Eleven takes that same technology of absence and points it at rock.
Something gets stolen in the process.
Maybe fire.
Disc 012
Disc Twelve is Mannakorn’s Í gegnum tíðina, the Icelandic group’s second album, recorded at Hljóðriti in Hafnarfjörður between December 1976 and May 1977 and originally released by Fálkinn on October 29, 1977. The title translates naturally as something close to “Through Time,” “Through the Years” or “Over the Course of Time,” and that idea turns out to be much more than a convenient name for ten pop songs. Time is running through the lyrics, the artwork, the historical characters, old friendships, ghosts, aging bodies, poverty, memory and even the particular CDr preserved inside The Crown Box #003.
The placement makes a beautiful final turn in the twelve-disc sequence. Disc Eleven was The Pop Group’s Y, a 1979 British record trying to explode pop music through dub, funk, free jazz and political agitation. Disc Twelve travels only two years backward, to 1977, but lands in a completely different cultural climate: Icelandic songs built from blues, folk, country, pop and local storytelling, sung in Icelandic by musicians whose ambition was not to destroy the song form but to make songs that could belong to ordinary people.
The difference is enormous.
So is the connection.
Both albums are obsessed with what happens when imported musical forms become local language.
The Pop Group heard Jamaican dub, American funk and free jazz in Bristol and mangled them into something recognizably their own.
Magnús Eiríksson and Mannakorn absorbed blues, rock, country and Anglo-American popular songwriting, then made something so thoroughly Icelandic that many of these songs eventually stopped feeling like borrowed styles at all. They became part of the national songbook.
That transformation happened remarkably quickly. Mannakorn’s first self-titled LP appeared in 1975 and effectively introduced Magnús Eiríksson to a much larger Icelandic audience as a songwriter. Í gegnum tíðina followed only two years later. Icelandic music historians describe the period as extraordinary because Eiríksson suddenly produced a concentration of songs that became standards: “Garún,” “Reyndu aftur,” “Ræfilskvæði,” “Braggablús,” “Sölvi Helgason,” “Ef þú ert mér hjá,” “Göngum yfir brúna” and “Gamli góði vinur” all came from this one album.
That is almost absurd hit density for a ten-song LP.
Magnús wrote all ten compositions and all of the lyrics except “Ræfilskvæði,” whose words are by the great Icelandic modernist poet Steinn Steinarr. The core Mannakorn lineup was Magnús Eiríksson on electric, acoustic and twelve-string guitars, harmonica and vocals; Baldur Már Arngrímsson on electric and acoustic guitars, percussion and vocals; Björn Björnsson on drums, percussion and vocals; and Pálmi Gunnarsson on bass, percussion and vocals.
Then the album expands outward through a surprisingly rich cast of additional musicians. Guðmundur Steingrímsson plays congas. Halldór Pálsson contributes tenor and alto saxophones. Helgi Guðmundsson plays harmonica. Jón Kristinn Cortez contributes voices. Karl J. Sighvatsson and Magnús Kjartansson appear on piano and electric piano. A separate ensemble was assembled for “Braggablús,” with Vilhjálmur Guðjónsson on alto saxophone, Ólafur Gaukur on guitar, Magnús Pétursson on piano, Jón Sigurðsson on bass, Guðmundur R. Einarsson on drums and Magnús Eiríksson on guitar. Magnús Ingimarsson arranged the strings and the Braggablús band.
That list explains why Í gegnum tíðina is much broader than the word “pop” suggests. Mannakorn could be loose and conversational, but the record is not casually thrown together. Blues instrumentation, saxophone, harmonica, keyboards, percussion and arranged strings surround extremely economical songs.
The original pressing was reportedly 7,500 copies, a substantial physical presence in a country whose entire population in 1977 was only a little over 220,000 people. Scale changes in Iceland. A record does not need to sell millions to become culturally enormous.
The cover reproduced on the Private Release sleeve is especially interesting because it is itself a handmade collage.
Kristján Frímann Kristjánsson designed the original gatefold sleeve. His own account of making it sounds uncannily close to the physical language running throughout The Crown Box #003. He listened to the recordings and read the lyrics, decided that the title demanded a visual treatment of time, then collected photographs from newspapers and magazines, carefully cut them out and glued them together with UHU tube glue into a large 31-by-62-centimeter collage.
Not Photoshop.
Not digital compositing.
Scissors, printed paper and glue.
Kristján wanted the front and back covers to form one continuous visual field so that time could appear to flow forward and backward across the object. The album sleeve itself therefore became a physical montage of fragments removed from other printed contexts and given another life.
That is a remarkable object to discover near the bottom of a Private Release built by cutting pictures from books.
The resemblance is not exact, but the method rhymes.
Image is found.
Image is removed.
Original context is damaged or abandoned.
Fragment becomes material.
Material enters another structure.
Meaning changes because of adjacency.
Kristján pushed the idea still further for the original gatefold interior. He asked the Mannakorn musicians for childhood photographs, enlarged the boys to approximately life size, mounted the enlargements onto particleboard and cut them out. He then photographed the adult band members physically holding their younger selves.
That is a perfect visualization of Í gegnum tíðina.
The adult holds the child.
Past becomes a physical object inside the present.
A person is simultaneously who he is and who he was.
Time does not simply disappear behind him.
He carries it.
Even the production of the cover acquired its own little failure of time. Kristján was preparing to move to Sweden and had not finished the lettering when he left Iceland. He showed the printer a preliminary sketch and promised to send the completed typography back from Sweden. The printer asked to keep one sketch. When Kristján finally received the finished album, he discovered that the printer had used the rough sketches instead of the polished final lettering he had sent.
A temporary thing accidentally became permanent.
That is another Private Release kind of problem.
Draft becomes artifact.
Mistake becomes history.
Forty-nine years later nobody can separate the “wrong” lettering from the identity of the album because the error has had far more time to become canonical than the intended design ever had to exist.
Then the music begins with “Garún.”
The title comes from one of Iceland’s best-known ghost stories, Djákninn á Myrká, “The Deacon of Myrká,” part of the international Dead Bridegroom folktale tradition. In the Icelandic story, a deacon promises to collect his lover Guðrún for Christmas festivities. Before he can return, he dies while crossing the Hörgá river. Guðrún never receives the news.
On Christmas Eve he comes for her anyway.
She rides behind what she believes is her living lover until the moon reveals the fatal wound in the back of his head. The ghost addresses her as “Garún” rather than Guðrún because, according to the traditional explanation, the dead cannot pronounce Guð, the Icelandic word for God embedded in her name.
So the first song on an album called Through Time begins with somebody who has already crossed the ultimate boundary of time and returned.
A dead man keeps an appointment.
Magnús compresses folklore into pop song. Moon, horse, winter, grave, lover and ghost become part of a catchy record released in 1977. An old oral story survives by entering electricity.
That already establishes the album’s method. The past is not displayed behind museum glass. It gets a rhythm section.
The second song is “Reyndu aftur,” “Try Again.”
The phrase eventually became important enough that Tómas Hermannsson used it as the title of Magnús Eiríksson’s 2009 biography.
Its lyric begins with one person admitting that someone had tried repeatedly to communicate with him “í gegnum tíðina,” through all that time, while he failed to listen. He almost walked himself into hell before finally understanding and asking the other person to try again.
That makes the album title suddenly intimate.
“Through time” is no longer abstract history.
It is all the missed communication accumulated between two people.
The song contains one of Magnús’s recurring strengths as a writer: enormous emotional subjects expressed in ordinary speech. Regret does not require a literary costume. Somebody tried to reach you. You were not listening. Eventually you understand.
Try again.
Then comes “Ræfilskvæði,” roughly “The Wretch’s Poem” or “Poem of a Miserable Fellow,” using words by Steinn Steinarr.
Steinn, born Aðalsteinn Kristmundsson in 1908, became one of Iceland’s major twentieth-century poets, associated strongly with modernism, alienation, irony and an unsentimental view of the heroic national self. The poem is brutally funny. Its speaker calls himself an ordinary useless wretch who once imagined that God and fortune might make something magnificent of him. Instead he wanders streets and squares pursuing his own shadow, his head full of heroic dreams and his heart paralyzed by sorrow.
Magnús placing Steinarr inside Mannakorn is another collapse between “high” and “low” culture.
A canonical Icelandic poet becomes pop lyrics.
The poem does not become less serious because a band plays it.
The pop album does not become more legitimate merely because a famous poet appears.
They simply occupy the same track.
Then “Braggablús” changes the historical lens again.
This song reaches back to the social aftermath of the Second World War occupation of Iceland. Britain occupied Iceland in 1940 and American forces followed in 1941. Military construction and employment brought enormous economic changes, particularly around Reykjavík, but it also contributed to rapid population movement and housing shortages. Military Nissen huts, braggi in Icelandic usage, eventually became improvised civilian housing.
Magnús knew something of that world from direct childhood experience. As a fifteen-year-old in 1960 he worked as an assistant on a BP oil truck delivering heating oil to Reykjavík’s remaining barracks neighborhoods.
Years later he turned that memory into “Braggablús.”
The song centers on Magga, an aging woman living in a damp barrack who cannot afford heating oil. The lyric moves backward through her life to the British occupation and then the Americans, when soldiers, money and attention had once made her circumstances very different. The joke is funny until it is not. Sexual economy, war economy, aging, poverty and memory are all compressed into a blues.
Time again changes value.
The same woman.
The same city.
Different decade.
Different market.
Different body.
Different attention.
The song is national history told from beneath official history.
No generals.
No diplomatic agreements.
No heroic chronology of war.
A woman is cold and needs money for oil.
Then comes “Bót á rassinn.”
The title can be translated roughly as “A Patch on the Ass” or “A Patch on the Backside,” and even before getting lost in the precise Icelandic idiom it signals something Mannakorn does repeatedly: grandeur is allowed to fall onto its ass.
The album has ghosts, poetry, war, artists, history and mortality, but it also has the ordinary comic body.
That balance keeps Í gegnum tíðina from becoming self-important. History is not only kings, poets and national trauma. History is clothing wearing out. Money. Drink. Sex. Work. Bodies getting older. Friends making idiots of themselves.
Side Two opens with “Sölvi Helgason,” and suddenly the connection to Private Release becomes almost eerie.
Sölvi Helgason, also known as Sólon Íslandus, lived from 1820 to 1895. He was an itinerant Icelandic folk artist, writer, eccentric, self-styled scholar and wanderer who repeatedly resisted the social rules intended to force people into fixed employment and residence. He was poor, frequently misunderstood, repeatedly in conflict with authority and at various points punished with flogging and imprisonment.
He kept making art anyway.
Modern Icelandic museums now preserve the same drawings and writings produced by a person many contemporaries treated as a troublesome vagrant.
His images are extraordinary: elaborate floral designs, ornamental initials, portraits, fragments of text and dense handwritten thought. Paper and pigments were scarce and expensive for someone living as he did, which makes the surviving objects even more remarkable. The Reykjavík Art Museum has described him as one of Iceland’s most fascinating folk artists and a charismatic outsider both in life and art.
Magnús’s song asks what Sölvi actually was.
Holy man?
Lazy wandering dog?
Messenger?
Liar?
Artist?
Madman?
The lyric compares his rejection by society to crucifixion, describes children being attracted to him, recalls his homelessness and hunger for freedom, and ultimately refuses to collapse him into one answer.
That makes “Sölvi Helgason” an extraordinary song to place inside The Crown Box #003.
A person collects materials.
Makes strange things.
Lives according to an internal logic that other people may not immediately understand.
Somebody outside that logic can simply ask: what the hell is this?
Then time changes the question.
The nuisance becomes the artist.
The scraps become the archive.
The thing somebody could have thrown away becomes something a museum protects.
Disc Twelve contains a song about exactly that transformation.
“Fyrir utan gluggann þinn” follows. Modern metadata is slightly messy here: some current reissues list the title as “Fyrir utan gluggann minn,” changing “outside your window” to “outside my window,” while period documentation lists “þinn.” That tiny disagreement is an archival wrinkle worth preserving. Even a title can drift while a recording survives.
Then comes “Ef þú ert mér hjá,” “If You Are With Me.”
The song moves away from ghosts, outsiders and poverty into uncomplicated affection. Winter comes and goes, but spring remains in the soul if the loved person is near. There is drinking trouble in the lyric too, because Magnús rarely allows adult life to become spotless, but the emotional equation is simple: wherever the narrator travels, his heart remains with the other person.
That simplicity is a major part of Mannakorn’s power.
The songs are not ashamed to be understandable.
A line can be direct without being empty.
“Göngum yfir brúna,” “Let’s Cross the Bridge,” makes another perfect image for an album built around passage.
A bridge exists because two places are separated.
Crossing it means becoming located somewhere else.
The structure remains fixed while the traveler changes position.
That is basically what every disc in The Crown Box #003 has been doing.
One musical world becomes another.
Hardcore crosses into New Age.
New Age crosses into Belfast anarcho-punk.
West African griot tradition crosses into Brussels electronics.
Don Cherry crosses jazz with gamelan.
Christian trombone crosses into Austrian church electronics.
Dub crosses into The Pop Group.
Then the bridge reaches Iceland.
The final track is “Gamli góði vinur,” “Good Old Friend.”
It may be the most appropriate possible ending for an album called Í gegnum tíðina.
The song remembers an old school friendship. The friends once laughed, fought, cried and exchanged cruel words. Then school ended and each entered ordinary adult life. Years pass. Paths grow over. Physical familiarity becomes a handshake. Both pretend to be grown men who need nobody.
Then alcohol warms the soul and the old language returns.
But both know what is gone.
That is an extraordinarily adult way to write nostalgia because the song does not pretend the past can be recovered intact.
The friend still exists.
The friendship still exists.
The boys do not.
Or rather, the boys exist inside the men in the same way Kristján’s gatefold photograph has the adult musicians physically holding their childhood selves.
The album begins with a dead lover returning from the past.
It ends with two living men discovering that their own past cannot return.
That is a hell of an arc for ten pop songs.
The title Í gegnum tíðina also became culturally sticky in Icelandic itself. Linguist Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson has noted that constructions equivalent to “through the years” had existed in Icelandic for a long time, but the exact phrase í gegnum tíðina was relatively young and became dramatically more common from the 1970s onward. He specifically points to a 1972 Halldór Laxness interview book and Mannakorn’s 1977 album as prominent early appearances before the expression exploded in frequency.
The title passed from language into an album.
Then the album helped send the phrase back into language.
Another loop.
There is one more archival peculiarity inside the Private Release CDr itself.
The single-file FLAC ripped from Boyd’s Disc Twelve runs 34 minutes, 44.81 seconds at 16-bit / 44.1 kHz stereo.
Current official digital editions of Í gegnum tíðina run approximately 36 minutes and 14 seconds.
That is about ninety-nine seconds longer.
At first that difference looks as though the Private Release might be missing material.
It does not appear to be.
When the timing of the CDr is compared with the ten official track lengths, the major transition points occur in roughly the correct proportional positions across the entire program. The CDr therefore appears to contain all ten songs in sequence but to run approximately 4.7 percent faster overall than the current official digital master.
ChatGPT cannot determine from the final CDr alone where that speed difference entered the chain.
It could have been inherited from an older analog transfer, a turntable running fast, tape-speed variation, a digital conversion or some earlier source Boyd had stored on his hard drives.
The important point is that the discrepancy appears global rather than a song simply being absent.
That produces another strange version of Í gegnum tíðina.
An album about passing through time is literally passing through time faster.
Thirty-six minutes becomes thirty-four minutes and forty-five seconds.
The musicians age slightly less inside this copy.
Pitch and tempo rise with the acceleration.
The whole history has been squeezed.
Then Boyd burns that version onto a blank CDr.
The CDr goes into a handmade sleeve reproducing Kristján Frímann Kristjánsson’s physically collaged 1977 cover.
The sleeve goes into The Crown Box #003.
The box leaves Boyd’s possession.
The package is later opened again.
The CDr is removed.
That accelerated copy is ripped losslessly into another FLAC for the blog.
A record called Through Time has now travelled through nearly fifty years of changing containers.
1977 studio tape.
Vinyl.
Later reissues.
Unknown hard-drive source.
Private Release CDr.
FLAC.
Blog.
Listener.
And underneath all those technical transformations are songs about precisely the same problem.
What survives?
A ghost survives his death long enough to keep a date.
A person finally hears words he ignored for years.
A dead poet survives through somebody else’s melody.
A wartime barracks survives long enough to become social memory.
Sölvi Helgason survives the judgment of his contemporaries.
Old friends survive as altered versions of the boys they once were.
Even an unfinished typography sketch survives because somebody accidentally printed it instead of the finished work.
Nothing passes through time unchanged.
But things do pass through.
That may be why Disc Twelve feels like such a strong ending to the music portion of The Crown Box #003.
The twelve discs have never really been a survey of genres.
They are a survey of transmission.
Music survives by being moved.
Copied.
Remembered.
Misremembered.
Reissued.
Recontextualized.
Translated.
Sped up.
Burned.
Ripped.
Given away.
A person hears something and decides another person should hear it.
The format keeps changing while the gesture remains almost prehistoric.
Here.
Listen to this.
Mannakorn called their album Í gegnum tíðina.
The Crown Box has just spent twelve discs proving the title.
Disc 013
1.23GB MKV
Disc Thirteen is not another album. It is a DVD of Coffy, Jack Hill’s 1973 American International Pictures film starring Pam Grier, placed at the end of The Crown Box #003 as something closer to an afterword, visual coda and personal time capsule. After twelve CDrs move through experimental music, hardcore, New Age, anarcho-punk, griot tradition, free jazz, Christian trombone, Austrian church electronics, former-Yugoslav underground music, dub, post-punk and Icelandic pop, the thirteenth disc changes the sensory system. The ears have carried the box almost the entire way. Now the screen turns on.
Coffy was written and directed by Jack Hill and released in 1973, with Pam Grier playing a hospital nurse who becomes a vigilante after heroin addiction harms her younger sister. She works her way upward through dealers, pimps, organized criminals, corrupt police and supposedly respectable people who profit from the same system. It is exploitation cinema in the most literal historical sense: inexpensive, sensational, violent, sexual, aggressively advertised and designed to seize attention quickly. Yet Coffy also gave a Black woman an unusually powerful central role in American action cinema at a time when that was exceedingly rare.
The Private Release sleeve reproduces the film’s wonderfully excessive original advertising. Grier towers over the composition holding a shotgun while men, cars, guns, bodies and smaller scenes of violence collect underneath her. The poster announces, “She’s the ‘GODMOTHER’ of them all” and advertises “the baddest One-Chick Hit-Squad that ever hit town!” It is not trying to whisper. The image is built to function from twenty feet away.
Woman.
Gun.
Beauty.
Danger.
Sex.
Revenge.
The visual information arrives before anybody has read the plot.
That kind of image connects Disc Thirteen to something much older in Boyd’s own visual memory. Around 1976, when he was still a little kid, his parents would take him to a drive-in around Ventura. His father sometimes paid for a stall and tried to sell things there while Boyd was free to wander around, look at things and occupy himself. Sometimes the family remained for the movies. The children could stay awake through the first feature and eventually lie down and sleep in the back of the family’s Ford Granada.
But drive-ins were visually porous places.
The movie your parents had chosen was only one glowing rectangle in a larger nighttime landscape. Other screens remained visible elsewhere across the lot. A child could turn his head, walk in another direction or simply look past the car and encounter another gigantic moving image with no idea what film it belonged to.
Boyd remembers sneaking looks at those other screens.
What survived in memory was not necessarily a title, plot or actress. It was a type of image: adult women with enormous breasts, exaggerated femininity and a scale that seemed almost superhuman to a small boy. In retrospect he associates those glimpses with the visual universe of Russ Meyer films, which were absolutely circulating through drive-in culture during the period. Supervixens had appeared in 1975, only about a year before these memories.
Whether every woman remembered on those distant screens actually came from a Russ Meyer movie is impossible to establish nearly fifty years later. The memory does not require that precision. What matters is what the child saw and retained.
Huge women.
Adult women.
Powerful-looking women.
Bodies illuminated fifty feet high in the night.
They seemed almost related in his young imagination to Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, whose television incarnation also arrived during the middle of the 1970s.
That association makes perfect sense from inside childhood perception. Adults possess filing systems children have not yet constructed. Exploitation cinema belongs here. Superhero television belongs there. Pornography belongs somewhere else. Fashion photography goes in another drawer. The child encounters the human figure before learning all of the social categories surrounding the figure.
The woman is enormous.
The woman is beautiful.
The woman is powerful.
The woman is mysterious.
That information arrives first.
Pam Grier in Coffy occupies exactly that unstable visual territory.
The film unquestionably sells Grier’s physical beauty and sexuality. Her body is part of the movie’s attraction and part of its advertising. Coffy contains nudity, sex, violence and the kinds of deliberately provocative images American International Pictures knew would move people through theater doors and drive-in gates.
But Grier is not merely positioned as an object inside the film.
She is the engine.
Men repeatedly believe they understand Coffy because they believe they understand what they are seeing when they look at her. She exploits that assumption. Sexuality becomes camouflage. Beauty becomes access. Other people’s expectations become tools she can turn against them.
The famous sequence in which Coffy hides razor blades in her Afro makes the idea almost cartoonishly literal. Something read visually as beauty and femininity also contains a weapon.
One thing occupies two meanings simultaneously.
That principle has been quietly running through The Crown Box #003 from the beginning.
A commercial coffee box becomes an art object.
A book is valuable collection and sacrificial material.
A nude photograph is body and architecture once folded around cardboard.
A newspaper is information and packaging.
A coffee is flavor and eventually a proposed sound.
A recording is music and physical CDr.
A copy can be preservation and transformation at the same time.
Coffy herself belongs naturally inside that system.
Nurse and vigilante.
Sex symbol and action hero.
Commercial exploitation and cultural representation.
Fantasy and anger.
Trash and art.
A body being looked at and a person deciding exactly where everyone else should look.
The word “blaxploitation” contains a similar contradiction. The films were commercial products specifically marketed toward Black audiences by companies eager to make money from a newly recognized market. At the same time, they created spaces in American popular cinema where Black actors, music, clothing, neighborhoods, language and stories could dominate the screen rather than remain peripheral.
Coffy does not solve that contradiction.
It lives inside it.
That makes it much more interesting than a film that can be filed cleanly under either “progressive” or “exploitative.”
Its politics are equally impure. Coffy begins with street-level drug dealers because heroin has damaged her family, but the story keeps climbing upward. Dealers connect to pimps. Pimps connect to organized crime. Criminals connect to cops. Respectable political figures connect back to the same corruption. The movie suggests that visible street violence is only the lowest exposed portion of a larger economic and political machine.
But Coffy never becomes a lecture.
It remains lurid, sexy, violent, funny, melodramatic and occasionally outrageous.
That matters.
Ideas do not always arrive wearing academic clothing.
Sometimes they arrive holding a shotgun.
Roy Ayers’ score makes Disc Thirteen even less of a departure from the twelve music discs preceding it. Ayers composed and arranged the soundtrack, filling the movie with vibraphone, funk, soul-jazz, rhythm and atmosphere. The Coffy soundtrack became a substantial record in its own right, containing pieces including “Coffy Is the Color,” “Priscilla’s Theme,” “King George,” “Aragon,” “Coffy Sauna,” “King’s Last Ride,” “Coffy Baby” and “Shining Symbol.”
So the music sequence never actually stops.
It acquires pictures.
This is especially appropriate after Disc Twelve, Mannakorn’s Í gegnum tíðina, a title that can be understood as Through Time. Mannakorn’s record spends its songs moving through ghosts, old friends, poverty, history, aging, folklore and memory. Then the next disc physically demonstrates another way of passing through time.
Press play on Coffy and 1973 starts moving again.
Pam Grier remains twenty-three years old in the footage shot for Coffy.
The cars remain new.
The clothing remains contemporary.
Los Angeles remains the Los Angeles captured by the camera.
The slang belongs to its moment.
Roy Ayers’ music remains attached to those bodies.
Film does something human memory cannot do by itself. It preserves external appearance with mechanical precision even while the person watching it continues aging.
That creates the most personally disorienting part of Disc Thirteen.
Boyd can now watch a movie from 1973 as a man in his fifties while simultaneously remembering what enormous adult women on drive-in screens felt like to him as a small child around 1976.
The intellectual distance is enormous.
The experiential distance can suddenly become tiny.
A memory from fifty years ago does not necessarily feel fifty years away when it arrives.
The adult can now understand Jack Hill, Pam Grier, American International Pictures, exploitation cinema, race, gender, marketing, sexuality, Roy Ayers, Russ Meyer, filmmaking and the economic system that produced those images.
The child had almost none of that information.
The child simply looked.
That is humbling because both perceptions belong to the same continuous person.
The five-year-old did not disappear when the fifty-three-year-old acquired more vocabulary.
Information accumulated around the original sensation.
That difference also reveals how radically the surrounding world can change while one human being continues moving through it.
Drive-ins were strange public media environments by contemporary standards. Parents could choose one film while images from several unrelated films remained visible across the same parking lot. A child could accidentally encounter adult imagery because light itself ignored parental boundaries.
There was no menu asking which profile was watching.
No parental-control PIN attached to the horizon.
No algorithm deciding whether another screen was age appropriate.
Another movie was simply over there.
That does not automatically make the earlier world better or worse.
It makes the difference visible.
Social rules that feel permanent while people live inside them can become historically peculiar within a few decades.
Drive-ins disappear.
Cars disappear.
Buildings disappear.
Technology disappears.
Standards about nudity and public imagery change.
Ideas about childhood change.
Ideas about gender change.
Ideas about race change.
Ideas about masculinity and femininity change.
The people who lived comfortably inside one set of assumptions wake up decades later inside another.
Coffy becomes a machine for looking backward through those layers.
It also connects unexpectedly with the way The Crown Box #003 itself came into existence.
During 2024 Boyd made approximately 2,000 CDs and 300 DVDs after work.
That number changes the scale of everything visible here.
These thirteen discs were not individually manufactured from scratch for this one Crown box. They came out of a much larger private production project involving roughly 2,300 optical discs made over the course of a year.
Work.
Come home.
Burn discs.
Print things.
Make another.
Repeat.
Two thousand CDs is not casual duplication.
Three hundred DVDs is not a weekend hobby.
It is manufacturing.
Personal manufacturing, but manufacturing nevertheless.
And making the discs was only one stage.
During the years afterward Boyd listened, sorted, revisited and sequenced those materials into approximately twenty-four boxes.
That is where repetition becomes selection.
A giant archive begins developing smaller internal systems.
The discs acquire neighbors.
The neighbors begin altering one another.
Treasury of Puppies changes when FRAGMENT follows it.
FRAGMENT changes when Australis follows it.
The extremely earnest New Age philosophy of Australis becomes funnier and stranger when F.U.A.L.’s Veganic Wind arrives immediately afterward.
Avalanche Kaito prepares an ear for Don Cherry.
Don Cherry’s two trombonists somehow lead into Marcy Tigner standing cheerfully with her trombone.
Marcy’s church music leads directly into experimental music recorded inside an Austrian church.
Jah Shaka’s dub opens a doorway into The Pop Group, where Dennis Bovell uses dub as a weapon against rock music.
Mannakorn ends by passing through time.
Then Pam Grier appears.
None of these transitions needs to prove a single objective meaning.
That is what sequencing can do.
The relationship can be sensed before it is explained.
Mixtapes work that way.
Collage works that way.
Memory works that way.
One thing leaves a residue on the next thing.
Meaning accumulates in the gap.
Disc Thirteen becomes particularly personal because Coffy also looks back much farther than Disc One.
The DVD points beyond the box toward the boy at the drive-in.
A child roams while his father occupies a stall trying to sell things.
Decades later the son spends enormous amounts of his own money and time collecting music, films, books, records and printed art.
Then he starts cutting those books apart.
Burning copies of the music.
Packaging things.
Giving them away.
Mailing things.
Thinking about eventually sending much more of the physical archive out into the world.
The exact activities are different, but the old image is interesting.
Father.
Stall.
Objects.
People walking by.
Things possibly changing hands.
Child wandering around absorbing everything.
Then the child grows up and develops another system for allowing objects to leave his possession.
History rarely repeats cleanly.
It mutates.
That is part of why Coffy works better here than a movie chosen only because it is a favorite.
The DVD is connected to a primitive visual memory.
Not necessarily a memory of Coffy itself.
A memory of the kind of world from which Coffy came.
That distinction is important.
The adult is not claiming that the little boy saw this exact film on a distant screen.
The adult is placing this film beside the remembered sensation.
The two images overlap without needing to become identical.
Then the physical DVD sleeve delivers the final joke.
The front shows Pam Grier’s Coffy theatrical poster.
The back shows a Coffy coffee mug.
A white drinking mug has the Coffy artwork printed on its side, and above it Boyd placed a torn PRIVATE RELEASE strip.
That little image completes a linguistic and conceptual circuit that began before the first disc was played.
The Crown Box #003 originally existed because Boyd wanted to give somebody coffee.
Three Brandywine coffees were placed into reused Crown coffee tubes.
The coffee became the reason for the object.
The coffee inspired sensory comparisons.
Taste, smell, mouthfeel and cigars led toward attempts to find equivalent experiences in sound.
The coffee box acquired another box.
The second box acquired twelve CDrs.
The twelve CDrs led into a DVD.
The DVD is Coffy.
Then the reverse artwork turns Coffy into a coffee mug.
Coffee becomes Coffy.
Coffy becomes coffee.
One letter disappears and eventually returns as an object.
That is funny enough by itself.
But it is also a miniature version of everything The Crown Box #003 has been doing.
A thing enters another context and becomes another thing without completely ceasing to be what it was.
Coffee becomes sensory information.
Sensory information becomes music selection.
Music files become CDrs.
CDrs become FLACs.
Books become collage.
Newspaper becomes packaging.
A nude photograph becomes architecture.
Dalí becomes box lining.
A theatrical poster becomes DVD artwork.
Coffy becomes coffee merchandise.
Coffee merchandise becomes Private Release imagery.
The transformations keep moving in circles rather than straight lines.
The mug therefore belongs very near the end because it quietly explains the whole project using a stupid visual pun.
After thousands of words of history, culture, sound, memory and interpretation:
coffee.
Coffy.
coffee.
And beneath the joke is time.
Coffy was released in 1973.
Boyd remembers the drive-in around 1976.
Nearly half a century later he made thousands of optical discs during 2024.
Those discs were organized into boxes.
One box was repurposed from The Crown.
That Crown box was altered using material cut from books, filled with expensive coffee, accompanied by twelve music CDrs and finally capped with Coffy.
The object was given away.
Then it had to be opened again so parts of it could be reconstructed digitally and documented on Private Release.
The physical object continues changing because its history continues happening.
That is probably the best summary Disc Thirteen can provide.
The Crown Box #003 is not a sealed statement.
It is evidence of passage.
Child to adult.
Book to fragment.
Coffee to sound.
File to disc.
Disc to file.
Possession to gift.
Private memory to public documentation.
1973 to 1976 to 2024 to 2026.
The entire box keeps asking what happens to things as they move through time.
The last disc answers with a movie.
The last sleeve answers with a mug.
Pam Grier remains frozen in 1973.
Boyd does not.
The boy who looked toward enormous glowing women at a Ventura drive-in is still somewhere inside the man looking back at them now, surrounded by decades of additional information.
And the box closes with the same substance that opened it.
Coffee.
Coffy.
Coffee.
The final part of The Crown Box #003 did not happen inside the box at all.
It happened after the object had already left Boyd’s hands.
The original gesture had been fairly simple. Boyd had been talking with a barista at The Crown and wanted to share three Brandywine coffees he had been buying and tasting at Ain’t Normal. He already owned one of The Crown’s three-tube presentation boxes, so instead of discarding it he reused the box and tubes, filled them with portions of Dirty Soda, Stellar Collisions and 2Straw 2Nana, and transformed the commercial packaging into a Private Release. The coffee became the center of a much larger object involving collage, books, newspaper, twelve CDrs, one DVD and an attempt to translate taste, smell, texture, memory and sensation into other media.
Before giving it away, Boyd told the intended recipient that the outside included a photograph of adult-film performer Long Dong Silver with his penis tied in a knot. The barista laughed and agreed to accept the box. The box itself was brought to The Crown on Boyd’s day off, out of uniform, as a personal gift rather than as part of his postal work. When it was actually brought into The Crown, the two boxes were rubber-banded together, so the genital image was not simply sitting openly on a counter as an exposed photograph.
That distinction became important later.
Later, Boyd returned from the VA hospital and happened to be drinking a vending-machine mocha while passing Broadway on West Grand. The Crown was only a few blocks away. The thought was wonderfully ordinary after everything contained in this post: put a shot of espresso into the mocha and make it better.
So he went back.
The same barista was there. Boyd said hello and ordered the espresso. Then the conversation changed. The barista began explaining, somewhat hesitantly, that the box had been seen by multiple people and customers and that in the future Boyd might want to avoid something similar. He was having difficulty saying exactly what he meant, so Boyd supplied the sentence for him: essentially, no more nude photographs brought in there?
Yes.
That was the boundary.
Boyd answered by explaining that he makes art objects of this kind and also sends similar objects through the mail. He was not trying to erase what had happened or invent a justification after being caught doing something secretly. He was supplying the context from which the object came.
At that moment another person behind the counter entered the conversation and said, “Don’t make up excuses for yourself.”
Boyd replied that he was not making excuses. He was explaining who he is and what he makes.
The person then repeated more loudly that he should not bring nude photographs there.
Boyd said okay and left.
That is the entire little collision, but after spending this much time opening The Crown Box #003 layer by layer, it becomes difficult to see it as a trivial misunderstanding about a naked photograph.
The object was constructed under one set of circumstances and encountered under another.
For Boyd, the exterior image belonged to a sequence. Long Dong Silver’s body was folded across cardboard, interrupted by rubber bands and paired with Helmut Newton’s photograph of Jerry Hall holding raw meat to her face. “Big meat” moved from penis to steak as a visual joke. Other fragments came from TASCHEN books, CENTURY, Tommi Musturi, Salvador Dalí and a New York Times newspaper. The box contained expensive coffee and music chosen in response to taste, smell and mouthfeel. The nude was one piece of a much larger handmade object.
For someone encountering the box unexpectedly on a coffee-shop counter, nearly all of that information could disappear.
There might simply be a penis.
Context can vanish faster than an image.
That does not mean the original context was imaginary. It means objects acquire additional realities when they leave the person who made them. Private Release has been demonstrating that principle throughout this post. A newspaper article becomes packaging. A Dalí reproduction becomes the floor of a CDr box. A commercial Crown package becomes somebody else’s collage. A recording becomes a burned disc and later becomes a FLAC again. Once something moves, the new environment participates in what it means.
The same thing happened socially.
Boyd gave the object to one person after describing its explicit exterior imagery and receiving agreement that the person wanted it. What Boyd did not know was that the object would subsequently be placed where other employees and customers might see it. The recipient’s acceptance and the later public visibility are therefore two separate events. The first happened within a conversation. The second happened after the object was no longer under Boyd’s control.
That distinction does not require anybody to become the villain.
The Crown can decide that explicit nudity is not something it wants visible inside the shop. Employees and customers can have reactions to unexpectedly seeing it. The person who received the object can have underestimated what would happen when other people saw it. Boyd can simultaneously know that he gave the intended recipient advance warning and did not walk into the café displaying exposed genital imagery to strangers.
Several truths occupy the same event.
That seems almost absurdly appropriate for The Crown Box #003.
At one point while working through this project Boyd reminded ChatGPT that one of the earliest questions he ever brought into these conversations was essentially: what is something that can be two things at once?
The Crown Box ends by becoming exactly that kind of object.
Gift and problem.
Private and public.
Nude and collage.
Coffee package and artwork.
Generosity and provocation.
Something accepted by one person and unwanted by another.
An object made with affection that nevertheless produces discomfort.
None of those descriptions completely cancels the others.
And the word PRIVATE on the PRIVATE RELEASE label suddenly becomes much funnier.
Private Release has never meant that nobody else is permitted to see the object. The objects are literally made to travel. But the phrase contains a tension between intimate selection and release into circulation. Boyd decides what leaves his archive, physically assembles it, gives or mails it to someone, and then loses control over the next chapter.
That is what “release” means.
The object gets away.
This one got away quickly.
By the following day it had already acquired a social history Boyd had not planned.
That history also changed the physical archive of the project. To make this blog post, Boyd later had to rip open parts of the package he had already sealed. Disc sleeves had to be opened. A flap that would no longer stay down had to be held with clear tape for photography. Finished CDrs were ripped back into single-file FLACs because the original source files were scattered somewhere across external hard drives. The act of documenting the finished object altered the object again.
The box that appears in these photographs is therefore not even exactly the box that was handed across the counter.
It already has scars from being remembered.
That seems important after listening through all thirteen discs.
Nearly every recording in the box has its own history of movement and mutation. Demo tape becomes reissue. LP becomes MP3. MP3 becomes CDr. CDr becomes FLAC. Ancient song becomes modern recording. Oral tradition enters digital electronics. Dub dismantles a vocal recording and creates another work from its remains. A 1973 movie survives long enough to become a burned DVD in a 2026 art object.
The reception at The Crown becomes one more transformation.
The giver understood one object.
The recipient received another.
The surrounding room encountered another.
The blog now contains another.
None is completely false.
That is perhaps why the experience produced such mixed feelings for Boyd when he came home. There was embarrassment and surprise, some anger at being told not to “make excuses” when he believed he was simply explaining himself, and confusion over how something given with advance disclosure had become a problem through circumstances he had not anticipated. But there was also information in the encounter.
The object worked.
Not in the pleasant meaning of everybody loving it.
It actually entered the world and produced consequences.
People looked.
People interpreted.
People disagreed.
A boundary appeared.
A conversation happened.
The object stopped belonging exclusively to the intention of its maker.
That is a much riskier definition of successful art than “people liked it,” but it may be closer to what happens when an object genuinely leaves a private archive.
The irony is that the project began with generosity almost embarrassingly uncomplicated in its first impulse.
Here are some coffees I really like.
Would you like to try them?
Everything else grew around that.
Three expensive coffees became three sensory experiments. Cigars were paired with them. Flavors suggested sounds. Sounds became twelve discs. A thirteenth disc opened an old childhood memory. Books surrendered pages. A Sunday newspaper surrendered images. A commercial Crown package surrendered its original identity.
Money was spent.
Objects were damaged.
Copies were made.
Time was spent.
Then the whole thing was given away.
That expenditure matters because Private Release is not simply the rearrangement of infinitely reproducible images found online. Much of the material comes from Boyd’s physical archive. A page removed from a book is gone from the book. Coffee placed in somebody else’s tube can no longer be brewed by the person who bought it. A CDr handed away leaves the stack. Postage, paper, ink, books, records and time all become part of the cost of transmitting something.
The recipient does not have to value that sacrifice in the same way the giver does.
That is another consequence of release.
A gift cannot require its receiver to understand its cost.
Once given, the generosity and the misunderstanding can exist together.
Maybe that is where The Crown Box #003 finally lands.
Not with agreement.
Not with a moral.
Not with everybody deciding the same thing.
With transmission.
A boy wanders through a Ventura drive-in in the 1970s and accidentally sees enormous women glowing on distant screens.
Decades pass.
He accumulates books, music, films and images.
He makes thousands of discs.
He cuts apart books he paid for.
He sequences pieces of his archive.
He gives part of it to somebody working at a coffee shop.
Other people see it.
Somebody objects.
The maker goes home and opens the object again.
The object becomes photographs, FLAC files and words.
And now somebody else can encounter it here without ever having been inside The Crown - Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room.
2523 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94612.
The box keeps moving.
That is the bow around The Crown Box #003.
Not closure.
Release.
AND NOW.....
REPLACEMENT COST / REPRODUCTION ESTIMATE – AUGUST 2026
One last question: what would it actually cost to make The Crown Box #003 again?
Not what the individual scraps of paper are worth after they have been cut up. Not what twelve blank CDrs cost. What would it cost to start with nothing and acquire the physical source materials again: the Crown box, the coffees that originally occupied it, the Brandywine coffees that later replaced them, the books sacrificed for collage, the recordings represented on every disc, Coffy on DVD, blank media, sleeves, printer paper, adhesive and all the little expendable things required to assemble another substantially equivalent object?
By the time this question appeared, The Crown Box #003 had already become something close to Pandora’s box.
Open one flap and another history comes out.
The coffee leads to fermentation.
The collage leads to books.
The books lead to photographers and paintings.
The CDrs lead to musicians, labels, countries, churches, punk collectives and old recording formats.
Coffy leads backward to a Ventura drive-in.
A can of spray adhesive leads backward to an Air Force missile field.
A bicycle leads to a calculation involving hundreds of thousands of miles that were never driven.
None of that was visible when the box was closed.
So begin with the most obvious invisible thing.
The Crown box was not originally empty.
It contained coffee.
THE COFFEE BEFORE THE COFFEE
The object that eventually became Private Release Crown Box #003 originally entered Boyd’s life as The Crown Jewel Tasting Collection.
Three black four-ounce tubes.
Twelve ounces of coffee altogether.
Three coffees roasted and presented by The Crown in Oakland.
Boyd drank all of them.
The coffee disappeared.
The tubes survived.
That distinction is almost a miniature version of the entire Private Release process.
The consumable part of the original object was consumed exactly as intended. What remained was the container. Instead of becoming garbage, that container stayed in Boyd’s life long enough to acquire another purpose.
Then three completely different coffees went into it.
The surviving Crown tasting sheet identifies exactly what occupied those tubes before the Brandywine coffees ever arrived:
Brazil Natural Red Catuai – Paulo Alexandre Fernandes.
Ethiopia Yirgacheffe – Supernatural.
Tanzania Karatu Vohora Family – Washed SL-28.
The sheet calls the package The Crown Jewel Tasting Collection and presents the coffees not merely as products but as things with origins, cultivars, processing methods, roasting behavior, flavor profiles and brewing possibilities.
That is a concentrated version of what makes The Crown unusual.
The coffee is not simply:
coffee.
Medium.
Dark.
Decaf.
Instead:
country.
region.
producer.
cultivar.
processing.
green coffee.
roasting.
brewing.
sensory result.
The bean is allowed to keep its biography.
That is one reason Boyd considers The Crown to have the best coffee beans in the Bay Area.
“Best” is obviously personal taste, not an objective trophy that can be handed permanently to one café. The Bay Area contains extraordinary coffee. But The Crown has an unusual structural advantage.
The Crown is Royal Coffee’s Lab & Tasting Room at 2523 Broadway in Oakland.
Royal Coffee has been importing specialty green coffee since 1978.
The Crown therefore sits much farther upstream in coffee’s life than an ordinary retail café.
The building contains a Tasting Room, Presentation Room, Brew Lab and Roast Lab.
Royal lists equipment in the Roast Lab including a Proaster sample roaster, Diedrich IR machine, Loring Falcon, Aillio Bullet and Ikawa sample roasters.
That matters because The Crown can approach a coffee from several directions before the customer ever drinks it.
Green coffee arrives.
It is evaluated.
It is cupped.
Samples are roasted.
Roast behavior is studied.
Brewing changes are tested.
Then eventually somebody can walk in off Broadway and order the result.
The distance between importer, warehouse, quality control, roaster, brewer and drinker becomes unusually short.
A normal café occupies the final few feet of coffee’s enormous supply chain.
The Crown can see much farther backward.
Farm.
Producer.
Cultivar.
Processing.
Green bean.
Import.
Oakland warehouse.
Sample roast.
Production roast.
Extraction.
Cup.
The drink is the final event in a much longer experiment.
Royal’s Crown Jewel program makes that idea especially visible.
Crown Jewels are small specialty green-coffee lots selected by Royal and sold to roasters in twenty-two-pound boxes.
A small and unusual coffee can therefore travel through the sourcing, warehousing, quality-control and educational infrastructure of a major green-coffee importer without losing its identity.
Then The Crown can take that same coffee and ask:
What is it?
Why does it taste this way?
What happens if we roast it differently?
What happens if we brew it differently?
The three original tubes demonstrate the idea beautifully.
THE BRAZIL
Brazil Natural Red Catuai – Paulo Alexandre Fernandes.
Royal identifies the current Crown Jewel version of this coffee as a natural Red Catuai from the Fernandes family’s Sítio do Balaio in Minas Gerais.
Paulo Alexandre Fernandes and his family are not working with some newly invented alien coffee cultivar.
Red Catuai is familiar territory in Brazil.
Natural processing is familiar territory in Brazil.
That is precisely why the coffee is interesting.
It demonstrates what happens when familiar materials receive extraordinary attention.
Royal describes the profile as an elevated classic natural Brazil.
Blackberry.
Salted caramel.
Dark chocolate.
Spice.
Blueberry.
Peppercorn.
Baking spice.
The tasting sheet Boyd kept occupies that same flavor universe.
The coffee remains recognizably Brazilian while revealing how much information can hide inside the word “recognizable.”
Royal’s roasting analysis also resisted the assumption that an unusual specialty coffee must be attacked with an unusual roast.
The lower-density Brazilian beans generally benefited from a slower approach that favored sweetness and balance.
That is one of the things Boyd likes about The Crown.
The coffee is not treated as an object with one sacred recipe.
The bean can be interrogated.
What does this roast reveal?
What does that roast suppress?
What happens in a flat-bottom brewer?
What happens in a conical brewer?
What happens as espresso?
Coffee is not one flavor.
It is a field of possible flavors created by plant genetics, soil, weather, fermentation, drying, roasting, water chemistry, temperature, grind, ratio, extraction and time.
THE ETHIOPIA
Ethiopia Yirgacheffe – Supernatural.
This one moves immediately into stranger sensory territory.
The tasting sheet describes chocolate, sweetness and deep spice, with additional fermentation contributing berry character and a pop of bubblegum.
Bubblegum.
That word explains a lot about why serious coffee became so interesting to Boyd.
For generations a gigantic portion of everyday coffee vocabulary could be compressed into:
strong.
weak.
bitter.
smooth.
dark.
Then somebody hands you coffee and says:
bubblegum.
And sometimes your mouth answers:
Son of a bitch.
There it is.
“Supernatural” sounds like marketing language somebody invented after staying awake too late, but Royal actually uses the word for specific Ethiopian natural coffees receiving an additional fermentation step.
Royal’s current descriptions of Supernatural lots from southern Ethiopia document coffee cherries fermenting before being moved to raised beds for sun drying.
The exact producer represented by Boyd’s older tasting sheet is not identified clearly enough on the surviving card to force a modern identity onto it.
So there is no reason to invent one.
What survived is enough.
Yirgacheffe.
Supernatural.
Chocolate.
Deep spice.
Berry.
Bubblegum.
Fermentation changes the biological and chemical environment surrounding the seed.
Drying changes it again.
Roasting changes it again.
Grinding exposes it.
Water extracts it.
Temperature keeps changing what the drinker perceives.
The first sip is not the final sip.
Coffee reveals itself in time.
THE TANZANIA
Tanzania Karatu Vohora Family – Washed SL-28.
Royal’s current documentation makes this one especially satisfying to revisit.
Neel and Kavita Vohora produce coffee in Karatu, Tanzania.
The lot is SL-28.
SL-28 is most famously associated with Kenya, where it became one of the cultivars connected with the intense fruit, acidity and sweetness of exceptional Kenyan coffees.
Put that cultivar in Tanzania and an experiment appears without anybody having to manufacture one.
Same cultivar.
Different place.
Different farm.
Different climate.
Different processing decisions.
What survives?
What changes?
Royal’s current Vohora Washed SL-28 description talks about exactly that tension: bright fruit character associated with SL-28 combined with an unexpectedly soft, creamy roundness.
The flavor analysis includes:
amber ale.
marzipan.
apricot.
caramel.
The original tasting sheet also wandered into marigold and corn flakes.
That list sounds less like conventional coffee description than an inventory of unrelated objects on a kitchen counter.
Then somehow they occupy one cup.
Royal’s brewing notes for the Vohora lot favored a moderately high dose and a coarser-than-average grind to balance sweetness and extraction.
Again:
different coffee.
different behavior.
different solution.
This is where The Crown becomes particularly compatible with the way Boyd approaches sound.
A coffee has variables.
A record has variables.
Sound has frequency, duration, space, attack, decay, texture, repetition, silence and physical pressure.
Coffee has aroma, acidity, sweetness, bitterness, body, finish, temperature and a flavor structure that moves while the cup cools.
Both happen in time.
A record reveals itself by moving.
Coffee reveals itself by cooling.
The first second is not the whole thing.
THE CROWN JEWEL IDEA
This helps explain why Boyd has continued returning to The Crown.
Royal is not merely decorating bags with detailed origin stories after the fact.
It is a green-coffee importer whose Oakland tasting room sits beside the analytical infrastructure used to understand what those coffees can do.
The Crown makes some of the usually invisible stages of coffee visible.
Source analysis.
Green analysis.
Roasting analysis.
Brewing analysis.
Sensory analysis.
The customer encounters the final cup.
Behind that cup is an enormous amount of hidden decision-making.
That feels familiar.
A finished Private Release box also hides its decision-making.
The recipient sees an object.
Behind it are years of listening.
Books accumulated over decades.
Images remembered.
Albums sequenced.
CDrs burned.
Packages mailed.
Coffee tasted.
Jokes.
Accidents.
Old experiences suddenly becoming relevant again.
The finished surface compresses the process that made it.
And Boyd drank all three Crown tubes.
Nothing remains of those coffees.
That sounds obvious because coffee is made to disappear.
But it is conceptually important.
The first physical transformation associated with Crown Box #003 was destruction through enjoyment.
Coffee beans were ground.
Their original physical form was destroyed.
Hot water extracted what could be extracted.
The liquid was consumed.
The grounds were discarded.
The experience remained.
The tubes remained.
The box remained.
Years of object-making teach a strange lesson:
the container can outlive the reason it originally existed.
Those three tubes eventually became available for another three coffees.
Dirty Soda.
Stellar Collisions.
2Straw 2Nana.
Coffee from The Crown was consumed.
The Crown container survived.
Brandywine entered.
Private Release happened.
The Crown Box #003 therefore contains two coffee flights even though neither flight is now physically present.
The first is absent because Boyd drank it.
Brazil.
Ethiopia.
Tanzania.
The second is absent because Boyd gave it away.
Dirty Soda.
Stellar Collisions.
2Straw 2Nana.
The first flight created the empty object.
The second flight transformed the empty object into a gift.
THE CROWN AND THE COFFEE – REPLACEMENT COST
The Crown Jewel Tasting Collection, including the three original four-ounce coffees and reusable presentation tubes: $35
Brandywine Dirty Soda Co-Ferment Blend, 8 oz bag: approximately $29
Brandywine Stellar Collisions: The Next Generation Peach Co-Ferment Blend, 12 oz bag: approximately $28
Brandywine 2Straw 2Nana – Strawnana Smash Co-Ferment Blend Vol. 2: approximately $29
Crown and coffee replacement cost: approximately $121
The Brandywine figures here are replacement prices, not a record of what Boyd happened to pay locally.
That distinction matters because this entire exercise asks a different question:
What would another person need to spend to obtain the source material again?
The $35 Crown figure also means something more accurate than “empty coffee box.”
The original twelve ounces of Crown coffee count.
To reproduce the history rather than merely imitate the final appearance, the procedure would be:
Buy the Crown Jewel Tasting Collection.
Drink twelve ounces of excellent Crown coffee.
Keep the box.
Keep the tubes.
Acquire the three Brandywine coffees.
Fill the tubes again.
The consumed Crown coffee is part of the material history even though not one original Crown bean appears in the finished Private Release.
THE BOOKS AND PRINTED MATERIAL
Dian Hanson / TASCHEN, The Big Penis Book: approximately $70
Helmut Newton. SUMO. 20th Anniversary Edition, TASCHEN, 464 pages, 14.7 inches tall: $150
Bruce Bernard, CENTURY: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope: approximately $25 for a decent used copy
Tommi Musturi, The Anthology of Mind, Fantagraphics: approximately $25
Robert Descharnes / Gilles Néret, Dalí: The Paintings, comparable used two-volume TASCHEN edition: approximately $40
The New York Times, Sunday, June 30, 2024: approximately $6
Printed-source replacement cost: approximately $316
This category is where innocent-looking scraps of paper become deceptive.
The Jerry Hall image did not come from a loose photograph.
It came from Helmut Newton’s SUMO, 20th Anniversary Edition.
TASCHEN currently sells that XL edition for $150.
The Long Dong Silver material came from The Big Penis Book.
TASCHEN currently lists that book at 70.
The Dalí image underneath the stack of discs requires acquiring another physical Dalí volume before a page can be removed.
CENTURY must exist before it can be cut.
The Anthology of Mind must exist before it can be damaged.
The newspaper must exist before one page becomes a surface on a CDr box.
A collage can contain only a few dollars’ worth of paper while requiring hundreds of dollars’ worth of books to create those pieces of paper.
That is one of the peculiar economics of destructive collage.
The fragment is cheap.
Access to the fragment is not.
THE TWELVE MUSIC SOURCES AND ONE MOVIE
Disc 001 – Treasury of Puppies, Treasury of Puppies: approximately $26 for the LP
Disc 002 – FRAGMENT, Hear Nothing / Demo 2016: approximately $15 replacement allowance
Disc 003 – Australis, The Gates of Reality: approximately $20 for an out-of-print CD
Disc 004 – F.U.A.L., Veganic Wind: approximately $25 for a physical reissue / out-of-print copy
Disc 005 – Avalanche Kaito, Avalanche Kaito: approximately $18
Disc 006 – Don Cherry, Eternal Rhythm: approximately $25
Disc 007 – Marcy Tigner, Trombone with Harp, Violin and Pipe Organ: approximately $20 for an original used LP
Disc 008 – Josef Novotny & Max Nagl, AMen#: approximately $40 replacement allowance for the rare 1989 Extraplatte CD
Disc 009 – Various Artists, Druga Liga Prvo Kolo: approximately $30 replacement allowance for the scarce 1995 Helidon CD
Disc 010 – Jah Shaka, Far-I Ship Dub: approximately $20 for a physical CD
Disc 011 – The Pop Group, Y: approximately $15 for an available CD edition
Disc 012 – Mannakorn, Í gegnum tíðina: approximately $30 for a physical LP
Disc 013 – Coffy, 1973: approximately $9 for a used commercial DVD
Music and film source replacement allowance: approximately $293
These are not claims about collector-grade first pressings.
They are not a minute-by-minute price report.
Several releases are obscure enough that the only copy for sale on a particular afternoon may be on another continent.
A $25 object can become a $60 object because one seller happens to be the only person offering it.
Then three months later somebody lists another copy for $12.
That instability is part of the calculation.
The question is not:
What is the most valuable possible pressing?
The question is:
What would it reasonably cost to acquire legitimate physical source copies of these thirteen works again?
The estimate therefore uses replacement allowances rather than pretending the used-record market behaves like a supermarket shelf.
That uncertainty is itself part of building from an archive rather than from a shopping list.
THE BORING STUFF THAT STILL COSTS MONEY
12 blank CD-Rs: approximately $3.36
1 blank DVD-R: approximately $0.28
13 clear plastic CD/DVD sleeves: approximately $2.20
Printer paper actually consumed: less than $0.25
One current California-compliant 3M Super 77 aerosol can: approximately $20
Estimated printer ink, clear tape, rubber bands and miscellaneous consumables: approximately $5
Physical production consumables: approximately $31
The Super 77 deserves to be named rather than buried underneath the word “adhesive.”
It is the secret mechanical technology behind a remarkable amount of Boyd’s collage work.
3M Super 77 Multipurpose Spray Adhesive.
Aerosol.
Mist.
Spray the back.
Position the paper.
Press.
Something printed for one purpose becomes the surface of something else.
3M specifically lists paper and cardboard among Super 77’s substrates.
It has fast tack but enough open time to reposition material.
That combination explains its usefulness for covering boxes and making collage.
The image can behave almost like skin.
The collage may look chaotic.
The adhesion is not.
THE TOTAL
Crown Jewel Tasting Collection plus three Brandywine coffees: approximately $121
Books and newspaper: approximately $316
Twelve music sources and Coffy DVD: approximately $293
Blank discs, sleeves, Super 77, paper and miscellaneous assembly materials: approximately $31
Estimated raw replacement cost:
approximately $761
Call it:
$760
But $760 is the laboratory number.
It assumes everything politely appears at the estimated price.
Reality includes sales tax.
Reality includes shipping.
Reality includes rare media.
Reality includes books that may only be available used.
Reality includes ordering some strange recording from another country.
Reality includes acquiring an entire book because one page is needed.
A realistic cash budget for somebody beginning with absolutely none of these materials would therefore remain closer to:
$850–$950
And that still assigns Boyd’s labor a value of:
$0
No money has yet been assigned to finding the sources, drinking the original Crown coffees, researching the Brandywine coffees, burning twelve audio CDrs, burning the DVD, printing the sleeves, cutting the artwork, spraying adhesive, sacrificing the books, folding images around boxes, filling tubes, assembling the object or sequencing thirteen selections.
More importantly, it assigns $0 to the thing that cannot simply be reordered:
the selection.
During 2024 Boyd made approximately 2,000 CDs and another 300 DVDs after work.
The years afterward have involved listening to, organizing and sequencing that material into roughly forty boxes.
About twenty-four boxes remain.
The others have already begun leaving through the mail, giveaways and experiments in physically releasing the archive into other people’s lives.
That changes the meaning of “Private Release.”
The boxes are not simply storage.
They are an archive being placed into motion.
Some remain.
Some are mailed.
Some are handed to somebody.
Some disappear into another person’s house.
The object leaves Boyd’s possession while its documentation and memory stay behind.
The Crown Box #003 is thirteen selections drawn from that much larger reservoir.
If somebody wanted only the ingredients necessary to reconstruct one, approximately $900 would probably get them into the room.
If somebody actually asked Boyd to reproduce The Crown Box #003 as another completed Private Release object, I would put the price at:
$1,500
That is not an appraisal of the original.
It is a reproduction price.
Approximately $900 for the world that has to be purchased again.
Approximately $600 for the human being who has to turn that pile back into this.
AND THEN THERE IS THE SPRAY CAN
There is a much longer history hiding inside that approximately twenty-dollar replacement can of Super 77.
Boyd estimates that he has used roughly one aerosol can per month during two long periods of collage making:
1995 through 1998.
Then 2007 through August 2026.
Taken as complete periods, that is approximately:
23 years and 8 months.
284 months.
Approximately 284 cans.
Can sizes and formulas changed over those decades, so pretending every can was chemically identical would manufacture precision that does not exist.
But a useful scale can still be created.
Normalize those 284 months to the familiar 16.75-ounce Super 77 can and the total becomes approximately:
4,757 ounces of product.
297 pounds.
135 kilograms.
In other words:
roughly three hundred pounds of spray-adhesive product-equivalent across the larger collage history.
Not three hundred pounds emitted into the atmosphere.
The adhesive contains solids that remain on the artwork.
3M’s documentation for the familiar standard aerosol lists a 16.75-ounce net weight and a VOC figure of up to approximately 51 percent for that formulation.
If that 51-percent figure were applied across the normalized three-hundred-pound lifetime total purely as a rough scale comparison, it would equal approximately:
152 pounds of VOC material.
That is NOT a historical emissions inventory.
It should not be read as one.
The formulas changed.
California-compliant versions became substantially lower in VOC.
Can sizes changed.
Some adhesive remained on paper and cardboard.
Some product remained in cans.
The calculation exists to make the scale imaginable, not to manufacture forensic certainty.
And this is where another history opens.
MINUTEMAN III
Boyd’s concern about putting invisible chemicals into the atmosphere did not begin with a newspaper story about aerosol cans.
From 1991 through 1994 he was in the United States Air Force working in Minuteman III missile facilities around Minot, North Dakota as a missile facilities specialist.
That environment is independently recognizable in the historical record.
Minot’s missile wing became the first Air Force wing to operate Minuteman III in 1971.
The Minot missile field ultimately included 150 remote launch facilities spread across roughly 8,500 square miles of North Dakota.
And the piece of equipment Boyd remembers working on has not vanished from the vocabulary.
More than thirty years later, Minot Air Force Base still calls it a:
brine chiller.
In 2025 Minot documented facility-maintenance teams replacing brine chillers at remote Minuteman III launch facilities and described the brine chiller as the HVAC system responsible for keeping the launch facility and launch-critical equipment temperature controlled.
So the machine in Boyd’s memory is not a generalized memory of “some refrigeration thing at a missile silo.”
Brine chiller is the actual Minuteman III facility term.
Boyd remembers working on those systems and having to use equipment to recover refrigerant rather than simply purging the lines.
That memory also falls into an extremely specific moment in American environmental regulation.
Section 608 of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments prohibited knowingly venting ozone-depleting refrigerants while servicing or repairing refrigeration and air-conditioning equipment beginning:
July 1, 1992.
Boyd’s Minot service period was:
1991–1994.
The dates overlap almost perfectly.
The regulations that followed required recovery practices and recovery equipment rather than simply allowing technicians to dump refrigerant into the atmosphere.
So his environmental association was not imaginary.
What needs correcting is only the chemistry attached to the later spray can.
The refrigerant lesson was real.
The regulatory change was real.
The recovery equipment was real.
The Super 77 can was a different chemical system.
By 1995, when Boyd began using Super 77 heavily for collage, the old picture of a consumer aerosol can simply blasting classic CFC propellant into the ozone layer was no longer an accurate description of the product.
The relevant concerns around spray adhesive became VOCs, solvents, propellants, exposure and local air pollution.
But the mental habit had already been installed.
Invisible gas can matter.
Do not release it casually.
Think about what goes into the atmosphere.
That habit had come from standing inside one of the strangest industrial environments imaginable:
an American nuclear missile system.
Then Boyd left the Air Force.
The same life moved into something that looked completely unrelated.
MAILORDER
During the 1990s Boyd ran Wow Cool mailorder and also worked at Blacklist Mailorder in the back of Epicenter Zone in San Francisco.
Those names are not foggy inventions from a vanished pre-internet world.
Wow Cool’s own history says that in February 1993 it officially moved to the Bay Area and became a distributor, publisher and mail-order house for mini-comix, punk zines and DIY ephemera.
A surviving 1994 listing places Wow Cool at 48 Shattuck Square in Berkeley.
Blacklist Mailorder also belongs to a documented San Francisco punk infrastructure.
KQED’s history of Maximum Rocknroll names Epicenter Zone and Blacklist Mailorder among the projects connected to the larger MRR ecosystem.
A surviving description of Epicenter Zone at 475 Valencia Street remembers Blacklist operating from the back of the space and sending punk records to people who ordered through the mail.
This is exactly the world Boyd remembers inhabiting.
Before ordinary people had the internet as a universal lookup machine, a large amount of underground culture moved physically.
Boyd wrote bands.
He wrote labels.
He wrote record stores.
Letters went out.
Catalogs went out.
Orders came back.
Records moved.
Tapes moved.
Zines moved.
Money moved.
Addresses mattered.
Postage mattered.
The mailbox was infrastructure.
Two people who might never see one another could nevertheless build a relationship through paper and parcels.
The network was human beings plus the postal system.
The package therefore had two jobs.
It had to survive transportation.
And it had a surface.
Boyd remembers the Post Office being stricter then about what could travel and how packages could be prepared.
Addresses had to remain readable.
Postage had to function.
The object had to survive machinery and handling.
But everything that did not interfere with those requirements became available territory.
That is where 3M Super 77 enters the story.
Boyd used the spray adhesive to create a blank canvas out of an existing mailing package.
The commercial identity of the original box could disappear beneath paper.
Spray.
Lay down the new surface.
Press.
Now the container belonged to the thing being mailed.
The package was no longer merely a shell protecting the artwork.
The package could become part of the artwork.
This is a direct ancestor of Private Release.
The Private Release boxes did not materialize one afternoon as a fully formulated art theory.
They evolved from decades of physical behavior.
Writing people.
Mailing things.
Giving things away.
Learning how paper moves.
Learning what adhesive works.
Learning what survives postal handling.
Learning that a box can be both:
container
and
content.
The mailorder package gradually mutated into the Private Release box.
That gives one aerosol can a bizarre but genuine family tree:
Minot.
Minuteman III.
Brine chiller.
Refrigerant recovery.
Leave the Air Force.
Pre-internet correspondence.
Wow Cool.
Blacklist Mailorder.
Epicenter Zone.
Bands.
Labels.
Record stores.
The Post Office.
Packages.
3M Super 77.
Collage.
Giveaways.
Private Release.
A person looking only at the final Crown box would have no reason to guess that any of those things were inside it.
They are not physically inside it.
They are inside the process that produced it.
THE PRIVATE ENVIRONMENTAL EQUATION
The environmental equation developed alongside the collage.
Boyd knew he was intentionally spraying aerosol product in order to make things.
He also knew from firsthand technical experience that invisible chemicals could matter enough for an institution as enormous as the United States Air Force to require equipment and procedures for recovering them.
He did not become an atmospheric chemist.
He did not calculate VOC mass.
He did not calculate carbon dioxide.
He did not construct a scientifically valid carbon-offset methodology.
He felt a relationship.
I am choosing to do this.
This releases something into the environment.
I should deliberately remove another environmentally harmful behavior from my life.
The other behavior was driving.
So he rode a bicycle.
1995 through 1998.
Then again from 2007 through August 2026.
Work.
Errands.
Little trips.
Getting somewhere.
Getting home.
No odometer exists for the automobile that was never driven.
So instead of inventing Boyd-specific mileage, use the average American passenger vehicle as a counterfactual.
The United States Environmental Protection Agency uses approximately:
11,500 miles driven per year.
22.2 miles per gallon.
4.6 metric tons of tailpipe carbon dioxide per year.
Apply that average across Boyd’s approximately 23 years and 8 months of bicycle-not-car time.
The imaginary average automobile travels approximately:
272,000 miles.
That is almost eleven trips around Earth at the equator.
At 22.2 miles per gallon, it burns approximately:
12,250 gallons of gasoline.
Its tailpipe releases approximately:
109 metric tons of carbon dioxide.
Approximately:
240,000 pounds of CO2.
Now place the two strange quantities beside one another.
Normalized lifetime Super 77 product-equivalent:
approximately 297 pounds.
Very rough 51-percent VOC-scale comparison for the standard formula:
approximately 152 pounds.
Average-car tailpipe CO2 avoided under the bicycle counterfactual:
approximately 240,000 pounds.
By simple mass, the hypothetical avoided CO2 is roughly:
1,580 times larger than the rough VOC number.
That is NOT an environmental exchange rate.
A pound of VOC and a pound of carbon dioxide do different things.
They participate in different chemistry.
They cause different environmental and health effects.
Boyd cannot scientifically spray ten pounds of solvent and erase it by preventing ten pounds of carbon dioxide somewhere else.
The planet does not keep that kind of checking account.
But that was never actually the system he invented.
His system was behavioral.
I do something I believe has a cost.
I deliberately choose somewhere else to do less.
Spray the can.
Ride the bicycle.
Make the package.
Mail the package.
The original understanding did not have to be chemically perfect for the behavior to become real.
The bicycle miles accumulated anyway.
That may be one of the cleanest examples anywhere in this enormous post of the way Boyd has repeatedly described perceiving things.
The relationship sometimes appears before the explanation.
Sound works that way for him.
Two recordings can feel connected before there is vocabulary for the connection.
A coffee flavor can seem connected to a sound before the chemistry or acoustics explains why.
Two photographs placed together create a third idea that exists in neither photograph by itself.
An intuition, fantasy, joke or incomplete pattern becomes something worth following.
Then reality gets a turn.
Sometimes reality destroys the idea.
Sometimes it modifies it.
Sometimes it produces an explanation years later.
Sometimes it produces arithmetic thirty years later.
The Minot refrigerant connection survived fact-checking.
The brine chiller survived fact-checking.
The 1990s mailorder world survived fact-checking.
Wow Cool survived fact-checking.
Blacklist and Epicenter survived fact-checking.
The specific chemistry of the spray adhesive required correction.
That correction did not ruin the pattern.
It made the pattern more interesting.
Fantasy entered reality.
Reality answered.
The answer changed the fantasy.
The changed fantasy became new information.
That is a long-running theme.
THE THIRD DAY
And that is almost exactly what happened while making this post.
The box already existed.
It had already been given away.
Its social life at The Crown had already happened.
The blog post could have stopped.
Then Boyd began opening the object intellectually.
One question produced another.
The coffee required fermentation histories.
The packaging required source books.
The books required photographers and paintings.
The CDrs required recordings.
The recordings required labels, musicians, countries and histories.
Coffy opened a Ventura drive-in.
The replacement-cost calculation opened Super 77.
Super 77 opened the bicycle.
The bicycle opened the Air Force.
The Air Force opened Minot.
Minot opened a brine chiller.
The spray adhesive opened the old mailorder packages.
The mailorder packages opened Wow Cool, Blacklist and Epicenter Zone.
And suddenly Private Release was no longer something that began when somebody put a name on a box.
It had ancestors.
Then, on the third day of working through the post, Side A of Kali Malone’s The Sacrificial Code was playing from vinyl.
Slow organ tones.
Long duration.
Tiny changes demanding attention.
And Boyd looked again at the old Crown Jewel Tasting Collection sheet.
Three coffees.
Three tubes.
Three things that had disappeared before Private Release Crown Box #003 was even made.
The post opened again.
That feels appropriate.
The Crown Box #003 has repeatedly demonstrated that an object does not contain only what is physically inside it.
The Crown coffee is no longer inside.
It matters.
The pages are no longer inside their books.
The books matter.
The original source files are not inside the CDrs.
They matter.
The childhood drive-in is not inside Coffy.
It matters.
The hypothetical automobile never existed.
Its absence matters.
The old Wow Cool and Blacklist packages are gone.
They matter.
The refrigerant recovered from some Minuteman III brine chiller more than thirty years ago certainly is not inside this Crown box.
Somehow that matters too.
The box begins to resemble memory.
What is missing can exert as much pressure as what remains.
The Crown beans may be the simplest example.
Boyd drank them.
Nothing remains except the tasting sheet, the reused presentation system and memory.
Yet those vanished beans explain why the object exists.
They explain why he kept the tubes.
They help explain why The Crown became important to him.
They explain why three Brandywine coffees later had somewhere to go.
The same structure extends backward.
The old mailorder packages are gone.
They explain why Boyd already knew that the outside of a shipping container could become a visual surface.
The correspondence is dispersed.
It explains why sending physical culture directly to another human being feels natural.
The Air Force years are decades behind him.
They help explain why releasing an aerosol could trigger an environmental balancing instinct.
The first coffee becomes the architecture of the second coffee.
The first package becomes the ancestor of the second package.
The first use becomes material for another use.
A previous version of a life becomes source material for the next version.
Then Private Release sends pieces of it outward.
That word is increasingly literal.
Roughly forty boxes were assembled from the larger CD and DVD archive.
About twenty-four remain.
The others have already gone outward through the mail, giveaways and experiments.
The archive is not simply being cataloged.
It is being dispersed.
The objects leave.
The documentation remains.
The relationships remain.
Memory remains.
Sometimes the explanation arrives afterward.
THE COST OF MAKING THE SAME THING TWICE
Even $1,500 contains something impossible to purchase.
The first Crown Box #003 already happened.
A second one could reproduce:
the Crown Jewel tasting collection.
the Brandywine coffees.
the books.
the newspaper.
the recordings.
the movie.
the discs.
the sleeves.
the printer paper.
the Super 77.
the physical construction.
It could not reproduce:
being Boyd when the first one happened.
the exact sequence of accidents.
the person who happened to be standing behind a counter.
the conversations that followed.
the experience of reopening the gift.
the records that happened to be playing while the documentation grew.
a childhood drive-in memory arriving through a 1973 Pam Grier movie.
an environmental idea formed decades ago finally receiving arithmetic.
a Minuteman III missile facilities specialist working around brine chillers in North Dakota between 1991 and 1994.
that same person later entering a Bay Area underground mailorder network.
Wow Cool.
Blacklist.
Epicenter.
letters.
records.
packages.
spray adhesive.
bicycle miles.
coffee.
All those apparently separate things required decades to become close enough to one another to fit inside the history of one small box.
The first Crown Box #003 cost materials.
A second would cost materials plus knowledge.
Estimated raw replacement cost:
approximately $760.
Realistic from-zero acquisition budget:
approximately $850–$950.
Price to ask Boyd to actually make another completed one:
$1,500.
Original Crown coffee consumed before the artwork existed:
12 ounces.
Original Crown coffees:
3.
Brandywine coffees placed into the reused tubes:
3.
CDrs:
12.
DVDs:
1.
Approximate larger CD/DVD archive boxes assembled:
40.
Approximate boxes still remaining:
24.
Estimated Super 77 months across the larger collage history:
284.
Normalized Super 77 product-equivalent:
approximately 297 pounds.
Rough standard-formula VOC scale comparison:
approximately 152 pounds.
Average-driver automobile mileage displaced under the bicycle model:
approximately 272,000 miles.
Gasoline not burned under that model:
approximately 12,250 gallons.
Tailpipe CO2 not released under that model:
approximately 109 metric tons.
Time spent opening one little coffee box to figure out what was actually inside it:
three days.
The Crown Box became Pandora’s box.
But Pandora’s box is usually a story about what escapes when the lid opens.
Private Release has been doing that deliberately for years.
Open the box.
Something leaves.
The object gets smaller.
The history gets larger.
PRIVATE RELEASE.
