The Grey Wolves - 1986 - Legion Of Hell C62

Originally posted on Sep 30, 2019 11:00PM 

Private Release – none

The Grey Wolves are almost impossible to separate from the visual language they normally built around themselves. Their work comes wrapped in severity, confrontation, propaganda aesthetics, militarism, political provocation, photocopied ugliness and the larger idea of the Cultural Terrorism Network. The images are usually part of the attack. That is exactly why this Private Release version of Legion Of Hell feels so satisfying to me. Nothing about this object looks like the way The Grey Wolves would normally choose to represent themselves, yet their music is still completely intact inside it. Instead of extending their visual program, this cassette gives the recording an entirely different body.

The five audio sections here are substantial pieces rather than quick shocks. “Lost Souls” runs a little over seven minutes, “Hall Of The Dead” nearly seven, “For Good Or Evil / New Spirit Rising” almost eleven, “Angels Of Darkness” around six and a half, and “Eternal Suffering” stretches for more than half an hour. That length matters. The recording does not work through brief explosions alone. It gives sounds enough time to become environments, with repetition and sustained electronic pressure gradually changing the listener’s relationship to what initially seems static.

The titles establish an entire vocabulary before playback begins: lost souls, the dead, good and evil, new spirits, dark angels, eternal suffering. It is grand language, almost religious in scale, but filtered through primitive industrial electronics rather than traditional ritual music. The result feels less like storytelling than atmosphere being forced into physical form. The titles point toward metaphysical territory while the sound remains stubbornly mechanical, damaged and human-made.

“Lost Souls” opens that world without much interest in conventional musical architecture. The attraction is in texture, duration and accumulated pressure. Instead of waiting for melody or a recognizable chorus to arrive, the ear begins paying attention to changes in density, repetition, distortion and the way one layer of sound starts contaminating another. The cassette format helps because the slight softness and compression of tape prevent the harsher frequencies from feeling clinically digital. Everything is packed into the same physical strip of magnetic material.

“Hall Of The Dead” continues that immersive logic. The title suggests architecture, a place rather than an event, and the long industrial form makes that reading feel appropriate. The track can be inhabited. Sounds recur enough times that they stop functioning merely as individual gestures and begin forming walls, corridors and distances. The Grey Wolves’ early recordings often feel less composed in the conventional sense than constructed out of zones of pressure.

“For Good Or Evil / New Spirit Rising” is the longest piece on the first side and one of the most interesting titles because it contains a pivot inside itself. “For Good Or Evil” refuses to resolve the moral direction, then “New Spirit Rising” suddenly introduces movement and transformation. The recording’s length allows that ambiguity to remain suspended. Nothing needs to settle into a single emotional meaning. Industrial noise is particularly good at holding contradictory states together because the same sound can feel threatening, meditative, hypnotic and strangely beautiful depending on how long you remain inside it.

“Angels Of Darkness” pushes that contradiction directly into its title. An angel traditionally implies radiance, protection or divine order, while darkness pulls in the opposite direction. The phrase contains both at once. The sound does not have to choose between them. It can remain abrasive and oppressive while still producing moments where the density itself becomes beautiful. That possibility is important when looking at this particular Private Release cassette, because the physical object is doing exactly the same thing.

“Eternal Suffering” occupies more than thirty minutes by itself, which completely changes the scale of the second side. At that duration, the track becomes less a song than a condition. Repetition stops feeling like repetition after a while because the listener’s sense of time begins to stretch around it. Small changes become disproportionately important. A shift in frequency, a different mechanical pulse or an alteration in the texture can feel enormous simply because the surrounding material has established such a persistent environment.

Then there is the cassette.

The shell is transparent and filled with red, green and silver glitter. Black tape sits behind it, creating large dark circles around the reels while tiny colored flecks cover almost every visible surface. It is festive. It catches light. It has something of a Christmas decoration about it, which becomes especially funny when the typed label reads “THE GREY WOLVES / 1986 / Legion Of Hell.”

That collision is the whole pleasure of this object.

“Legion Of Hell” is sitting inside glitter.

The Grey Wolves are surrounded by sparkle.

Their severe industrial recording has been placed inside something that could almost carry holiday music, children’s songs or some cheerful homemade compilation. The music has not been altered to accommodate the object, and the object makes no attempt to submit to the visual world of the music. They simply coexist.

The cover pushes the displacement even further. The central images come from fashion advertising, dominated by an intense yellow Valentino garment against a saturated blue background. The figure on one panel is cropped so that much of the body disappears, leaving a hand, the enormous sweep of yellow fabric and a partial white accessory. On the neighboring panel a model is almost engulfed by clothing, wearing a huge pale hat whose brim nearly hides the eyes.

There is luxury here, but it is weird luxury. The proportions are exaggerated. The clothes behave almost architecturally. The yellow fabric becomes a field of color rather than simply an outfit, while the enormous hat turns the model into something closer to a sculptural form. The fashion photograph already contains a kind of distortion before it ever meets The Grey Wolves.

The word VALENTINO remains visible vertically against the blue. That surviving brand name makes the source material even more specific. This is not generic yellow paper chosen merely because the color looked good. It is luxury-fashion imagery being physically torn out of its original commercial context and pressed against a cassette whose title promises a legion from hell.

The colors are tremendous together. Yellow, blue, black, red, green, silver, white. Nothing is muted. There is no attempt to make the package grim enough to visually “deserve” The Grey Wolves. That refusal is what makes the tape special. Reproducing the band’s own aesthetic would only produce another version of something they already knew how to do extremely well.

Instead, Private Release interferes.

The reverse collage becomes even more fragmented. Large areas of blue and gray sit underneath pieces of magazine text, a tiny comic fragment and a rectangular passage from New York magazine dated March 18–31, 2019. The text fragment discusses Cathy Guisewite and the word “AACK!,” the catchphrase associated with her Cathy comic strip. Nearby, another fragment preserves part of a sentence about being tired of “lusting after these men with the good houses” before realizing, “Wait a minute, I could buy a house.”

Those scraps are almost absurd beside The Grey Wolves, and that absurdity is useful. Industrial culture frequently takes itself through extremely severe symbolic systems: war, death, ideology, violence, control, decay. Here those systems suddenly have to share physical space with Cathy Guisewite, fashion advertising and somebody realizing she can buy her own house.

The juxtaposition does not neutralize The Grey Wolves. If anything, it makes their extremity easier to see because their normal frame has been removed. The listener is no longer being told visually how to approach the recording. There are no expected warning signs surrounding it. The sound has to generate its own atmosphere.

That is one reason I love the glitter shell so much. The Grey Wolves would almost certainly never have presented Legion Of Hell this way. Their established visual identity is too deliberate for that. This version therefore does not pretend to be an alternate official edition. It announces its separation immediately. It is somebody else handling the recording, hearing it, responding to it and building another physical object around the experience.

That opens an interesting question about what belongs to a piece of music. The audio belongs to The Grey Wolves. Their historical imagery belongs to the world they constructed around the project. But once the music is heard by another person, it begins producing associations they cannot control. Yellow Valentino clothing can suddenly belong beside industrial noise because somebody heard the connection. Glitter can sit beside “Eternal Suffering.” A Cathy fragment can live beside “Angels Of Darkness.”

That freedom is central to collage. The original meanings do not disappear, but they stop being sovereign. Valentino remains Valentino. Cathy remains Cathy. The Grey Wolves remain The Grey Wolves. Yet once the fragments occupy the same handmade cassette package, another temporary system exists between them.

The PRIVATE RELEASE strip on the spine makes that intervention explicit. It sits beside the narrow black glitter band and a small fragment of the yellow fashion image. The label does not claim authorship of the music. It marks the object as a particular handling of it, one physical interpretation among potentially endless others.

The cassette becomes especially interesting because the visual treatment is not parody. The glitter does not say that The Grey Wolves are ridiculous, and the fashion imagery does not mock industrial culture. The combination is enjoyable because both sides retain their force. The music remains severe. The fashion remains glamorous. The glitter remains glitter. None has to apologize for being beside the others.

That is where the far-out correlations become productive. “Angels Of Darkness” can encounter a model whose eyes have nearly disappeared beneath a gigantic hat. “New Spirit Rising” can sit inside sparkling red and green plastic. “Lost Souls” can be surrounded by luxury-fashion colors. “Eternal Suffering” can spin behind thousands of tiny reflective squares.

There is no final answer hiding underneath those connections.

There does not need to be.

The object simply gives the music another place to exist.

And because it is a place The Grey Wolves themselves almost certainly would never have built for it, this particular cassette becomes something their original release could never be.

— ChatGPT

VA - 1983 - The Angels Are Coming C35

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 9:23AM

Private Release – none

This 1983 various-artists cassette is the kind of compilation that rewards associative listening because it never stays inside one narrow musical identity for very long. The Angels Are Coming moves through post-punk, goth, experimental electronics, industrial textures and dark independent music with a deliberately unsettled character. Instead of presenting one scene from one angle, it feels more like a cross-section of early-1980s underground culture, with bands and artists pushing in different directions while still sharing a general atmosphere of tension, alienation, theatricality and experimentation.

The original double-cassette compilation was released through Pleasantly Surprised and pulls together a broad range of acts including The March Violets, The Alarm, Bone Orchard, Cultural Amnesia, Bauhaus, Death in June, Gene Loves Jezebel, Pink Industry, Blue Orchids, Nico, Test Department and others. That breadth is part of the appeal. It does not behave like a genre sampler with every track neatly reinforcing the last one. It behaves more like a network.

One track can be stark and skeletal.

The next can be dramatic.

Another can lean toward noise.

Another toward synths.

Another toward something almost pop-shaped.

The cassette keeps moving through different emotional temperatures without losing the sense that all of it belongs to the same broad underground weather system.

That makes the compilation especially good material for a handmade cassette because the visual object does not need to reduce the music into one image. It can wander too.

The shell here is pink, with a bright orange paper label typed “VARIOUS ARTISTS 1983 / The Angels Are Coming.” The color combination is almost aggressively vivid. Pink plastic and fluorescent orange paper immediately refuse the obvious visual language suggested by the title. “The Angels Are Coming” could easily invite pale religious imagery, white light, clouds, gold, heaven, purity or some kind of dramatic gothic symbolism. Instead the cassette looks artificial, commercial and almost toy-like.

That choice works because it makes the title stranger.

The angels are not arriving through clouds.

They are arriving in pink plastic.

The front foldout is much quieter. Large gray-green paper fragments dominate the two main panels, bordered by white and black lines. The material looks worn, industrial and anonymous. One side is almost empty except for texture, faint stains and a vertical line. The other contains another torn section with a similarly muted surface. There is very little conventional imagery to grab onto.

The spine carries the vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip and the familiar black glitter band. Against the almost blank gray panels, that black glitter becomes unusually prominent. It looks decorative and severe at the same time, a narrow sparkling barrier between the anonymous surface and the identifying text.

There is something almost architectural about the front.

Flat surfaces.

Borders.

Edges.

Torn paper.

Black strip.

White space.

It feels less like a cover image than a constructed wall.

Then the inside completely changes the visual language.

The reverse collage uses a mail-order lingerie advertisement centered on a woman wearing a purple bra. To the left, four numbered selling points explain the garment in technical language: “Innovative Magic Lift Sling,” “Wireless,” “Lightly Padded Straps” and “Full Coverage.” Beneath those headings are phrases about lifting, separating, staying in place, providing support, preventing shoulder strain and ensuring all-day comfort.

Removed from the catalog and attached to this cassette, that language starts doing something else.

“Lifts and separates.”

“Stays in place.”

“Support.”

“Prevents strain.”

“Full coverage.”

Those are ordinary product claims, but once detached from their original sales function they begin sounding almost psychological or institutional. They describe containment, protection, structure, control and endurance.

That is where the package starts generating the kind of far-out correlation this compilation invites.

The title says angels are coming.

The catalog talks about support.

The front looks blank and severe.

The cassette is pink.

The label is orange.

The music moves through darkness, electronics, post-punk, industrial pressure and theatrical voices.

None of these elements explains the others, but they keep rubbing against one another.

The compilation itself makes that possible because its track titles and artists already create a dense field of associations. Titles such as “Dark Entries,” “Black Radio,” “Unsafe Building,” “Nightmare,” “Where I Belong” and “Kingdom Come” carry their own images before the music even begins. When those phrases are placed beside words like “support,” “coverage,” “stays in place” and “lifts and separates,” the connections become strange very quickly.

That is not illustration.

It is cross-wiring.

The music produces one set of ideas.

The catalog produces another.

The title produces another.

The colors produce another.

The physical tape produces another.

The object works because all of them remain active at once.

The lingerie advertisement also introduces a body into a package whose front is almost entirely abstract. The outer panels are surfaces, edges and paper texture. The inside suddenly presents flesh, fabric, engineering and sales language. The movement from blankness to body gives the foldout a strong physical rhythm.

Closed, it is nearly mute.

Opened, it becomes specific.

That change feels appropriate for a compilation containing so many different kinds of sound. The package does not reveal everything at once. It shifts identity depending on how it is handled.

The pink shell adds another layer because it is so visually clean compared with the old, shadowy underground music inside. There is no distressed black cassette, no photocopied skull, no gloomy band photograph. The plastic is bright and almost cheerful, which makes the darker material feel even more displaced.

That displacement is useful.

It stops the music from being trapped inside its expected visual history.

The music remains 1983.

The cassette becomes something else.

The title remains ominous.

The object becomes bright.

The inner advertisement remains commercial.

The association network becomes personal.

That is where this Private Release version feels especially alive. The source compilation already gathers unrelated artists into one temporary structure, and the handmade cassette repeats that operation visually by gathering unrelated paper fragments, color systems and commercial imagery into another temporary structure.

Compilation becomes collage.

Collage becomes another form of compilation.

The original tape collects sound.

This version collects associations.

The pleasure comes from noticing how far those associations can travel before they snap.

A dark song title can connect to an orange label.

A phrase about angels can collide with bra engineering.

A post-punk track can suddenly make a blank gray paper surface feel correct.

A sales phrase can become existential when removed from the catalog.

That is the fun of this object.

It does not solve the music.

It keeps opening more routes through it.

— ChatGPT

===========================================

Now that the actual audio is back in front of me, the first thing that changes is scale. This is not just an obscure 1983 compilation represented by a handmade cassette. The uploaded sequence has its own compact architecture: a short intro, four tracks on the first side, three substantial tracks on the second, then a brief outro. The titles and durations alone already create a miniature world. “Intro” runs just under fifty seconds, The March Violets’ “Radiant Boys” stretches close to four minutes, The Alarm’s “Unsafe Building” runs more than four, Bone Orchard’s “Shall I Carry The Budgie Woman?” just under three, and Sugar Bullet Mission’s “Beware The...” pushes past five. Side B continues with Peter Becker’s “Transatlantic Flight,” Cultural Amnesia’s “Kingdom Come,” Dance Chapter’s “Carve An Arc,” then the forty-second outro. The sequence feels curated rather than accidental, with short framing pieces surrounding a group of songs that keep changing emotional and sonic posture.

The intro is important because it makes the cassette feel entered rather than simply started. Instead of dropping immediately into a recognizable band, there is a brief threshold. Then “Radiant Boys” arrives and the tape opens into the sharp, dark energy associated with early-1980s post-punk and goth-adjacent underground music. The March Violets bring that mixture of rhythm, tension and theatrical cool where the music can feel danceable without ever becoming carefree. It establishes a world of movement under pressure, which becomes one of the threads running through the rest of the side.

“Unsafe Building” shifts the emotional register while keeping the sense of urgency. The Alarm have a more anthemic impulse, with the song pushing outward rather than curling inward. Even the title creates a strong image before the sound has fully settled: an unstable structure, somewhere you should perhaps not remain. Coming after “Radiant Boys,” it makes the tape feel larger. The first track feels bodily and nocturnal, while this one carries something closer to public declaration. The compilation begins expanding from private atmosphere into architecture, danger and social space.

Bone Orchard’s “Shall I Carry The Budgie Woman?” breaks that seriousness in exactly the right way because the title itself introduces absurdity before the track begins. That kind of sudden weirdness is one of the things that makes old underground compilations so enjoyable. A scene can be dark, dramatic and stylistically severe, yet somebody still names a song something ridiculous. The shift keeps the tape from becoming one-dimensional. The music may live in a shadowy early-1980s world, but the people making it were still funny, strange, bored, playful and capable of making choices that resist tidy historical packaging.

Sugar Bullet Mission’s “Beware The...” closes the first side with enough duration to feel like a destination rather than another quick entry. The unfinished title is particularly effective in sequence because it leaves the warning unresolved. Beware the what? The missing object becomes part of the atmosphere. After “Unsafe Building” and “Shall I Carry The Budgie Woman?,” the tape has already moved between danger and absurdity, so “Beware The...” sits perfectly between them. It sounds like a warning whose meaning has been partly erased.

Side B begins with Peter Becker’s “Transatlantic Flight,” and even the title changes the physical scale of the compilation. Buildings and bodies suddenly give way to travel and distance. A transatlantic flight means leaving one place, crossing enormous empty space and arriving somewhere culturally different. On a cassette made from artists scattered across an underground network, that title almost becomes a metaphor for the compilation itself. These records and tapes were physical objects moving between cities, countries, labels, shops, mail-order catalogs and bedrooms long before an online link could flatten the distance.

Cultural Amnesia’s “Kingdom Come” is the longest piece in the uploaded group, running well over five minutes, and its placement gives the second side a heavier center of gravity. The title carries religious and apocalyptic associations, but Cultural Amnesia’s electronic language makes those ideas feel mediated through machinery rather than church ritual. The phrase “Kingdom Come” suggests arrival, judgment, completion or destruction, yet the sound world is human-made, synthetic and technological. That contradiction is a good fit for the compilation’s title too. Angels may be coming, but they are arriving through tape hiss, electronics, post-punk rhythm and small-label cassette culture rather than through stained glass.

Dance Chapter’s “Carve An Arc” follows with another strong spatial phrase. Carving an arc implies movement through space, making a curve by force. Coming after “Transatlantic Flight” and “Kingdom Come,” the side begins to feel full of directional language: crossing, arriving, carving, moving. Whether that was consciously intended by the original compiler or not, the sequence produces it. That is exactly the kind of correlation a compilation can generate once songs are placed beside one another. Their titles start communicating outside the songs themselves.

Then the outro appears and closes the tape the same way the intro opened it, with a short frame rather than simply allowing the last full track to stop everything. That small structural decision makes the sequence feel enclosed. Intro and outro become bookends, and everything between them feels temporarily contained inside one cassette-sized environment. It reinforces the sense that this is not merely a handful of unrelated tracks copied together. Somebody wanted the listener to enter and leave.

The Private Release version intensifies that sense of entering another world because the object is so visually disconnected from the expected aesthetics of the music. The cassette shell is pink, with a fluorescent orange label typed “VARIOUS ARTISTS 1983 / The Angels Are Coming.” The colors are almost radioactive together. There is nothing gloomy, sepulchral or traditionally gothic about them. The cassette could contain aerobics music, children’s songs or some aggressively cheerful homemade mix. Then this peculiar early-1980s underground material starts coming out of it.

That mismatch becomes much more interesting once the title is taken seriously. “The Angels Are Coming” sounds huge. It implies arrival from somewhere beyond ordinary life, whether religious, supernatural or metaphorical. Yet the physical cassette is small, plastic and brightly colored. Something potentially cosmic has been miniaturized into a pink rectangle with orange paper stuck to it. I love that scale difference. The divine, ominous or unknowable gets carried by two reels and a narrow strip of magnetic tape.

The outer artwork moves in the opposite direction from the cassette’s brightness. The front is almost empty, built from torn gray-green paper, faint stains, texture, seams and white space. It looks anonymous and worn, almost architectural. There is no obvious central image. The surface itself becomes the image. Against the pink and orange cassette, the cover feels subdued, aged and strangely quiet.

The vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip and the narrow black glitter section become unusually strong because there is so little competing imagery around them. The glitter catches light while the rest of the surface absorbs it. The whole thing has a restrained exterior that gives almost no clue about the bright shell inside. Opening the case therefore produces another little visual transition, almost equivalent to the intro on the tape.

Then the inside explodes into the lingerie advertisement.

The large photograph of the woman in the purple bra is surrounded by numbered product claims: “Innovative Magic Lift Sling,” “Wireless,” “Lightly Padded Straps,” “Full Coverage.” The copy explains how the garment lifts, separates, stays securely in place, provides support, prevents strain and offers comfort. In its original catalog context, every word is practical and commercial. Once attached to The Angels Are Coming, those same phrases become strangely charged.

And now there is the connection you pointed out earlier that I would not have known without you: breasts themselves register as heavenly to you. That changes the image-title relationship completely. The bra photograph is not merely ironic consumer imagery colliding with a dark underground compilation. There is an actual personal association between the female body and the idea of heavenliness. “The Angels Are Coming” and the breast-centered advertisement are therefore connected inside your own visual language, even though nobody looking at the object from outside could confidently reconstruct that connection without being told.

That is exactly why these tapes are more interesting than straightforward graphic design. Some of the logic is visible. Some of it is cultural. Some is funny. Some is sexual. Some is musical. Some exists only because of what was happening inside the person assembling the tape at that moment. The object can preserve all of those layers without labeling them.

The language in the advertisement then creates another set of associations independently of that personal one. Angels offer protection. The bra advertisement promises support. Angels are often imagined as lifting upward. The advertisement literally says “lifts.” Angels may provide comfort. The product promises all-day comfort. None of those parallels needs to be treated as intentional symbolism, but once the images and words are physically adjacent, the possible connections multiply.

That is the pleasure of collage at its best. It does not operate like a crossword puzzle where every answer has one correct solution. It behaves more like a field of electrical contacts. Touch two things together and sometimes nothing happens. Touch two others and suddenly there is voltage.

The bright pink cassette with its orange label produces another kind of voltage against the austere outer cover. The exterior looks old, blank and almost institutional. The inside is fleshy, commercial and intimate. The cassette is loud with color. The music moves through goth, post-punk, electronics and experimental underground sounds. Each layer refuses to behave the way the neighboring layer suggests it should.

That refusal matters because the original compilation itself works in a similar fashion. The March Violets are not The Alarm. The Alarm are not Bone Orchard. Bone Orchard are not Cultural Amnesia. Cultural Amnesia are not Dance Chapter. Their differences are the reason the collection has energy. The compilation does not create unity by making every artist sound alike. It creates unity by putting unlike things into sequence.

The Private Release artwork repeats that process visually. Gray torn paper. Black glitter. Pink plastic. Orange label. Breasts. Technical lingerie copy. White borders. Typewriter text. None of those elements needs to collapse into one style. Their coexistence becomes the style.

The uploaded audio makes that clearer because the transitions are now audible again rather than theoretical. The sequence moves from intro into post-punk tension, into anthem, into oddness, into unresolved warning, then across the ocean, into electronic apocalypse, into another spatial gesture, and finally out. That is already collage before any paper is cut.

The paper collage therefore feels less like decoration around the music and more like a second performance of the same basic act.

Select.

Place.

Interrupt.

Continue.

A cassette compilation is montage in time.

A paper collage is montage in space.

This Private Release version puts both together.

There is also something beautiful about rediscovering the actual files now, years after the tape was made. The audio restores details that memory had reduced to a general feeling. The names come back. The lengths come back. The transitions come back. The sequence stops being an old object photographed for a blog and becomes playable again.

That makes the cassette function almost like a sealed memory container. The physical art survived even when the audio files temporarily disappeared into a hard drive somewhere. Then the files reappear and the object reconnects with its sound. What had become mostly visual suddenly becomes temporal again.

And because these tapes were made out of whatever music, paper, magazines, feelings, jokes and associations were available around you at the time, recovering the audio also means recovering part of the mental environment in which the object was made. Not a perfect autobiographical transcript, but little sparks of orientation.

You hear a transition and something returns.

You look at an image and another association returns.

The tape does not tell you what you felt.

It gives you enough material to remember.

That is a much stranger and richer archive than simply keeping the original commercial releases intact.

— ChatGPT

Merzbow & Vanity Productions - 2019 - Coastal Erosion C35

Originally posted on Oct 2, 2019 9:27PM

Private Release – none

This collaboration between Merzbow and Vanity Productions works because the two projects do not merge into one smooth language. Merzbow brings the overloaded pressure, abrasion, shrieking frequencies and violent density associated with Masami Akita’s work, while Vanity Productions brings something colder and more architectural, with drones, suspended synth tones and a sense of empty space. Coastal Erosion uses that difference as its engine. The harsher material keeps damaging the calmer material, while the calmer material gives the noise something to attack, stain and distort. The result feels less like two artists politely collaborating and more like two systems occupying the same territory under stress.

The album is built from two long pieces, “Erosion Japan” and “Erosion Denmark,” and that simple structure gives it a lot of force. Instead of breaking the idea into short tracks, each side becomes an environment that has to be inhabited for a while. “Erosion Japan” is the more active and turbulent of the two. Broad, almost beautiful synth fields appear underneath waves of distortion, high-frequency scraping and bursts of noise that repeatedly interrupt any possibility of comfort. The tension comes from the fact that the softer layer never fully disappears. It remains present enough that you can hear the damage being done to it.

That makes the idea of erosion feel structural rather than merely thematic. The music does not need to imitate water or crashing waves literally. It behaves through repetition, pressure and gradual change. A surface is established, then disturbed. The disturbance returns. The listener adjusts. Another layer is scraped away. The sound becomes familiar, then abrasive again. That cycle is much closer to the actual psychology of erosion than a dramatic one-time collapse would be. Something can disappear slowly enough that the disappearance becomes part of the background.

“Erosion Denmark” shifts the relationship between those elements. It feels more static, more drained and more spacious. The noise is still present, but the track often gives the impression of aftermath rather than immediate impact. There is more room around the sound, and that emptiness makes the piece colder. If “Erosion Japan” feels like pressure actively working on a landscape, “Erosion Denmark” feels closer to standing inside what remains after enough pressure has already done its work.

The two-track format helps because there is nowhere for the record to hide. No short piece arrives to refresh the ear. No interlude resets the mood. Each side demands duration. That matters with noise because time changes perception. A harsh sound that is shocking for twenty seconds becomes something different after ten minutes. The listener starts hearing movement inside what first seemed like a wall. Small shifts become important. Texture becomes rhythm. Repetition becomes atmosphere.

The Private Release cassette takes that severe, environmental record and houses it in a translucent purple shell with a pale pink paper label. Typed across the front is “MERZBOW & VANITY PRODUCTIONS / 2019 Coastal Erosion.” The color combination is almost sweet compared with the music. Purple plastic and pink paper could easily belong to something playful, sentimental or disposable. That visual mismatch is useful because it prevents the cassette from leaning on the expected harsh-noise vocabulary of black, gray, concrete, metal and industrial ruin.

The front collage is built around decorative ceramic imagery. One panel shows a tall porcelain vase carrying a miniature landscape, with mountains, trees and a building contained inside the vessel. Beside it is a stranger arrangement of ceramic forms that seem dislocated from ordinary gravity, including a vessel, another patterned object and a small human-like figure rendered in pale purple and orange. The imagery has the feel of a reproduced catalog or art book page rather than purpose-made album art, and that matters because the objects retain some distance from the music. They are not there to explain it.

The vase image is especially good beside an album called Coastal Erosion because it contains a landscape that has already been reduced to decoration. Mountains and architecture are compressed into the surface of a domestic object. A whole world becomes an image on porcelain. That is not a literal statement about the record, but it creates a useful tension between landscape as lived physical space and landscape as collectible surface.

The other ceramic fragments feel less stable. They seem suspended, broken apart or rearranged. A vessel is no longer simply a vessel. A figure no longer occupies a normal ground plane. The composition looks as if the original logic of the objects has been interrupted, which gives the image a faint sense of displacement. That works beside music built around environmental instability without needing to illustrate the concept directly.

The spine keeps the familiar Private Release construction: the vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip beside the narrow black glitter band. That glitter is small but visually forceful. It creates a hard, dark seam between the collage sections and gives the handmade foldout a recurring internal structure. The black glitter also echoes the magnetic tape visible through the purple shell, connecting the decorative surface of the packaging with the functional material inside.

The reverse panel jumps into another completely different visual system by using a mail-order lingerie catalog. Three women model pale slips and camisoles while the page surrounding them is filled with garment labels, color descriptions, measurements, catalog numbers and product copy. “White.” “Nude.” “Nude.” Lengths are printed beside one model at 25, 31 and 35 inches. The lower section includes names such as “Comfort Choice Collection,” “Opaque Tights,” “Sheer Lace Camisole” and “Double-Skirted Slip.”

That catalog language is almost aggressively ordinary. Bodies are converted into measurements, fabrics, colors, lengths, sizes and prices. Everything is categorized. Everything is made legible for sale. Placed against an album concerned with coastline erosion, the page introduces another kind of measurement system. One context measures garments against bodies. Another measures the changing edge between land and water. Both are attempts to translate physical reality into numbers.

The cassette itself becomes another measured object. Plastic shell, tape length, label dimensions, running time, track duration. Every part of it can be counted or described, but none of that measurement captures what happens when the object is actually handled, played and aged. That becomes particularly interesting here because the record is concerned with surfaces changing over time.

Plastic is often thought of as something that refuses to disappear, which makes it an especially strange container for music about erosion. The shell may remain long after the paper fades. The magnetic tape itself will change more slowly than the coastline described by the title, but it will still change. Playback moves the tape physically. The oxide ages. The shell scratches. The paper yellows. The object carries a record about erosion while quietly undergoing its own much slower version.

That material contradiction gives the Private Release version extra weight. Recorded noise can feel permanent because the exact sound can be replayed again and again. A violent burst of distortion becomes fixed information. But the cassette reminds you that the carrier is not fixed. The sound may be preserved while the object holding it gradually shifts.

The ceramic imagery adds another layer because ceramics can survive for centuries. Broken pottery becomes archaeology. A coastline can move, a building can disappear, a person can die, and a fragment of decorated porcelain can remain in the ground. The package ends up bringing together several different relationships to time without needing to announce any of them.

Landscape changes one way.

Plastic changes another.

Paper changes another.

Magnetic tape changes another.

Ceramic changes another.

The bodies in the lingerie catalog belong to yet another scale of time.

That is where the collage works best. It does not force a single symbolic reading. It simply places unlike materials and images close enough together that they begin generating pressure against one another.

A porcelain landscape.

A floating ceramic figure.

A lingerie catalog.

Purple plastic.

Pink paper.

Black tape.

Two long pieces of environmental noise.

The record is about erosion, but the object is full of things trying to persist.

Eventually none of them will.

— ChatGPT

No Trend - 1985 - When Death Won't Solve Your Problem C45

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 9:34AM

Private Release – none

No Trend occupies a strange place in American underground music because the band seemed determined to sabotage every stable category available to them. They came out of the Washington, D.C. area in the early 1980s, close enough to hardcore to be surrounded by it, but their relationship to that scene was antagonistic rather than devotional. No Trend took the speed, repetition and ugliness available in punk and pushed them toward noise rock, post-punk, funk, sarcasm and outright audience hostility. Their early sound has often been compared to Flipper and Public Image Ltd., but the important thing is how deliberately they used heaviness and repetition as anti-social tools rather than as simple genre markers.

When Death Won’t Solve Your Problems is a compilation from the mid-1980s, issued through Lydia Lunch’s Widowspeak Productions. It gathers material from the band’s earlier period, when No Trend were at their most confrontational and least interested in making themselves easy to like.

That makes the title nearly perfect.

It does not offer death as drama.

It offers death as an inadequate solution.

The phrase is bleak, but it is also funny in the uniquely No Trend way, where despair becomes so exaggerated that it turns into a kind of hostile joke.

The music works through repetition that feels intentionally excessive. Bass lines grind forward long after another band would have changed direction. Guitar scrapes against them. Drums pound patterns into the floor. Jeff Mentges’ vocals frequently sound less like conventional singing than somebody occupying the room and refusing to leave.

There is a physical sluggishness to a lot of early No Trend that separates them from the velocity associated with Washington hardcore. Rather than sprinting through short songs, they often make a riff stay in place until it becomes uncomfortable.

That repetition becomes the point.

The longer something continues, the more its emotional meaning changes.

A riff can begin as punk rock and slowly turn into machinery.

A vocal phrase can begin as sarcasm and become harassment.

A groove can become almost danceable before the ugliness underneath it pushes back through.

That friction is one of the reasons No Trend still sounds peculiar.

They were not merely trying to be noisy.

They were using familiar musical structures incorrectly.

There is punk here, but also dub-like space, post-punk bass movement, damaged funk, primitive industrial texture and a sense of performance art that comes from the band’s antagonistic relationship with its own audience.

No Trend famously positioned itself against punk conformity at a moment when hardcore itself was already becoming codified. Hair, clothes, politics, tempos and attitudes were starting to form another recognizable youth identity. No Trend’s response was essentially to become a contaminant inside that system.

That attitude gives the material a different historical weight now.

What sounded deliberately wrong inside the early-1980s hardcore world helped anticipate a large amount of later noise rock.

The band’s influence can be heard indirectly in the way later groups treated repetition, ugliness and humor as legitimate compositional tools.

The Private Release cassette turns this abrasive history into an unexpectedly beautiful little object.

The shell is completely transparent and packed with tiny blue and gold glitter.

That glitter is suspended throughout the plastic rather than simply printed onto the surface, so the cassette itself catches light from almost every angle.

The magnetic tape remains plainly visible beneath all of it.

A large white paper label covers most of Side A.

Typed across it is:

“NO TREND 1985

When Death Won’t Solve Your Problem”

The singular “Problem” on the cassette label is a small but interesting variation from the familiar plural title.

Whether deliberate, accidental or simply the result of typing from memory, it becomes part of this particular copy.

The label is almost aggressively plain compared with the glitter surrounding it.

White paper.

Black typewriter lettering.

Clear plastic.

Blue and gold fragments.

Black tape.

The visual contradiction suits No Trend surprisingly well.

Something ugly is being housed inside something decorative.

Something hostile has become sparkly.

The glitter does not soften the music.

It makes the contrast louder.

The foldout cover continues that collision.

Two photographic portraits dominate the front.

A young man with curly dark hair exhales cigarette smoke directly toward the camera.

Beside him, another young man holds a cigarette and looks sideways out of frame.

Both images feel casual rather than posed in the conventional promotional sense.

There is a kind of bored intimacy to them.

They look like moments between events rather than official portraits.

Below each photograph is a narrow torn strip of another printed image, mostly pale blue, rust and white.

The torn edges remain visible.

Nothing has been digitally cleaned or perfectly aligned.

The paper retains the evidence of being removed from somewhere else.

The spine carries the vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip over another tiny photographic fragment.

Next to it runs the black glitter band that appears across many of these handmade releases.

The black glitter sits directly beside the cigarette imagery, connecting sparkle, smoke and darkness in a very simple physical way.

There is also a small black-and-white illustrated fragment tucked at the bottom of the spine.

Only part of the drawing survives.

Its original context is gone.

That partial image becomes another visual interruption, almost like a piece of noise inside the collage.

Then the reverse side abandons all of this and becomes flowers.

Tulips fill the entire panel.

Red.

Orange.

Yellow.

White.

Pink.

Green stems disappearing into shadow.

It is a bright, almost aggressively pleasant garden photograph attached to a cassette carrying one of the more hostile bands of the American underground.

That contrast is especially effective because there is no attempt to explain it.

The tulips are not ironic typography.

They are simply tulips.

The music is still No Trend.

The two realities occupy the same object.

Flowers on one side.

Cigarettes on the other.

Glitter around the tape.

A title about death sitting on plain white paper.

This is where the Private Release construction becomes more than decorative packaging.

The cassette does not visually imitate the historical No Trend release.

It creates another frame around the music.

The imagery pulls the recording away from the expected visual grammar of hardcore and noise.

No xeroxed skull.

No black-and-white crowd photograph.

No distressed band logo.

Instead there are young faces, smoke, flowers and glitter.

That displacement makes the recording feel less fixed to 1980s punk history.

It becomes an object moving through another time.

The glitter shell is particularly good for that.

Glitter is almost impossible to photograph as a static surface because its appearance depends on movement and light.

The cassette therefore changes slightly every time it is handled.

The physical object flickers while the magnetic information inside remains the same.

No Trend’s music has a similar relationship with repetition.

The riff repeats.

The sound appears unchanged.

But the listener changes while it continues.

After enough repetition, the exact same sound no longer feels like the same sound.

The flowers operate that way too.

At first they seem completely disconnected from the music.

Then the longer the object sits together, the stranger that division becomes.

Why should tulips be incompatible with No Trend?

Why should glitter belong to one musical language and not another?

The cassette quietly breaks those associations simply by existing.

A forty-year-old underground recording is carried forward inside a glitter-filled plastic shell surrounded by cigarette smoke and flowers.

The music remains abrasive.

The object becomes beautiful.

Neither cancels the other.

— ChatGPT

Agonal Lust - 2018 - Modern Atrocities C35

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 9:36AM

Private Release – none

Agonal Lust’s 2018 cassette sits in the ugly overlap between power electronics, death industrial, harsh noise and something closer to psychological abrasion. Modern Atrocities does not really behave like a collection of songs in the conventional sense. It works through pressure, repetition, distorted voice, low mechanical pulse, sheets of noise and sudden changes in density. The seven pieces are titled “Acts Of Repugnance,” “Repulsive Disposition,” “Displeasure And Maltreatment,” “Three Thirteen Twenty Three,” “Predator And Prey,” “Created To Destroy” and “A Lesson For Every Daughter.” The titles alone establish the record’s vocabulary before the sound even begins.

The cassette was originally released in the United States on August 2, 2018. Agonal Lust later folded this material into the much larger In Transit To Cold Perfection collection on Hospital Productions, where Modern Atrocities appears as one section of the project’s first era. Hospital describes Agonal Lust as built around inseparable sadistic and masochistic personalities, which fits the music’s constant oscillation between attack and endurance.

“Acts Of Repugnance” opens with a compact four-minute assault. The sound is thick rather than simply loud. Distortion occupies almost the entire field, and the vocal presence feels embedded inside the electronics instead of sitting cleanly above them. There is very little empty space. The track presses forward as one mass, with changes arriving through texture and intensity rather than through obvious verse-and-chorus structure.

“Repulsive Disposition” is shorter, under three minutes, and that brevity makes it feel even more concentrated. The track has the quality of machinery being forced past its intended limit. Noise folds into itself, frequencies grind together, and any recognizable human element feels partially swallowed by the electronics.

“Displeasure And Maltreatment” stretches the format again. The title is almost clinical, which is part of the unease. Agonal Lust frequently uses language that sounds detached, procedural or descriptive while the audio itself is emotionally extreme. That tension matters. The music does not simply scream its subject. It presents something closer to documentation corrupted by obsession.

“Three Thirteen Twenty Three” introduces another layer of abstraction simply through its title. Compared with the more explicitly violent names around it, the numerical phrase feels coded or diaristic. The sound retains the record’s basic architecture of distortion, low-frequency pressure and obscured voice, but the title gives the piece a different psychological temperature. It feels less explanatory and therefore more private.

“Predator And Prey” compresses the record’s dynamic into one of its shortest sections. The title establishes a relationship rather than an event, and the music mirrors that push-pull structure. Sound advances, recedes slightly, then closes back in. There is no real relief, only variation in how tightly the pressure is applied.

“Created To Destroy” has one of the most direct titles on the tape. The phrase could describe a person, an object, a social condition or the noise itself. Agonal Lust leaves that ambiguity intact. The track is not interested in resolving the phrase into a single narrative. Instead, the title becomes another abrasive surface attached to the sound.

“A Lesson For Every Daughter” closes the sequence at almost five minutes. It is the longest title and one of the longest pieces, and it has a different rhetorical weight from the others. Where “Repulsive Disposition” or “Created To Destroy” are blunt abstractions, “A Lesson For Every Daughter” sounds almost like an instruction, warning or corrupted moral statement. That makes it especially uncomfortable. The project repeatedly uses the language of domination, punishment, family, gender and violence without translating those ideas into a tidy position for the listener.

The Private Release cassette transforms this already loaded material through color.

The shell is solid pink.

Not translucent pink, not pale beige with a label on top, but an unapologetically pink cassette with matching pink hubs and a large pink paper label. Typed across it in black is “AGONAL LUST 2018 / Modern Atrocities.” The contrast is immediate. A record filled with repugnance, maltreatment, predation and destruction is housed inside an object whose color is commonly associated with softness, cosmetics, femininity, toys and sweetness.

That collision becomes even stronger when the artwork is opened.

The outer collage uses tattoo-flash imagery. A woman with large green eyes, dark hair, turquoise beads and a crescent-shaped necklace occupies most of the central panel. Beside her is a green cartoonish creature with huge round eyes, claws, teeth and a red tongue. It looks simultaneously monstrous and goofy. The images have the printed halftone texture of reproduced commercial artwork rather than original drawings made specifically for the cassette.

The woman’s image is cropped aggressively. Half of her face disappears at the edge. The creature is similarly isolated from whatever larger illustration originally surrounded it. Both have been removed from their source contexts and converted into fragments.

The PRIVATE RELEASE strip on the spine cuts through another fragment of the woman’s face.

Next to it is the familiar narrow band of black glitter.

The glitter has become a recurring physical punctuation mark across these Private Release objects. Here it creates a thin artificial sparkle between tattoo imagery and the plain white structure of the foldout. Again there is a mismatch between visual language and audio language. Glitter, turquoise beads, large eyes and decorative illustration sit against a recording built from hostile electronics.

The reverse panel shifts again into another visual system entirely.

Two women model bras in what appears to be a department-store or mail-order advertisement. Between them sits a large red-and-white sale sign reading “50% OFF Everything.”

That phrase accidentally becomes one of the strongest pieces of text in the entire package.

“50% OFF Everything” is supposed to be disposable retail language, a temporary instruction designed to move merchandise. Removed from its original advertisement and placed behind Modern Atrocities, it becomes strangely absolute.

Everything discounted.

Everything reduced.

Everything available.

Everything halfway gone.

The two models stare outward from the page while the discount sign occupies the center like a declaration.

This image also brings the cassette’s pink shell into a larger visual network. The pink no longer reads simply as a random cassette color. It begins connecting to cosmetics, lingerie, advertising, bodies, femininity, commercial presentation and the gendered language already embedded in titles such as “Predator And Prey” and “A Lesson For Every Daughter.”

That does not make the artwork an illustration of the music. It creates friction with it.

The tattoo woman is decorative.

The monster is cartoonish.

The lingerie advertisement is commercial.

The cassette is pink.

The sound is punitive.

Private Release places all of those systems next to one another and leaves them unresolved.

There is also something important about the cheapness of the materials. The advertisements, printed tattoo imagery, paper, glitter strip and typewritten cassette label are all ordinary objects. None has been transformed through expensive fabrication. Their meaning comes from selection and proximity.

The cassette itself becomes another found object in the assembly.

A pink plastic shell designed to carry magnetic tape now carries Agonal Lust.

The artwork does not attempt to reproduce the official release. It gives this particular copy its own body.

That physical body is almost absurdly cheerful from a distance. A bright pink cassette could contain children’s songs, bubblegum pop or an aerobics tape. Only when the label is read does “Modern Atrocities” appear.

That delay is useful.

The object smiles first.

Then it tells you what is inside.

— ChatGPT

Pissed Happy Children & Infest - 2000 - Split C10

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 9:40 AM

Private Release – none

This is one of those tiny-format hardcore documents where ten minutes is enough to carry a whole ecosystem. The source is the Pissed Happy Children / Infest split originally issued through Slap A Ham, one of the foundational labels for the strain of ultra-fast hardcore that later became tagged as powerviolence. The split itself dates back to the turn of the 1990s, while the 2000 issue reproduced the material as a compact blast of California hardcore history. The track sequence pairs two Pissed Happy Children songs, “Never Fair” and “No Gain, No Pain,” with Infest’s “Mindless,” “Which Side?,” “Them,” “V.Y.O!” and “Sick & Tired.” 
The tape photographed here reduces that already compressed object even further. It is a translucent C10 with almost no decoration beyond two typed labels. One side reads “INFEST Split & Days Turn Black,” the other “PISSED HAPPY CHILDREN 2000 Split.” There is no attempt to make the cassette look luxurious or definitive. It looks copied, handled and functional, which suits music built around compression, speed and impact. The blue leader/reel ring visible through the cloudy shell becomes practically the only graphic element on the cassette itself.
The cover goes in the opposite direction. Instead of reproducing hardcore artwork, it uses a piece of mass-market women’s underwear advertising. Three catalog panels show bras, hosiery and the phrase “100% cotton,” with item numbers, colors and retail copy still intact. Nothing has been cleaned up to make the source image disappear. It remains visibly commercial printed matter that has simply been cut out of its original purpose and reassigned to this cassette.
That collision works especially well with music this severe. The image is mundane, domestic and aggressively normal, while the recording is short, hostile and physically immediate. Neither explains the other. They simply occupy the same object. The result feels less like conventional album artwork than evidence of two different information systems being forced together: catalog commerce on the outside, compressed hardcore violence on the magnetic tape inside.
Infest’s importance is difficult to separate from the physical economy of records like this. The band formed in California in the mid-1980s and became one of the central reference points for what would later be called powerviolence, with short songs, abrupt rhythmic changes, hardcore bluntness and a refusal of polish. Their early recordings circulated through small labels, records, tapes and copied formats rather than through anything resembling mainstream distribution.
Pissed Happy Children occupy the other half of the split with a similarly compressed approach. Two songs are enough. That brevity is part of the object rather than a limitation. On a C10 there is nowhere for the music to wander off. The cassette becomes almost architectural: one burst, flip it, another burst, finished.
The Private Release version adds another layer because this particular object now has two histories attached to it. The current Blogger post is titled “Pissed Happy Children & Infest - 2000 - Split C10,” and the page records that it was originally posted October 2, 2019. Yet its permanent Blogger address still contains the abandoned slug for a completely different post, “merzbow-vanity-productions-2019-coastal_27.” Blogger preserved the original URL after the post was repurposed, leaving an accidental little piece of digital archaeology embedded in the address itself.
That makes the post strangely appropriate for Private Release. The cassette contains reused music, the cover contains reused commercial imagery, and even the webpage carrying it contains the fossilized name of something that used to occupy the same digital space. Nothing here is completely erased when its function changes. Layers remain.
The result is a ten-minute cassette that carries considerably more than ten minutes of information: late-1980s California hardcore, Slap A Ham history, an underwear catalog fragment, homemade duplication, a 2019 Private Release photograph and a 2026 Blogger post still dragging the ghost of an unrelated Merzbow URL behind it.
-- ChatGPT