Zuider Zee - 2018 - Zeenith

 

Light In The Attic – LITA 166

Zeenith has one of those histories that makes the word “reissue” feel inadequate. When Light In The Attic released it in 2018, the music was already more than forty years old, recorded by Zuider Zee during the early 1970s before the Memphis band finally released its lone self-titled Columbia album in 1975. These were not familiar songs being polished for another anniversary edition. The material had never been released at all. An entire alternate Zuider Zee album had effectively remained buried in tape storage while the band itself became a small cult footnote in American power pop. Heard decades later, the remarkable thing is not simply that the tapes survived. It is how little the music sounds like something that deserved to disappear.

Zuider Zee occupied an odd place geographically and musically. The band settled in Memphis, but Richard Orange and company were not particularly interested in sounding Southern. Their reference points leaned heavily toward British pop: The Beatles, glam, Merseybeat, carefully built vocal harmonies and the kind of melodic rock that eventually became categorized as power pop. The obvious comparison is Big Star, another Memphis band making exquisitely melodic guitar music at almost exactly the same moment, although Zuider Zee apparently had virtually no relationship with them. There is something wonderfully strange about two groups working in the same city, drawing from overlapping musical ancestry and nevertheless occupying separate little universes.

“Haunter Of The Darkness” makes an excellent opening argument for Zuider Zee. It has the large chords and momentum expected from power pop, but underneath that brightness is a groove with considerably more movement than a straight guitar charge. Organ adds another distinctly early-1970s texture, while Richard Orange’s vocal immediately reveals one of the defining characteristics of the band: his ability to jump into a high register that can make Paul McCartney feel less like an influence than a distant relative. Even the song’s origins are peculiar. Orange later recalled rewriting it rapidly after reading H.P. Lovecraft, turning the song into his own little story about something coming after the narrator. That combination of musical sunshine and lurking darkness is a good introduction to a band that rarely seems satisfied with doing exactly what the genre around it suggests.

“Lancelot’s Theme” heads somewhere more openly charming. There is almost an innocence to Zuider Zee when they allow themselves to make a straightforward love song. The hooks are immediate, but little rhythmic and arrangement decisions keep the music from becoming anonymous nostalgia. These recordings were made before power pop had fully hardened into a recognizable genre, so Zuider Zee are pulling directly from Beatles and post-Beatles pop rather than imitating a later codified style. That distinction matters. The songs have the ingredients that would eventually become power-pop clichés, but here those ingredients still feel fluid enough to wander into glam, psychedelia, music hall and progressive arrangement ideas without anybody worrying whether the record still belongs in the correct bin.

“Miami” is one of the clearest examples of that flexibility. Piano introduces a more reflective quality, gradually opening into something grander without losing the band's melodic directness. There is a faint almost devotional feeling to parts of the arrangement, followed by the realization that Zuider Zee can make music feel large without making it heavy. Their strength is not brute force. It is lift. Chords rise. Harmonies appear. A melody that seems modest for a few seconds suddenly opens into another section and the whole room gets larger.

“Lana” continues the album’s gift for melody without needing to announce itself as one of the major discoveries. That may actually be one of the reasons Zeenith works so convincingly as an album rather than a historical collection. There is remarkably little sense of hearing archivists clean out a drawer. The songs belong together. The recording quality is coherent, the personnel remains recognizable and the melodic instincts are consistent enough that the record develops a personality rather than becoming a scrapbook of leftovers.

Then comes “Ackbar Didedar,” perhaps the song with the most moving history attached to it. Orange wrote it for an Iranian immigrant neighbor, building a long, warm melody around an acoustic framework and shifting meters. Decades later, drummer Gary Simon Bertrand located the old tapes in storage and had to find equipment capable of playing the original analog reels. Orange has recalled that “Ackbar Didedar” was one of the first recovered songs Bertrand played to him. He had apparently forgotten the song completely. Hearing it again after all those decades moved him to tears. There is something extraordinary about that situation: not merely discovering an unreleased recording, but discovering a piece of one's own creative life that memory itself had already erased. The tape remembered something its author did not.

That story quietly changes the entire album. Zeenith is full of young musicians who do not know they are recording messages for their older selves. Nothing in these performances knows that the songs will spend four decades unheard. The band sounds ambitious, energetic and remarkably unburdened by hindsight because hindsight has not happened yet. These recordings have not been constructed to explain Zuider Zee's historical importance. They are simply a working band trying things, writing constantly and getting better at what they do.

Side two begins with “After The Shine’s Gone,” where the band's ability to move between muscular rock and more expansive pop becomes particularly obvious. Contemporary reviewers have heard both Wings and Pink Floyd in it, which sounds like an impossible combination until Zuider Zee make the transition seem perfectly normal. “Better Than All The Others” pulls another old British ingredient into the mixture with touches of music hall, emphasizing again how culturally displaced this Memphis group could sound. Their imaginary map often seems to point across the Atlantic rather than toward the American South immediately surrounding them.

“Royal Command Performance” even announces that fascination in its title. Zuider Zee were not attempting to erase their American identity, but their melodic imagination was saturated with British pop culture. That could easily have produced mannered imitation. Instead the group’s years of performing ridiculously long club sets appear to have given them enough practical muscle to keep the music alive. Orange later described years of playing five-to-seven-hour nights, six days a week, often in miserable venues. Whatever glamour existed in the songs had been earned through profoundly unglamorous labor.

“Quite A While” may be one of the album's simplest pleasures. It has the brightness of morning music, melodic and lightly whimsical without becoming weightless. By this point Zeenith has demonstrated how many varieties of pop Zuider Zee could move through while maintaining a recognizable center. That center is melody. A hook rarely feels pasted onto a song after construction. The melody usually seems to be the reason the structure exists in the first place.

The vinyl version makes an interesting archival choice near the end. “Old” appears in its shorter single edit rather than the longer version found digitally and on CD, while “Nightlight” is absent from the LP entirely. “Old” wears the band's Beatles fascination especially openly, but there is something appealing about musicians being this unapologetic about what formed them. Influence does not automatically cancel personality. Zuider Zee can sound astonishingly Beatlesque in one passage and then make some peculiar harmonic, rhythmic or arrangement choice that belongs to nobody else quite as neatly.

“Might Be I’m Losing My Mind” closes the LP in full early-1970s English-pop splendor, another song packed with the sort of melodic material other groups might have stretched across several singles. That abundance may be the strangest fact about Zeenith. These do not sound like recordings withheld because nobody could find enough worthwhile material for release. The record sounds like evidence of a band generating songs faster than circumstances could properly accommodate them.

Which leaves the inevitable historical question: how does music this good vanish? There is no satisfying answer. Zuider Zee eventually signed to Columbia and released their self-titled LP, but the label never even issued a single from it. The group failed to become the major band that admirers thought they might become. Cheap Trick's Rick Nielsen was reportedly baffled by their lack of success. Meanwhile these earlier recordings were not merely unsuccessful; they were essentially nonexistent to listeners.

That is what makes Zeenith such an enjoyable archival release. There is no need to pretend the album secretly altered musical history. It did not, because almost nobody heard it. Its value comes from the opposite fact. Music does not have to influence history in order to have been excellent. Sometimes history simply loses things.

Light In The Attic recovered these recordings from the original tapes and John Baldwin remastered them without trying to turn the early 1970s into 2018. The resulting album still belongs unmistakably to its period: glam stomp, Beatles-derived harmonies, bright guitars, keyboards, psychedelia and unapologetically elaborate pop writing. Yet it also demonstrates why the best power pop tends to survive fashion unusually well. A really good melody does not require much historical explanation before it starts doing its work.

Zeenith therefore exists in two times simultaneously. It is a young band from the early 1970s still imagining what might happen next, and it is a 2018 record whose listeners already know that almost none of those imagined possibilities came true. Zuider Zee did not become enormous. These songs did not become radio staples. Most sat unheard for more than four decades.

Then somebody found the tapes.

Suddenly the future arrived after all.

Far Caspian - 2018 - Between Days 12''

 

Dance To The Radio – none

Between Days is only five songs long, but it establishes a remarkably complete emotional environment almost immediately. Far Caspian works with the familiar materials of dream pop and bedroom indie: chiming guitars soaked in reverb, soft distant vocals, warm bass, crisp drums and arrangements that feel intentionally hazy around their edges. What makes the record work is how naturally those sounds attach themselves to uncertainty. Nothing here feels aggressively miserable, yet almost every song contains somebody trying to locate themselves after something has already shifted. Relationships are failing, memories are being replayed, home exists partly as geography and partly as an idea, and even moments of escape arrive with the knowledge that whatever is being escaped from will eventually have to be faced again.

The title track establishes that atmosphere beautifully. “Between Days” does not begin with a dramatic statement. It begins with uncertainty about direction. Seasons blur together throughout the song: winter coats, autumn leaves, summer haze, pine trees and cold weather all occupy the same memory. That seasonal movement makes time feel unreliable. The narrator remembers people and places through weather rather than through a neat chronology, which is exactly how memory often behaves. Years compress into a few physical sensations. A particular coat. A city street. Trees. Cold air. Somebody standing nearby. The guitars reinforce that feeling by shimmering around the vocal rather than forcing it into the foreground. Johnston’s voice often sounds as though it is arriving from inside the memory rather than narrating from safely outside it.

“Blue” tightens the emotional focus. The relationship at its center is obviously failing, and the song understands something unusually useful about that kind of failure: knowing something will not work does not cause the attachment to disappear. The repeated idea of having to let something hurt becomes almost practical advice delivered from inside the situation rather than afterward. The verses contain little domestic memories, unanswered calls, a basement, smoke, dry lips, dancing while wasted. None of these details is especially monumental on its own, but together they produce the specificity of a relationship that has already become more vivid in recollection than it may have felt while happening. Musically, Far Caspian keeps the sadness buoyant. The rhythm continues moving while the guitars create enough air that the song never collapses into melodrama.

That balance is one of the EP’s strongest qualities. Between Days is nostalgic without treating nostalgia as uncomplicated comfort. Memory is attractive here precisely because the present feels uncertain. The past becomes somewhere to visit when the future has not yet acquired a recognizable shape. A contemporary review described the record in terms of nostalgia, solitude and wandering, and that is accurate, but the EP never sounds completely isolated. These songs keep reaching outward. Someone is being called. Someone is being remembered. Someone is being asked to leave the house, drive somewhere, work something out. Even loneliness retains another person’s outline.

“The Place” is probably the record’s most concentrated expression of that inwardness. The lyrics repeatedly return to the head, the bed, advice that has stopped being useful, and an “unknown place” that sounds simultaneously threatening and attractive. The song catches that peculiar state where indecision itself becomes comfortable. Staying confused can be easier than choosing because choosing creates consequences. The vocal delivery remains restrained while the surrounding guitars soften the edges of that anxiety, giving the song an almost weightless quality even when the words are circling self-doubt. Far Caspian’s production repeatedly performs that trick: difficult emotions are not translated into harsh sound. They are allowed to float.

“Let’s Go Outside” is where the record starts trying to break the enclosure. Even the title sounds like somebody opening a door after spending too much time thinking. The song repeatedly proposes movement: go outside, drive, work things out, find out what life is about. It is a wonderfully modest response to existential confusion. There is no revelation waiting at the end of the road. Going somewhere is valuable because remaining motionless has stopped helping. The arrangement reflects that shift. The song feels broader and more open, still carrying the hazy Far Caspian guitar sound but allowing the rhythm to give the track a stronger forward pull. It is less about solving anything than interrupting stagnation.

That idea makes “Finding My Way Home” the natural ending. Home appears here through the lake house, old pine trees and the recognition that time has passed whether the narrator was prepared for it or not. The song jumps between days and years, departure and return, damage and rebuilding. Home is not presented as a magical place where everything becomes correct again. Finding the way home is an action, something repeatedly attempted while feeling displaced. That gives the closing song more weight than a simple nostalgic return would have had. The past cannot actually be re-entered. The landscape remains, but the person approaching it has changed.

Across all five songs, nature keeps appearing whenever language starts struggling with emotion. Autumn leaves, pine trees, snow, summer, rain, gardens, a lake house, cold air. The natural imagery gives the EP an unusually visual quality without requiring complicated storytelling. Far Caspian often writes as though emotional memory is stored geographically. A feeling belongs to a street, a basement, a house, a line of trees or a season. The result is music that can feel intensely familiar even when the listener has never visited any of the actual places being described.

The production is equally important to that effect. Johnston’s DIY approach does not use lo-fi aesthetics as an excuse for unfinished sound. The EP is carefully controlled, but it preserves enough softness and distance to keep the music intimate. Guitars frequently occupy the emotional foreground more strongly than the voice. They shimmer, repeat and hang around after individual notes should have disappeared. Reverb creates the sensation that every sound leaves a faint memory of itself behind. The drums provide definition without breaking the atmosphere, giving the songs enough physical structure that the haze never turns shapeless.

There is also very little unnecessary excess. Five tracks, around twenty minutes, and the record is finished. That compact size suits the material. Between Days captures a state rather than attempting to document an entire life. The title itself describes that suspended quality perfectly. These are songs made in the spaces between certainty: between seasons, relationships, homes, decisions and versions of oneself. The EP never announces that everything will eventually work out. Its optimism is smaller and more believable than that. Leave the room. Drive somewhere. Let it hurt. Rebuild. Look for the road home.

That is probably why the record has continued finding listeners long after 2018. Far Caspian did not invent hazy guitars, bedroom recording or songs about feeling lost. Between Days succeeds because those familiar materials are arranged with unusual emotional clarity. The record understands that confusion does not always sound chaotic. Sometimes it sounds beautiful, slow and strangely comfortable. Sometimes being lost becomes a place of its own, and for twenty minutes Far Caspian makes that place remarkably easy to inhabit.

Instant Cold Commando - 1993 - Command The Slaves C50

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 3:01PM

Private Release – none

Instant Cold Commando is P. Nyström, and the surviving insert for “Command the Slaves” identifies three tracks: “Horror Beats,” “Waste Inside” and “Bone Structure.” The material was recorded in 1992, with the insert specifically stating that no samples were used and noting Dolby B. It also explains that the tracks had originally appeared on a split cassette with Meat Machine before being issued through Marco Corbelli’s Slaughter Productions as T-18. Addresses for Nyström in Oxelösund, Sweden and Slaughter Productions in Sassuolo, Italy remain printed directly on the sheet. There is even the wonderfully hostile little declaration “fuck all commercial music.” Everything about it belongs to a period when underground music could exist as a small physical transmission between people rather than as something dependent upon a permanent centralized catalog.

Boyd bought an original copy through Discogs years later and loved the release enough that simply owning it was not sufficient. He wanted to make his own version of the object. That distinction matters. This was not a matter of finding the audio and putting it onto another cassette with unrelated Private Release artwork. Considerable attention went into understanding how the original Slaughter Productions edition had actually been constructed and then deciding which of those physical ideas could be carried into another handmade edition decades later.

One of the strangest and most important features of the original is the enormous paper label attached directly to the cassette. It covers Side A in a way that interferes with the normal operation of the tape. The portion covering the necessary opening was intended to be broken or torn away when the owner finally decided to play it. Playback therefore altered the object. An untouched cassette retained evidence that it had never crossed that threshold.

Boyd’s copy was mint and apparently unplayed, meaning the label had survived intact. Rather than tear through it, he very carefully peeled the entire original label from the cassette so that its complete form could be preserved and reproduced. The Private Release version restores the same idea. A large reproduction of the Slaughter Productions label is again applied over Side A, including the area that has to be opened if the cassette is going to function normally in a player. The recipient therefore receives something more peculiar than a conventional duplicated tape. It arrives in an intentionally unplayed-looking state and asks for a small irreversible decision before use.

That decision becomes even more interesting because the Private Release copy was distributed with the music available as digital files. Nobody receiving one actually needed to damage the paper in order to hear Instant Cold Commando. The physical cassette could remain completely mint while the recording was played from the digital copy, or the owner could decide that the tape itself should become a working object and break the paper away. Both states are legitimate. The unopened version preserves the construction. The opened version records an act of use. In that sense every copy potentially develops its own history after leaving Boyd’s hands.

The cassette case was another problem. The original was not housed in an ordinary modern cassette box. Boyd remembers it arriving in some kind of simple 1990s Italian paper envelope, the sort of packaging that is extraordinarily difficult to reproduce accurately now because the exact paper stock, manufacture and source have disappeared into ordinary material history. Trying to fabricate a fake approximation would have been less interesting than acknowledging that the Private Release copy was being made at another time.

So the reconstruction deliberately changes direction at that point. Boyd ordered unusual cassette cases from Tape Line in the United Kingdom. Unlike standard cassette cases, these do not have the familiar molded plastic teeth or projecting holders that normally grip the cassette. The smooth clamshell presentation allows the large paper-covered tape to sit inside more naturally and also makes the object feel less like an ordinary store-bought cassette. This is one of those nearly invisible decisions that reveals how much physical thinking went into the edition. The plastic box itself became part of the interpretation.

Another surviving feature of the original appears to involve a piece of extremely fine mesh laid over the corpse image. Boyd believes it may actually have been vintage window-screen material. That possibility fits perfectly with the economy of underground cassette production: ordinary material removed from its intended context and suddenly functioning as packaging, texture and image filter. He considered locating comparable window mesh and cutting pieces to reproduce the original construction more literally. Ultimately the clamshell case won. The mesh therefore becomes one of the boundaries of the reconstruction, something studied and remembered rather than mechanically duplicated.

That makes this Private Release especially interesting because its strongest moments are found in the places where reproduction stops being simple copying. The corpse imagery is retained. The Slaughter Productions graphics are reconstructed. The typed information survives. The unusual destructive Side A label is carefully recreated. The original packaging is studied. The screen material is considered. Special cases are sourced from another country. Then decisions are made about what should remain faithful and what should change.

Even the visual bluntness of the original survives remarkably well. The body imagery is ugly, flattened and photocopied into heavy black-and-white shapes. Flesh becomes texture. The mesh converts the image into another layer of interference. The cassette label looks almost institutional in its rectangular simplicity, with SLAUGHTER PRODUCTIONS TAPE RELEASE sitting above the corpse like an archival classification. There is none of the slick ornamental horror vocabulary that later became common around extreme music. It feels closer to something manufactured with whatever materials happened to be available, which is precisely why reproducing the object convincingly requires noticing those materials rather than merely scanning the artwork.

The original insert also places the release very specifically inside the international cassette underground of the early 1990s. Sweden, Italy, postal addresses, a numbered Slaughter Productions release and a previous split cassette are all compressed onto one sheet of paper. Long before a listener could search an artist name and immediately produce an entire history, the object itself had to carry the trail. The address was part of the network. Someone could hear the tape, write a letter, mail something back, order another cassette or begin another exchange. The recording moved because physical objects and people moved.

Private Release takes that old network object and sends it moving again under different conditions. The music now exists digitally, but the cassette still matters. In fact the availability of the digital file makes the cassette stranger because it no longer has to justify itself merely as a container for sound. It can remain sealed. It can be handled. It can be examined. It can sit untouched for twenty years. Someone can eventually tear through the Side A label and play it, leaving behind physical evidence that a decision was made.

That little piece of paper is therefore one of the best parts of the entire reconstruction. The original Slaughter Productions release contained a built-in transition from mint artifact to used cassette. Boyd preserved that mechanism rather than merely reproducing how the tape looked after somebody had already played it. His copy begins again at zero.

For a project built around making physical editions and sending them into the world, that is unusually appropriate. The maker controls the object only until it leaves. After that, somebody else determines what happens. Keep the paper intact. Tear it. Play the digital files. Play the cassette. Lose the case. Preserve everything. Pass it to somebody else decades later. Each possibility moves the object farther away from the moment it was assembled.

Boyd has said he should have made many more copies of this one. Looking closely at it, that reaction makes sense. It is one of the Private Release objects where affection for another underground release becomes almost archaeological. The goal was not to impersonate Slaughter Productions or manufacture a counterfeit original. The goal was to understand an object that mattered enough to rebuild it, then allow that understanding to pass through another set of hands and materials.

This write-up is ChatGPT’s reading of the surviving objects, photographs and details supplied by Boyd. The personal history described here belongs to Boyd; the interpretation of how those details operate together is the review. That separation is worth stating because this cassette is itself about transmission: Nyström made the recordings, Slaughter Productions gave them one physical form, Boyd encountered that form years later and constructed another, and now the object is being described again from photographs and memory. Every stage leaves something behind and changes something else.

The best detail remains brutally simple. Side A is waiting underneath a piece of paper. The music can be heard without touching it. The cassette can stay perfect forever.

Or somebody can decide to break it open.

H.C.O.D. - 2014 - Fracture Of Mercy C30

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 3:07PM

Private Release – none

H.C.O.D. - 2013 - Hideous Colors Of Decay C35

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 3:15PM

Private Release – none

The front image almost completely abandons the visual restraint that appears on a lot of these Private Release tapes. There is no ambiguous landscape, old illustration or photograph that needs to be stared at for a while before deciding what might be happening. This is graphic bodily destruction immediately. A torn rectangular photograph fills most of the front panel with dark red, brown, black and sickly flesh tones. Human faces and body parts are caught inside an indistinct mass of blood, wounds and damaged tissue. One pale face sits along the lower right edge with its eye partly visible, while darker material crosses through the center of the image. Open the J-card and the photograph continues into another fragment where a badly damaged face with exposed teeth appears beneath a pale foot. Whether the source photograph documents something real, staged or fabricated is not something the surviving image itself tells us, and that uncertainty is worth leaving intact. What can be seen is enough. Bodies have been reduced to matter. Faces remain recognizable just long enough to make the destruction register as human.

That makes the name H.C.O.D. unusually direct here because H.C.O.D. is itself short for Hideous Colors Of Decay. Normally a title can sit beside artwork and create an association that might or might not have been intended by the original artist. Here the words and the colors practically collapse into one another. The cover really does contain colors of decay: blackened reds, browns, bruised yellows, gray-green flesh and the almost waxy pale tone of the face. The image is not monochrome horror. Its disturbing quality comes partly from color. Decay is not represented as clean black-and-white death. It is wet, stained and chromatic. The picture contains an ugly palette that is nevertheless visually dense enough that the eye keeps moving through it. The title sounds almost formal when typed on the cassette, while the image gives the phrase its literal physical mess.

Then the cassette itself turns the entire object pink.

The shell is solid bubblegum pink with a large pale pink paper label covering most of each side. H.C.O.D. is typed neatly across the top, followed by Hideous Colors Of Decay. Side A and Side B are marked with single typewritten letters beside the reels. Everything about the cassette is orderly. The label has been carefully cut to follow the window and angled corners of the shell. The typewriter gives the information a little administrative precision. Nothing about the physical cassette looks corroded or damaged. It is clean, brightly colored and almost toy-like. The shell could easily have contained pop music, children’s songs or some homemade mixtape. Instead it carries a recording whose identity announces decay before the tape even starts moving.

That bright pink matters within this larger Private Release sequence because colored shells keep functioning almost like punctuation. A recording does not automatically receive the visual conventions normally attached to its genre. Noise does not require black. Black metal does not require black. Something sexually explicit can appear on glitter plastic. Something violent can arrive in pink. The color belongs to the physical object first. After enough tapes, those shells form another sequence running underneath the musical one: transparent, glitter, white, green, brown, black, pink. The listener can line these things up and see a completely different composition than somebody browsing the same recordings digitally. The cassette bodies become color blocks holding pieces of recorded time.

The inside image makes the move even stranger. The gore disappears completely and is replaced by flowers. Bright red and orange tulips fill most of the left side while a separate photograph of purple, white and yellow crocuses has been laid across them toward the upper right. Another narrow strip of greenery and small flowers runs beneath that image. These are visibly separate pieces of printed material rather than one seamless photograph. Their edges overlap. One picture interrupts another. The collage does not attempt to conceal its construction. It looks made by hand because it was made by hand.

That is becoming one of the clearest repeated structures across these Private Release objects. Flowers do not appear once as a clever contrast and disappear. They keep coming back. Tulips, crocuses, hyacinths, daffodils and other garden photographs recur across recordings that otherwise have little connection to each other. The repetition changes their function. At first a listener might see flowers beside extreme noise and think the point is opposition: beauty against ugliness, life against death, softness against brutality. Across dozens of tapes that explanation becomes too simple. The flowers start becoming part of the Private Release vocabulary itself. They were among the printed materials available for making covers. They were selected repeatedly. Eventually their recurrence says as much about the archive as it does about any individual recording.

This one makes that especially visible because Hideous Colors Of Decay already gives color an explicit role. Outside the case, color belongs to damaged flesh. Inside, color belongs to flowers. Red can be blood or tulip. Yellow can be diseased tissue or crocus. Pink can be a cassette shell. None of those colors inherently belongs to one meaning. The object keeps moving them around. That is more interesting than reducing the construction to a simple “life versus death” statement. Color survives every change of subject. The thing being colored changes.

The collage method reinforces that movement. The front gore photograph has torn edges. The interior flower photographs are cut and layered. The spine carries another narrow fragment underneath the familiar PRIVATE RELEASE tag. The source images have been removed from whatever books, magazines or other printed contexts originally gave them meaning. Whatever captions once explained them are gone. Whatever page came before or after them is gone. They are now pieces of paper that can be moved into another sequence. That same treatment has happened repeatedly across the archive with drawings, pornography, gardening photography, historical images, cartoons, art reproductions and other printed fragments. Their previous identities are not necessarily erased, but they are no longer sufficient to explain why they are here.

The recording undergoes a related physical movement. H.C.O.D. existed independently of Private Release. Evidence from the project’s later history places it within a particularly grim form of American industrial noise, with later work described through cavernous bass rumble, abrasive midrange noise, high feedback tones, metallic crunch and a smeared analogue atmosphere. By 2016 H.C.O.D. had developed into longer, sprawling compositions associated with the Northern European “post-mortem” industrial tradition, but documentation also points backward to three earlier tapes issued during 2013 and 2014. This cassette belongs to that early period. I cannot verify enough about the exact recording represented here to pretend that the later descriptions are a precise sonic map of these thirty-five minutes, but they do establish the larger world the project inhabited. This is not simply a name chosen because gruesome imagery looked cool. Hideous Colors Of Decay was the identity around which the project continued to organize its sound.

Private Release then gives that identity another body. The recording becomes magnetic tape inside a pink shell. The pink shell enters a clear plastic case. The clear case receives a white-bordered collage. The collage joins gore with flowers. The spine receives PRIVATE RELEASE. None of those steps changes who made the original sound. What changes is the physical history of this copy.

That distinction is important across all of these objects. They are full of other people’s work, yet the particular relationships between those works did not exist until these tapes were made. Somebody made the noise. Somebody manufactured the cassette. Somebody photographed the flowers. Somebody produced the graphic image on the front. Somebody printed all of those things onto paper. Then these fragments eventually arrived in the same room and were selected for the same cassette. The authorship of Private Release exists partly in that act of bringing unrelated material into contact and then doing it again hundreds or thousands of times.

The title almost becomes descriptive of that larger process too. Decay changes things without necessarily making them disappear. A body decomposes into other material. A magazine gets torn apart and becomes cassette artwork. A commercial recording leaves its original packaging and becomes another tape. A photograph loses its caption and enters another visual sequence. A piece of magnetic tape ages while continuing to hold information. Even the photographs of these objects eventually become another form through which the cassette can survive after the physical object has moved elsewhere or disappeared.

That is why the gore photograph does not have to carry the entire weight of the object. It is the first thing seen, and it is unquestionably extreme, but then the case opens and suddenly there are flowers. Then the tape comes out and there is pink plastic. Then the cassette is turned over and Side B looks almost identical to Side A. Then the tape moves through the machine and an invisible recording emerges from brown magnetic material. Every layer changes what came immediately before it.

The damaged faces remain on the outside.

The flowers wait inside.

The recording waits inside the pink shell.

And all three become another Hideous Color Of Decay.

Sadio & Prurient - 2016 - BDSM Atlantic Partnership C40

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 3:20 PM

Private Release – none

The physical cassette is almost aggressively clean compared with the subject suggested by its labels. The shell is opaque white, its surface mostly empty except for a small rectangle of hot-pink paper centered above the window. One side reads SADIO / BDSM. Flip the cassette over and another pink strip reads PRURIENT / Atlantic Partnership. That is the entire identification system. Two artists, two phrases, two sides of the same object. The cassette itself becomes the dividing line. There is no need for a track list or explanatory text on the shell because physically turning it over performs the split. Sadio occupies one face, Prurient the other. Even the amount of tape visible through the center window changes depending on which side is being photographed, so the recording announces itself through mechanics as much as typography. White plastic, black magnetic tape and fluorescent pink labels create a strangely neat object for music issued as a split LP specifically presented by Freak Animal as raw, violent power electronics. Freak Animal described Sadio as the collaboration of Grunt and Kommando Skingraft, using simple, fierce live-in-studio recording methods, while Prurient’s material was presented as deliberately abandoning some of the project’s more obvious rhythmic and melodic electronic elements in favor of a brutal, noisy recording. The original LP contains four pieces: “One Day We Meet,” “No More Usfull,” “Electric Cord Basement Bondege” and “Rape File.” The wording alone turns BDSM Atlantic Partnership into something less playful than the initials BDSM might initially suggest. Meeting, usefulness, electrical cord, basement, bondage and a file documenting sexual violence form a vocabulary of intimacy, utility, control, evidence and threat.

The title BDSM Atlantic Partnership is particularly good for a split between Finnish and American projects because it makes geographic separation part of the joke or structure. An Atlantic partnership normally sounds diplomatic, commercial or military. Governments form partnerships. Corporations establish transatlantic partnerships. Universities announce them. The phrase belongs to institutions trying to make distance sound administratively manageable. Put BDSM in front of it and suddenly that bureaucratic phrase becomes sexualized and coercive. Two noise projects separated by an ocean are connected through one record, one title and two sides of vinyl. This Private Release cassette makes that division even more literal. You cannot hear both halves simultaneously. One artist exists on one side of a white plastic body and the other artist waits on the reverse. To move from Sadio to Prurient requires removing the cassette, turning it around and putting it back. The international partnership becomes a physical gesture. The hot-pink labels help because they do not look bureaucratic at all. They are almost cheerful, a flash of fluorescent color interrupting the blank white surface. BDSM appears on a tiny piece of pink paper with the casual directness of a file-folder label. Atlantic Partnership receives the same treatment. The extreme title has been reduced to something that could have been typed at a desk and stuck onto an office object.

The flower image pushes that physical vocabulary somewhere completely different. Dense blue-purple hyacinths fill almost the entire photograph, their individual star-shaped blossoms stacked so tightly around each stalk that every flower becomes a column made from dozens of smaller flowers. The photograph is close enough that texture begins taking over from simple botanical identification. Each large form is actually an accumulation. Petal after petal after petal produces a single heavy mass of blue. Bright green leaves cut vertically through the background, with smaller pale flowers and a little yellow showing through at the edges. There is nothing obviously erotic, violent or industrial about the picture. It is simply abundant. The flowers look almost too full, too densely constructed, each stalk carrying more visual information than it seems capable of holding. That makes the photograph work beside this recording without needing to symbolize it. The picture does not tell the listener what Sadio or Prurient means. It gives the object another surface. This recurring movement into flowers has become one of the strongest visual continuities across these Private Release tapes. Different music keeps passing through the same larger visual environment. Industrial electronics, black metal, noise, obscure pop, soul and DJ records can all end up opening into gardens. The repetition gradually becomes more important than the individual pairing. One set of flowers remembers another set of flowers used three tapes earlier. A pink label recalls another pink label. A white shell answers a glitter shell. The sequence develops by recurrence rather than by one strict graphic identity.

There is also something useful in comparing this cassette with the Sadio objects immediately surrounding it. Sophisticated Methods In Torture sat on an opaque black cassette with a large white typewritten label. Questionable Pleasures was transferred onto transparent glitter plastic with red hubs and hot-pink labels. The Sadio/Caligula031 split used another glitter shell, this time blue and gold, again with a bright pink identifying strip. Here all of that glitter suddenly disappears. The body becomes plain white. The hot pink remains. Seen individually, those could be arbitrary choices. Seen consecutively, they start behaving almost like variations inside a set. The music has already been released elsewhere with its own packaging, label identity and intended artwork, so Private Release does not need to duplicate any of that. Each recording can instead pass through the same homemade system and emerge with another physical personality. This is where the idea of making tapes as though operating a record label becomes clearer. A conventional label manufactures a large number of identical objects. Private Release can reverse the economy: rather than making a thousand copies of one artist, make one or a few copies of hundreds or thousands of different artists and let the repeated production method become the label identity. The continuity is not identical product. It is repeated attention.

That makes found imagery particularly appropriate. A photograph of hyacinths already existed for some completely unrelated purpose. Somebody took the photograph, somebody selected it for publication, somebody printed it, and later it became available as physical paper to be cut or fitted into another object. The same basic fact applies to the music. Sadio and Prurient already made the recordings. Freak Animal already manufactured the original record. None of the source material belongs to Private Release by origin. What belongs to Private Release is the encounter between those materials: this recording, this cassette shell, this pink paper, this typewriter, this flower photograph, this moment of assembly. The project does not need to disguise that borrowed structure. In fact, the visible simplicity makes it clearer. The cassette says exactly who made the sound. The flower remains obviously a photograph from somewhere else. There is no attempt to erase provenance and pretend everything sprang from one author. The authorship exists in selection, placement, repetition and the decision that this particular combination deserves to exist physically.

The split format also fits that way of thinking because neither Sadio nor Prurient has to absorb the other. They remain separate entities occupying one object. Their proximity creates a relationship without pretending they have become the same thing. That is what a good split record does. It creates a temporary architecture around difference. One artist enters, uses the allotted space and leaves. Another enters from the opposite direction. The title gives them a shared roof, but each side retains its identity. The Private Release cassette preserves that division more visibly than a digital folder ever could. On a computer, four tracks can simply sit in one list. Here one name is literally inaccessible while the other side faces you. SADIO / BDSM is visible only while PRURIENT / Atlantic Partnership is hidden against the table. Turn the object over and the hierarchy reverses. The listener physically chooses which half of the partnership faces upward.

And behind all of that white plastic and fluorescent pink paper are the blue hyacinths. They do not explain BDSM. They do not explain the Atlantic. They do not explain Sadio or Prurient. They are another fragment that happened to enter the same Private Release current and therefore become part of how this particular recording survives visually. That is increasingly what makes these tapes interesting as a group. Each object documents more than music. It documents what was available to be seen, cut, typed, purchased, handled and combined at that exact point in the process. A flower photograph that once had nothing to do with power electronics now sits permanently beside a 2016 transatlantic noise split. A cheap white cassette becomes its new body. Two tiny pieces of pink paper tell you which side of that body you are holding. Then the tape turns, the black magnetic ribbon moves from one reel to the other, Sadio becomes Prurient, Finland gives way to the United States, and the partnership crosses the Atlantic again.

Sadio & Caligula031 - 2016 - Split C45

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 3:26PM

Private Release – none

The cover is built from three different fragments of fetish imagery rather than one complete scene. At the top, a pair of bare legs stands in delicate high-heeled sandals, the rest of the body removed by a rough torn edge. Directly beneath them another pair of legs appears in glossy black thigh-high or over-the-knee fetish boots, elongated by extremely high heels and rendered in stark black-and-white line work. Open the J-card and the second panel introduces a maid figure in a dark dress, white apron and headpiece, holding what looks like a bundle of switches or a small flogger in one hand while the other hand handles cords or restraints hanging beside her. A partial hand enters from the lower right, another piece of an image whose larger situation has been cut away. None of these fragments is presented as a complete narrative. Legs without bodies. A maid without the person she may be addressing. Hands and implements without explanation. The fragmentation is especially effective because fetish imagery often depends upon objects, surfaces and roles acquiring an exaggerated importance. Shoes, stockings, boots, uniforms, restraints, posture and material can become more significant than a complete portrait. Here the collage physically does the same thing. It removes context until the selected detail is almost all that remains.

The cassette carries another version of that selective reduction. It is transparent plastic packed with blue and gold glitter, with dark hubs and a single hot-pink strip of paper reading SADIO / CALIGULA031. There are no individual track names on the shell and no explanation of which side belongs to which artist. The black magnetic tape forms a nearly perfect dark circle behind one reel, surrounded by hundreds of glitter particles suspended inside the plastic. Flip the tape and that black circle moves to the opposite side. The shell looks decorative and almost glamorous, particularly beside the harsh subject matter associated with both projects. The pink label makes it even more visually excessive. Yet the cassette remains completely transparent. Every wheel, screw, post and moving section of tape is visible. The object displays its machinery while the cover imagery displays selected pieces of bodies and clothing. One reveals how it functions mechanically while the other withholds almost everything except the fetishized detail.

The original 2016 split divides the record very cleanly between two power-electronics projects. Sadio occupies one side with three tracks: “Inhale the Animal Filth,” “Slavemarket” and “Innocent And Pure.” Caligula031 occupies the other with four: “Needle Park - Platzspitz 1990,” “Nothing Comes For Free,” “Sponge Of The Sidewalk” and “Sob Story.” Sadio is the Finnish collaboration of Grunt and Kommando Skin-Graft, while Caligula031 is the project of Italian artist Marco Deplano, also associated with Wertham. Contemporary descriptions of the release characterize Sadio’s material as especially raw and minimally polished, with piercing mid-to-high frequencies, overloaded feedback, low-end pressure and barked vocals appearing through an abrasive live-in-studio sound. “Innocent And Pure” reportedly slows that attack into something more atmospheric, using sweeping tones, bass rumble and distant vocals rather than simply repeating the first two tracks’ violence. Caligula031’s half approaches a different subject. Its four pieces revolve around heroin addiction, prostitution, degradation and the social world surrounding the notorious Platzspitz “Needle Park” in Zurich. The electronics are described as murkier and more restrained, leaving larger spaces for heavily accented vocals and samples concerning addiction, crime and bodies being exchanged for the next fix.

That division makes this cassette more interesting than simply having two similar noise artists sharing forty-five minutes. Sadio and Caligula031 are both working inside a hostile electronic vocabulary, but the emphasis is not identical. One side appears to push physical sonic aggression forward as the event itself. The other uses electronics as an environment for stories of dependency and human deterioration. Even the track titles reveal the difference. Sadio gives the listener commands and images that are immediate and bodily: inhale, animal filth, slave market, innocent and pure. Caligula031 supplies locations and consequences: Needle Park, nothing comes for free, sidewalk, sob story. The first vocabulary sounds like entering a situation. The second sounds like watching what remains after people have been living inside one for too long. The split format allows those two approaches to touch without needing to merge into one identity. Turn the cassette over and a different artist takes control of the same physical object.

The original vinyl packaging apparently pushed its subject matter into the object itself. Freak Animal described the edition as limited to 250 copies in plain white sleeves with pasted artwork and actual blood splatter, each copy therefore slightly different. Private Release takes the same recording and gives it another transformation entirely. The blood-marked white sleeve is gone. In its place are glitter, hot pink paper, fetish illustrations and a flower photograph. Nothing here attempts to imitate the original edition. This is another stage in the recording’s physical life. The music remains Sadio and Caligula031, but the object surrounding it becomes unmistakably part of the wider Private Release run. That distinction is increasingly important when looking across these tapes. They are not replicas pretending to be original pressings. They are records of another person encountering already-existing recordings and deciding to make them physically present again through a personal system of shells, labels, found imagery and collage.

The inside photograph makes that system impossible to miss. A dense bed of tulips fills almost the entire image in red, pink, purple, yellow, white and orange. Some have smooth petals, others are fringed, others striped or multicolored. The photograph is so crowded that the flowers barely have room to exist individually. Along the bottom edge the image has been torn rather than neatly trimmed, leaving a white irregular shape cutting into the blossoms. That torn edge links the flower photograph back to the fragmented fetish illustrations outside. In both cases the source image is visibly handled. The original rectangle is not sacred. Printed material gets torn, trimmed, overlapped and repurposed to fit the cassette. The flowers also continue a visual rhythm already established across these tapes. Again and again, recordings associated with noise, metal, industrial music, violence, sex, domination or bleak historical subjects open into flowers. After enough examples the flowers stop feeling like surprise contrast and start behaving like part of the Private Release alphabet. They are simply one of the recurring visual materials through which the archive speaks.

This particular object also makes the relationship between fetish imagery and the Private Release process unusually visible without requiring the images to “mean” the recording in any fixed way. Fetish depends heavily upon selection. Attention becomes concentrated on one object, one action, one surface, one role or one piece of clothing. The collage does that through scissors and tearing. A pair of legs is selected and the person disappears. Boots are selected and the rest of the illustrated body disappears. The maid survives because of the recognizable uniform, the stance and the objects in her hands. The photographs and drawings have been converted into fragments that can operate outside whatever original publications contained them. The same thing is happening sonically at a different level. Existing albums are selected from an enormous field of recorded music, removed from their original commercial objects and transferred onto another cassette. The point is not that these processes are identical. It is that selection itself keeps appearing as an action.

Across Private Release, that action accumulates until it becomes a kind of authorship without pretending that the source material originated here. Sadio made Sadio. Caligula031 made Caligula031. Other people drew and printed the fetish images. Somebody photographed the tulips. Somebody manufactured the glitter cassette shell. The typewriter supplied its standardized mechanical letters. Private Release brings those separate things into contact. One recording meets one shell. One shell meets one label. One label meets several pieces of printed erotic imagery. Open the object and those fragments meet an explosion of flowers. Put the cassette beside the Sadio tapes that came before it and another layer appears: opaque black plastic becomes red-and-green glitter, then blue-and-gold glitter; white labels become hot pink strips; hyacinths become blue woodland flowers and then a packed field of tulips. None of these objects explains the others, but together they develop continuity.

That may be the strongest quality of this tape visually. Everything is already somebody else’s material, but the particular collision is new. Finnish power electronics, Italian addiction narratives, fetish illustrations, flowers, glitter plastic and typewriter text should have no inherent reason to occupy the same small cassette case. Yet they do. Once assembled, photographed and placed into the archive, that meeting becomes permanent enough to be revisited years later. The black circle of magnetic tape moves from reel to reel. The glitter remains trapped in clear plastic. The maid keeps holding her switch. The boots remain suspended without a body. The tulips remain impossibly crowded together behind the cassette. Another recording passes through the Private Release system and leaves behind one more physical arrangement that did not exist before somebody decided to make it.

Sadio - 2018 - Questionable Pleasures C40

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 3:32PM

Private Release – none

The cassette almost looks like a piece of candy. Clear plastic is densely suspended with tiny red, green and silver glitter, the hubs and guide rollers are bright red, and two narrow strips of hot pink paper carry the typewritten words SADIO and Questionable Pleasures. There is very little conventional design beyond that. No album photograph is attached to the cassette, no elaborate logo covers the reels, and the title has been physically separated into its own little strip as though somebody typed the words, cut them out with scissors and decided that was enough. Through the transparent shell the magnetic tape becomes another graphic element, forming one solid dark circle behind the left reel while the right side is almost empty. Turn the cassette over and even the identifying labels disappear. There is only clear glittering plastic, red hubs and the black mass of tape now occupying the opposite reel. It is one of those cassettes where the mechanics are allowed to become part of the artwork simply because almost nothing has been placed in front of them.

The glitter is especially good here because “Questionable Pleasures” is already a phrase that invites the listener to wonder what kind of pleasure is being questioned and who gets to decide that it is questionable. The shell itself looks pleasurable in the most uncomplicated physical sense. It sparkles. It catches light. The red and green specks move visually every time the cassette changes angle. The pink labels are loud enough to look almost fluorescent against the transparent body. There is something tactile about the whole thing even in a photograph. You can imagine turning the cassette over just to watch the tiny reflective pieces change. Nothing about enjoying glitter is difficult to understand. Then the title is sitting directly on top of it introducing doubt into the word pleasure. Not forbidden pleasures. Not dangerous pleasures. Questionable pleasures. That is a much less settled phrase because a question requires somebody asking it.

The original Freak Animal description of the album emphasizes seven tracks of fierce power electronics, feedback assaults, pulsating signals, broken rusty sound and wild vocals, with a heavier and more layered approach than some of Sadio’s previous material. That description is useful because it gives the physical cassette another dimension without requiring this Private Release version to reproduce the original album’s visual language. The sound was already designed to provide intensity. The cassette can glitter. The pink labels can look almost playful. The object does not have to dress itself in black and gray industrial imagery in order for the recording to remain what it is. This is the same process that keeps occurring throughout these tapes: the recording arrives with its own history and identity, then passes through another layer of physical selection. Shell. Label color. Typewriter. Image. Case. Sequence. None of those choices replaces the original recording. They become the surroundings in which this particular copy exists.

Then there is the photograph inside the J-card. Instead of a close photograph of individual flowers, the image opens into a landscape. Huge tree trunks rise through what looks like an almost continuous carpet of tiny blue or blue-violet flowers. The blossoms spread from the foreground deep into the picture, wrapping around the bases of the trees until the entire ground begins looking tinted blue. Above them is a darker layer of green vegetation and shadow. There is very little sky, if any. The viewpoint stays low enough that the ground itself becomes the event. Thousands of small individual flowers combine into one large field of color. It has a completely different scale from the cassette. The shell invites looking at tiny glitter particles trapped inside plastic. The photograph invites looking at thousands of tiny flowers spread across open ground. In both cases a mass is created from repeated small units.

That repetition may be the most interesting visual connection between the two surviving images. Glitter works because no individual speck matters very much. A single red fleck inside clear plastic would barely register. Hundreds of them create a surface. The flowers behave similarly. One tiny blue blossom would be almost insignificant in this photograph, but thousands collectively transform the landscape. The cassette and the garden are both built visually through accumulation. Magnetic tape works that way too. A recording lasting dozens of minutes is physically represented by an enormous length of extremely thin tape wound into one compact dark circle. Sound becomes another accumulation hidden inside the object.

This also fits the larger Private Release process unusually well. No individual decision has to explain the whole project. One shell color does not define it. One photograph does not define it. One tape does not define it. The identity becomes visible through accumulation. Make another cassette. Type another label. Use another image that was already circulating through the room. Put another recording into the sequence. Photograph it. Send it somewhere. Repeat the procedure enough times and what looked like isolated choices starts becoming an archive with its own visual behavior. The flowers become particularly obvious when these tapes are viewed together because gardens keep resurfacing beside recordings from radically different musical worlds. One tape gets tulips. Another receives crocuses. Another has hyacinths. Here the flowers are so numerous that the ground itself almost disappears beneath them. The specific species matters less than the recurrence of growth, color and natural form moving from cassette to cassette.

Questionable Pleasures also follows Sophisticated Methods In Torture in a way that makes the two Sadio objects interesting beside each other. The earlier Private Release copy used an opaque black shell with a large white typewritten label. It was visually closed, severe and almost administrative. This one is transparent and sparkling. You can see through practically the entire body. The earlier cassette hides its mechanics behind black plastic while this one exposes every wheel, post, screw and section of tape. The titles change and so does the physical personality of the cassette. Put the two next to each other and they are unmistakably related through the same Private Release process while remaining completely different objects. That is much closer to making hundreds of different releases on an imaginary record label than manufacturing hundreds of identical copies of one release. The repetition is in the method rather than the product.

There is something satisfying about the cheap material reality of it too. Glitter cassette shells are not precious objects in the traditional art sense. The pink identification strips are not luxurious printing. The lettering is mechanically typed. The flower photograph came from another printed source rather than being commissioned for Sadio. Everything looks available, usable and close at hand. That accessibility is part of the energy. There is no waiting for an art department, printer, pressing plant or marketing schedule to grant permission for the thing to become real. The recording exists. A blank cassette exists. Images exist. Paper exists. Put them together and there is now another physical object in the world.

That logic has a distant relationship to underground music itself. Freak Animal issued Questionable Pleasures as catalog number FREAK-CD-103 in 2018, documenting a very specific Finnish power-electronics collaboration that exists far outside the ordinary commercial center of recorded music. Private Release then takes that already specialized recording and moves it again, this time away from its factory-made CD form and onto a one-off or tiny-run cassette object. The music becomes increasingly specific rather than increasingly universal. Instead of trying to make the album look acceptable to the largest possible audience, the cassette records one particular encounter with it.

The photograph does the same thing. It does not tell everybody what they are supposed to think about Sadio. It merely says that, for this object, this field of blue flowers ended up here. Years later the choice becomes evidence of what material was moving through the room at the same moment as the music. A garden photograph and Finnish power electronics crossed paths. Glitter plastic and magnetic tape crossed paths. Hot pink paper and a typewriter crossed paths. Nobody needed those things to meet, but now that they have, the photographs preserve the meeting.

The title remains the sharp little hinge holding everything together: Questionable Pleasures. Pleasure in sound. Pleasure in noise. Pleasure in aggression. Pleasure in collecting. Pleasure in flowers. Pleasure in color. Pleasure in making another cassette even though there is no practical necessity to make one. Pleasure in taking something that already exists and giving yourself a physical version that exists differently. Which of those pleasures are questionable depends entirely on who is doing the questioning.

The cassette itself never answers.

It just sparkles.

Sadio - 2017 - ST C20

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Sadio - 2015 - Sophisticated Methods In Torture C45

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 3:43PM

Private Release – none

What survives visually here is almost aggressively simple: a black cassette shell with a plain white paper label typed SADIO / Sophisticated Methods In Torture, and a full-color photograph of orange and yellow hyacinths filling the inside of the J-card. There is no elaborate identification system on the tape itself, no decorative logo, no track list wrapped around the reels, no attempt to visually reproduce the original Freak Animal packaging. The cassette looks functional first. Black plastic. White paper. Black typewriter text. Magnetic tape visible through the center window. Then the J-card opens and the whole object fills with flowers. The hyacinths are dense, heavy blossoms rather than delicate little points of color. Orange and yellow stalks occupy most of the photograph, packed so tightly that the individual petals begin turning into texture. Dark green leaves and shadow sit behind them. It is another one of those Private Release combinations where the image was not selected because it neatly illustrates the genre. It entered because it belonged to the visual material moving through the same room, the same books, magazines, photographs and paper that fed all these tapes.

The 2015 Sadio release itself comes from a very different vocabulary. Sadio is the Finnish collaboration of Grunt and Kommando Skin-Graft, and the original album was issued by Freak Animal. The ten-track program is titled almost like a sequence of confrontations: “Authentic Experiences,” “Look At Me,” “Will To Fuck,” “She Came To Me,” “Hanging From The Ceiling,” “Your Flesh,” “Sadoland,” “Sadio,” “Sophisticated Methods In Torture” and “White Tiles.” The wording is intimate, bodily and coercive. It repeatedly places attention on flesh, looking, sexual will, physical position and environments that feel clinical or enclosed. Even before hearing anything, the titles produce a small vocabulary of observation and control. “Look At Me” is a command. “Your Flesh” turns the listener’s body into an object named from outside. “Hanging From The Ceiling” creates a physical image immediately. “White Tiles” is especially effective as an ending because it is so ordinary. White tile belongs to bathrooms, hospitals, kitchens, laboratories, locker rooms and institutional spaces. After a title as explicit as “Sophisticated Methods In Torture,” two words describing an architectural surface can suddenly feel loaded.

That is one of the strengths of this kind of power electronics naming. It does not need a detailed story. The titles create enough fragments that the listener starts building the room mentally. Something is happening. Somebody is watching. Somebody is being addressed. A body is present. The details remain incomplete. The original release was described by distributors as an extremely fierce power-electronics collaboration, and later writing about Sadio characterized this debut as direct aggression rather than meticulous studio polish. The emphasis was on force, roughness and immediacy. That matters here because the Private Release cassette does not try to visually duplicate that force. The black shell already has enough severity. The rest of the object is allowed to come from somewhere else.

The flower photograph becomes more interesting when placed in the larger sequence of these Private Release tapes. Flowers keep returning beside material that would conventionally be packaged with completely different imagery. Hellhammer gets flowers. Darkthrone gets flowers. God Is War gets flowers. Noise, industrial electronics, old soul, hip-hop, metal and other recordings keep sharing gardens. At some point the flowers stop functioning as individual cover ideas and start functioning as continuity. They become one recurring visual instrument in a much longer composition. The genre changes while the visual vocabulary keeps moving. That makes the archive feel less like hundreds of unrelated handmade bootlegs and more like one enormous work broken into individual cassette-sized units.

The same applies to the label format. A commercially released album normally arrives with its own complete identity: typography, logo, photographs, credits, label information, catalog number and artwork all designed to tell the buyer exactly what object they are holding. Private Release strips much of that away. SADIO and Sophisticated Methods In Torture are enough. The recording is identified, but the surrounding physical object now belongs to the repeating handmade system. The shell may change color. The paper may change. The image may come from a completely unrelated source. The typewriter remains. The rectangular cassette window remains. The larger archive keeps absorbing recordings into the same process.

There is a useful connection between that process and noise itself. Power electronics frequently treats sound less as a cleanly separated sequence of conventional musical parts and more as material: distortion, feedback, voice, pressure, frequency, repetition, saturation. The question is not always “what instrument is playing?” but “what is this sound doing to the space?” Private Release approaches images in a similarly material way. A photograph does not have to remain attached to its original subject. A page can be torn. A section can be isolated. A flower photograph can be put beside a Finnish power-electronics recording without needing permission from some imaginary rule stating that flowers belong only with gentle music. The image becomes material available for another arrangement.

The title Sophisticated Methods In Torture introduces another interesting word: sophisticated. Torture itself suggests brute force, but sophisticated suggests refinement, planning, technical knowledge and systems. It implies that cruelty can become methodical. The word is colder than something like “violent.” Violence can erupt. A sophisticated method has been designed. Somebody has considered procedure. Somebody has improved technique. The album’s sequence moves repeatedly between direct physical language and that larger sense of controlled environment. “Authentic Experiences” sounds almost like promotional language. “Look At Me” is interpersonal. “Will To Fuck” is blunt impulse. “She Came To Me” could be ordinary until placed among everything surrounding it. “Hanging From The Ceiling” becomes explicitly physical. “Your Flesh” reduces distance again. “Sadoland” gives the whole atmosphere a location. Then the self-titled “Sadio” appears before “Sophisticated Methods In Torture” and “White Tiles” close the sequence. The titles feel less like a linear story than ten pieces of evidence taken from the same mental architecture.

The black cassette suits that architecture precisely because it gives almost nothing away. Unlike glitter shells, bright pink shells or translucent bodies used elsewhere in the Private Release run, this one is visually closed. The cassette body absorbs light. The white label sits on top like a file tag attached to an anonymous piece of evidence. Remove the tape and the flowers appear. That physical act matters. The listener does not see everything simultaneously. The cassette and the interior image occupy different moments. First object, then inside. First identification, then color. It creates sequencing through handling.

That handling is also part of what separates these objects from simply storing digital files. A digital folder can contain the same recording with perfect convenience, but it does not require the body to participate in the same way. A cassette has orientation. It has a front, back, Side A, Side B, reels, leader tape, a case, paper that unfolds and a shell that has to be physically removed. Private Release uses all of those surfaces. Even when the artwork is minimal, the object still has multiple stages. The experience happens through opening, turning, removing, reading and eventually pressing play.

The hyacinths therefore become one more stage rather than an explanation. They are bright, excessive and alive. Their thick clusters almost look artificial because there are so many petals packed into each stalk. They do not soften the recording. They simply occupy the inside of this particular version. Another person could have reissued the same Sadio album with photographs of concrete cells, restraints, blood or medical equipment and immediately told the listener how to interpret the title. This object refuses that easy visual instruction. It gives the recording a black tape and flowers.

Across enough Private Release objects, that choice starts saying more about the person making the tapes than about any one artist being reproduced. The music comes from Sadio. The original release comes from Freak Animal. The flower photograph came from somewhere else. The cassette shell came from a manufacturer. The typewriter supplied the letters. None of those pieces originated together. They meet here because one person selected them and placed them into the same physical object. That repeated act of selection is the part that belongs to Private Release.

Then the tape joins the pile.

Another artist. Another recording. Another shell. Another photograph. Another fragment added to the archive.

Morrissey - 1997 - Maladjusted C45

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 3:49PM

Private Release – none