God Is War - 2019 - ST C35

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 4:39PM

 

Private Release – none

The first thing this object does is make the words GOD IS WAR fight with almost everything surrounding them. The cassette is pink. Not dark red, military green, black or some predictable industrial shade, but a soft uninterrupted pink shell with a plain translucent label typed 2019 / GOD IS WAR / Self Titled. Open the J-card and the interior is filled with a dense bed of purple flowers beside bright green leaves and grass. The exterior is assembled from torn fragments of old erotic illustrations: bodies cropped by ripped paper, clothing, legs, bent figures, exposed flesh and partial scenes whose original narratives have been interrupted. Nothing visually settles into the expected language of a record built around titles like “Premonitions Of War,” “The Rules Of His Game,” “...Let The Games Begin,” “The Altar: The Final Arena, The Ultimate Battleground” and “The Divinity Of A Violent Duality: The Power To Kill, The Strength To Love.” That mismatch is the point where this particular Private Release object begins to become something separate from a simple reproduction. The music already knows how to communicate aggression. The package does not need to repeat it. Instead the surrounding object introduces sex, historical illustration, flowers, torn paper, white space and pink plastic. Violence is placed beside softness. War is placed beside eroticism. Divinity is placed beside a body. The title says GOD IS WAR while the interior quietly gives the listener flowers. The erotic drawings also belong to a visual language that keeps surfacing throughout this run of Private Release tapes. Existing art is cut out of books, magazines and whatever printed material happens to be available, then stripped of its original framing and placed beside completely unrelated music. Across many of these cassettes, Taschen books and especially the huge historical reservoir of erotic imagery in Erotica Universalis became particularly useful source material. The important act is not pretending to have drawn the original illustration. The intervention happens through selection, ripping, cropping, placement and sequence. A fragment originally created to belong to one image becomes part of another object entirely. Here the ripping is especially visible. The paper edges are not disguised. Large areas of white remain between fragments. One scene on the front appears almost amputated from its original page, while the opposite panel isolates the curve of a body so severely that flesh becomes shape before it becomes narrative. The spine reduces the imagery again, trapping another tiny bodily fragment behind the vertical PRIVATE RELEASE strip. The construction is not attempting seamless collage. It continually reminds the viewer that pieces have been removed from elsewhere. That fractured visual construction works unusually well with the titles of the five pieces because the language itself keeps dividing experience into opposing forces. “Premonitions Of War” begins with anticipation rather than war itself. A premonition is not an event. It is the mind producing the possibility of an event before the event arrives. Violence therefore begins as imagination, warning, intuition or fear. The first title places the listener in the period before certainty, when something may be coming but has not yet completely revealed itself. “The Rules Of His Game” immediately introduces another structure. War has rules. A game has rules. Someone apparently owns those rules because this is his game. The wording creates hierarchy before any individual story has been supplied. Somebody designed the field. Somebody else may be forced to participate in it. Games usually promise fairness through rules, but history repeatedly demonstrates that rules can also be mechanisms for controlling who is permitted to win. Then comes “...Let The Games Begin.” The ellipsis makes it feel less like a beginning than the continuation of a sentence already in progress. The premonition has happened. The rules have been established. Now participation starts. The phrase can sound ceremonial, theatrical, sporting or threatening depending upon whatever surrounds it. Inside a God Is War release, its innocence evaporates quickly. A competition implied by “game” starts drifting toward conflict. By the fourth piece, the vocabulary becomes enormous: “The Altar: The Final Arena, The Ultimate Battleground.” Game, war and religion have now converged. An arena provides spectators. A battleground provides enemies. An altar provides sacrifice. Putting all three into one title creates a place where conflict stops being merely physical and becomes ceremonial. The phrase “final arena” implies there is nowhere afterward to advance. “Ultimate battleground” raises the stakes even further. The sequence has moved from anticipating conflict to entering somebody’s game and finally reaching a place where conflict becomes absolute. Then the final track gives the release its central contradiction: “The Divinity Of A Violent Duality: The Power To Kill, The Strength To Love.” Power and strength are separated. Killing is described as power. Loving is described as strength. Violence and tenderness are not presented as opposites that can never occupy the same human being. They are placed inside one duality and then described as divine. That title alone makes the pink cassette suddenly much more interesting. If the release were packaged only in black, skulls, weapons and ruined buildings, “the power to kill” would dominate the visual reading before “the strength to love” had any opportunity to register. Pink plastic and purple flowers refuse to let violence monopolize the object. The beauty is not there to cancel the aggression. The aggression is not there to invalidate the beauty. Both remain. The interior photograph of purple flowers is especially excessive after the torn, faded erotic drawings on the outside. The flowers are dense enough that individual blossoms almost stop functioning as individual objects. Purple occupies most of the image. A tree trunk enters from the left, green leaves fill the spaces between blossoms, and a section of bright lawn opens on the right. It is an ordinary garden image presented at full color saturation after an exterior made from pale brown, cream and black fragments. Opening the J-card therefore creates a visual event. Outside: bodies fragmented through reproduction and torn paper. Inside: growth repeated dozens of times. That pattern has appeared elsewhere across these Private Release tapes as well. Flowers keep returning beside material that would not conventionally be packaged with flowers. Hellhammer receives daffodils. Darkthrone receives tulips. Electronic and industrial recordings appear beside gardens. The recurrence gradually stops feeling like a decorative joke and starts becoming part of the visual grammar connecting one cassette to another. A listener encountering only one tape might see an incongruous flower photograph. Across many tapes, the flowers become continuity. The same thing happens with erotic imagery, old illustrations, typewriter text, the black speckled spine strip and the PRIVATE RELEASE tag. None of those elements belong exclusively to God Is War. That is precisely why they identify this object as part of something larger. A traditional label repeats a logo while changing releases. Private Release repeats an entire method of attention. Find the recording. Find a cassette. Type the information. Pull images from whatever visual material is circulating nearby. Cut or tear them. Put the pieces together. Give the object enough identity to exist. Then move on and make another. The individual release becomes one fragment inside a much larger accumulation. God Is War’s self-titled program happens to fit a C35 almost perfectly. Five long-form pieces occupy a little over thirty-one minutes, with no need for a twenty-track sequence or a conventional album structure. The titles themselves create enough progression to make the complete program feel almost narrative without requiring any literal story. Premonition. Rules. Game. Arena. Battleground. Duality. Killing. Love. The vocabulary keeps increasing in scale until the final title turns inward and complicates everything that came before it. War is no longer simply armies fighting somewhere outside the listener. Violence and love occupy the same sentence. Divinity is inserted between them. The title GOD IS WAR becomes less straightforward as a result. Is it declaring violence sacred? Accusing religion of violence? Describing existence as conflict? Building theatrical language around aggressive electronics? The object does not need to choose one interpretation. The phrase can remain unstable. That instability is strengthened by the fact that the artwork refuses to provide an authoritative answer. There is no illustration of God. There is no battlefield. No soldiers. No weapon. No national flag. No sacred icon. Instead there are old erotic bodies, ripped edges, empty paper, flowers and a pink cassette. The listener has to create the bridge between those things. That is where an object like this becomes useful beyond reproducing audio. It does not explain the recording. It adds another set of relationships around it. Someone else made the music. Someone else originally drew or printed the erotic images. Someone else photographed the flowers. The cassette itself was manufactured by somebody else. The paper came from somewhere else. Private Release does not erase any of those previous authorships. It gathers fragments and makes the encounter between them the new thing. Put GOD IS WAR on pink plastic. Put violent duality beside flowers. Put a body torn out of an old book beside hyperaggressive electronics. Let the object exist without resolving the contradictions. Then send it into the world. The reels turn. The music ends. The pink shell remains. The flowers remain. The torn bodies remain. The words remain too: the power to kill, the strength to love. Neither side wins.

God Is War - 2019 - King Of The Arabs C45

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 5:00PM

Private Release – none  163.45MB FLAC

The cassette itself is transparent plastic filled with tiny blue and gold glitter, almost festive under light. Through the shell, the wound magnetic tape forms two dark circular masses beneath a pale typewritten label: 2019 / GOD IS WAR / King Of The Arabs. Outside it, the J-card uses a torn sepia erotic illustration. A nude or nearly nude lower body has been isolated from its original scene, with pale fluid-like marks across the skin and another fragment of the same illustration continuing across the opposite panel. The paper has been ripped rather than cleanly cut, leaving irregular white borders and large areas of empty space. Open the J-card and huge pink tulips fill the inside, backed by green leaves and soft garden color. The original 2019 program runs a little over thirty-nine minutes across six pieces: “The Arrival of the King,” “The Ascension to His Throne (The 1979 Purge),” “Chemical Ali (Halabja 1988),” “To Be A Woman, Chosen By A Prince,” “The Final Assault on the Princes” and “Sentenced to Hang.” Mack Chami described the concept as dating back to 2011, after moving to the Bay Area and being encouraged by Sam Torres to make a Saddam-focused tape. He eventually framed the album not as a defense of Saddam Hussein’s politics but as an examination of the brutality, domination and terror associated with Saddam and his sons, pushed through what he called hyper-violent industrial music. The sequencing becomes unusually important because the six titles do not behave like unrelated names placed onto abstract electronic tracks. Read in order, they form a compressed rise-and-collapse narrative. “The Arrival of the King” begins with entrance. Before anybody has been purged, gassed, chosen, attacked or executed, a ruler simply arrives. The wording is ceremonial. A king does not walk into a room like an ordinary person. An arrival implies witnesses. Somebody is already expected to look. Then “The Ascension to His Throne (The 1979 Purge)” turns arrival into consolidation. Saddam became president in July 1979 and days later presided over the infamous Ba’ath Party purge, during which alleged conspirators were publicly identified, removed and later subjected to imprisonment and execution. The track title compresses political ascent and elimination into one event: the throne rises because people around it are being removed. That relationship between spectacle and terror matters because Saddam’s rule repeatedly depended upon making power visible. The violence was not always hidden somewhere underneath authority. At times the performance of authority required that people know precisely what could happen to anybody who crossed it.

“Chemical Ali (Halabja 1988)” moves the sequence from internal political control toward mass atrocity. Ali Hassan al-Majid, Saddam’s cousin, became known as “Chemical Ali” because of his role in Iraq’s chemical attacks against Kurdish civilians during the Anfal campaign. Human Rights Watch describes him as a principal architect of that campaign and documents the Iraqi chemical attack on Halabja in March 1988, where thousands of civilians were killed. Thousands of tiny reflective particles sit suspended in the clear cassette around a recording containing a piece titled after Halabja. They catch light beautifully. Nothing in the physical material itself warns the eye that one of the titles printed above it points toward chemical warfare and mass death. Then “To Be A Woman, Chosen By A Prince” changes the scale again. The first three titles concern kingship, political purge and mass violence. Suddenly the language becomes personal. One woman. One prince. Chosen. The word “chosen” initially sounds privileged. Fairy tales train the word toward romance: someone is selected, elevated, desired. Inside this sequence, however, power has already established what selection can mean when one side controls the rules. The title allows the supposedly romantic language of being chosen to become threatening without having to explain precisely what occurred. That makes the torn erotic artwork more than decorative sexual material. The exterior does not show an intact erotic scene. It shows the aftermath of cutting or tearing one apart. The original image has lost its surrounding context. A body remains. Flesh becomes composition. One fragment appears on the front, another on the back, while portions of whatever story originally connected them have disappeared into white paper. Erotic images recur across these Private Release tapes because the source material itself recurs. Books, magazines and paper circulating through the same room become a visual reservoir. Something made by another artist is removed from its original publication and starts interacting with completely unrelated music. Here the record contains a title about a woman being “chosen” by power while the Private Release collage places another body beside it without telling the viewer how to interpret the relationship.

Then “The Final Assault on the Princes” reverses direction. The king and princes who occupied positions of overwhelming power earlier in the sequence are suddenly described as targets. “Final assault” implies that the system built around them has reached its terminal confrontation. The people once doing the choosing and eliminating are no longer insulated from force. At nearly ten minutes, it is also the longest piece on the original album. The sequence gives its largest block of time to collapse. Everything ends with “Sentenced to Hang.” No throne. No king arriving. No ascension. No prince choosing. No declaration of dominance. A sentence. A method of execution. An ending imposed by another authority. The album therefore travels from power being acquired to power being removed. The first title elevates its central figure. The last reduces him to a condemned body. Turn the exterior erotic fragments inward and there is no historical image of Saddam Hussein, no battlefield, no execution chamber and no photograph of Halabja. There are simply pink tulips. They are close enough to the camera that only a handful dominate the frame. Their petals shift between pink, purple and pale vertical streaks. The background disappears into soft greens and smaller flowers. That visual move is consistent with the flow across these Private Release objects. Flowers keep appearing where conventional genre packaging would rarely put them. Black metal beside tulips. Hellhammer beside daffodils. Industrial electronics beside gardens. The flowers become part of the larger Private Release sequence rather than illustrations of the recordings themselves. The same room, books, magazines, paper and visual habits keep feeding one object into the next, creating a continuity that operates somewhat like the flow between songs on a mixtape.

The glitter shell participates in that same visual system. If someone encountered only the original God Is War edition, the artwork and packaging would belong to the language established by the artist and label. This version passes the recording through another physical and visual process. Existing music becomes associated with another cassette shell, another photographic sequence and another encounter. The object contains several acts of transformation at once. Historical events become track titles. Historical figures become subjects for experimental electronic music. That music becomes magnetic information on cassette. A manufactured shell becomes a Private Release object through selection, typing and assembly. An erotic illustration becomes collage material through tearing. A garden photograph becomes part of an industrial release because it entered the same visual vocabulary. Nothing begins here. Everything has come from somewhere else. That may be why the torn paper feels so appropriate. The fragment never pretends to be the whole. King. Purge. Chemical attack. Woman. Prince. Assault. Execution. The album itself is six fragments placed in sequence around a much larger and far uglier history. Private Release adds more fragments without pretending to complete it. The flowers do not explain Saddam Hussein. The erotic drawing does not explain God Is War. The glitter cassette does not explain Halabja. They simply become additional information surrounding the recording. Then the tape reaches the end, the reels exchange their dark circles, and the glitter is still there catching light.

VA - 2011 - Boddie Recording Company: Cleveland, Ohio 3xCD

Numero Group – NUM035  828.01MB FLAC

This object looks less like a conventional anthology of old Cleveland music than an archive of somebody who decided there was no good reason recording technology had to belong exclusively to large companies. The photographs, homemade graphics, record-label identities, library stickers, handwritten numbers and three differently designed compact discs all orbit the same name: Boddie Recording Company. The back cover reduces everything to almost nothing. BODDIE RECORDING COMPANY / CLEVELAND, OHIO / 035 sits in the middle of a large white field. The Oakland Public Library barcode occupies the upper-right corner. There is no giant track list competing for attention, no collage of stars, no attempt to make the package look historically monumental. The understatement becomes appropriate once the history behind the name starts expanding. Thomas and Louise Boddie operated a recording studio, label operation and eventually a pressing facility from Cleveland’s east side for decades. Thomas Boddie was fascinated by electronics and built, rebuilt or modified much of the equipment he used. The studio ultimately operated from a former dairy building behind the family home on Union Avenue. Musicians could arrive without belonging to some established national industry and still leave with recorded sound that could become an actual physical record. That practical possibility is the heart of the whole thing. Make the recording. Manufacture the object. Put a name on it. Send it outward. The Numero Group collection gathers material from Boddie’s own Soul Kitchen, Luau and Bounty labels across three CDs, but even those names reveal how much activity was happening around one relatively modest operation. Disc One is visually labeled SOUL KITCHEN in enormous hand-drawn lettering on pale blue. Disc Three, photographed here, is bright red with BOUNTY written inside a wonderfully homemade looping logo. The designs do not resemble products emerging from one rigid corporate art department. They resemble small labels having personalities. The Oakland Public Library then adds another layer. Every disc has an OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY / MAIN LIBRARY ring around the hub. Numbers are written directly on the discs in black marker. Disc One is identified as #1. Disc Three is marked #3. The library barcode on the back corresponds to the same object, while the booklet receives its own classification label: MAIN / CD / RB / BODDIE / Booklet. Another sticker announces that the CD booklet is available by request at the Reference Desk. Even access to the historical documentation became administratively separated from access to the discs themselves. There is something beautiful about that. Numero assembled a lavish historical package full of photographs, information and reproduced ephemera, and then the public library had to convert that package into manageable civic property. Booklet over here. Discs over there. Barcode everything. Mark the hubs. Make sure it comes back. The original Boddie operation and the library are very different institutions, yet both are ultimately systems for moving information between people. One records and manufactures it. The other catalogs and circulates it. The photographs make Boddie’s version of that process wonderfully physical. One image shows a car carrying an enormous loudspeaker apparatus on its roof. A campaign sign attached to the door reads LOUIS STOKES / CONGRESS. Beside it stands a hand-painted Boddie Recording sign advertising the company’s services. The wording visible in the photograph gets directly to the philosophy of the place: they could record practically anything, anywhere, onto records, tapes and cassettes. The equipment was not confined to an acoustically perfect sacred chamber. Recording could leave the building. Sound could travel. Politics, advertising, music and public address could all pass through related machinery. Another photograph shows the BODDIE sign surrounded by plants outside the property. There is nothing visually grand about it. It looks domestic because it was domestic. A serious recording operation grew out of the same kind of physical territory where somebody also lived. That proximity between work, invention and ordinary life is one of the strongest things in the package. The story is not that somebody acquired unlimited resources and then built a studio. The more interesting direction runs the other way: somebody wanted to record sound badly enough that available resources were continually turned into whatever equipment was necessary. The music collected here reflects that openness. Soul, funk, vocal groups and gospel sit inside the same history because the studio did not need every client to fit one cultural identity. Boddie could record local musicians who might never have been accepted into the larger commercial system. A record could exist because people showed up wanting to make one. That distinction matters when listening decades later. Commercial history has a brutal filtering mechanism. A handful of records become famous enough to represent an entire place or era, while thousands of others effectively disappear. They are not necessarily worse. They simply did not travel as far. Boddie captured an enormous amount of Cleveland music before anybody could know which performers would become historically important. Numero’s three discs reverse part of that filtering process by taking music once scattered across tiny pressings and placing it back into one continuous archive. The listener gets the famous-history hierarchy after it has been disturbed. A person whose single once disappeared almost immediately can now occupy the same physical set as somebody whose name survived. The studio becomes the organizing principle instead of celebrity. That may be why the Boddie name itself becomes more interesting than any single track. It represents infrastructure. Somebody had to own microphones. Somebody had to know how to repair electronics. Somebody had to record the tape. Somebody had to cut or master the record. Somebody had to press copies. Somebody had to print labels, answer phones, accept payment and hand the finished objects back to the people who made them. Thomas and Louise Boddie turned all of those mundane requirements into a functioning doorway. The story becomes even better when the technological limitations are considered. This was not a frictionless digital world where a finished recording can be duplicated infinitely at essentially no manufacturing cost. Every physical record represented material. Tape cost money. Vinyl cost money. Equipment broke. Components had to be repaired. Presses required maintenance. Electricity had to stay on. Clients needed affordable prices while the business still needed to survive. The Boddies were not making objects because physical media possessed some romantic retro charm. Physical media was simply how sound became portable. Numero’s 2011 edition then moves the same recordings into another technological moment. Decades of 45s and tapes become three compact discs. Original labels become reproduced graphics. Business records become archival ephemera. Photographs that once documented ordinary working life become historical evidence. Then this exact copy moves again, into the Oakland Public Library. It gets stickers. It gets numbers. Somebody checks it out. Somebody returns it. Maybe somebody opens the booklet because they already know Boddie. Maybe somebody has never heard the name and simply grabs a strange three-CD soul collection off a library shelf. The information travels without requiring the receiver to understand its importance beforehand. That is one of the quiet miracles of libraries. Historical significance does not have to announce itself loudly enough to generate a sale. Something can simply remain available. The worn physical copy photographed here proves that availability happened. The plastic case has marks. The inserts have creases. Library labels occupy portions of the original design. Disc Three has handwritten identification directly on its red surface. The object has been administratively handled into individuality. There are countless copies of this Numero release, but only this one has exactly this path through Oakland’s library system. That echoes the recordings themselves. Thousands of musicians may have entered small studios during the twentieth century. These particular performances passed through Boddie. Later they passed through Numero. This copy passed through Oakland Public Library. Now the same object appears again inside Private Release. None of those stages erases the previous one. They accumulate. Recording becomes record. Record becomes archive. Archive becomes compact disc. Compact disc becomes library property. Library property becomes photographed object. The photographs become another archive. Thomas Boddie’s technological curiosity therefore keeps traveling farther than the original machinery ever could. The equipment itself can become obsolete. The building can stop operating as a studio. The companies and labels can disappear. The people eventually disappear too. But the little physical consequences of deciding to record something keep moving. A voice captured once can enter rooms fifty years later. A local 45 pressed in small numbers can become part of a three-disc historical set. A hand-painted sign advertising recording services becomes evidence preserved inside a booklet. A car with enormous loudspeakers becomes an image looked at by somebody who was not there. That is the accumulation represented by Boddie Recording Company. Not one masterpiece demanding everybody’s attention, but thousands upon thousands of hours of people deciding that whatever they were doing was worth recording. Somebody had to believe the sound deserved an object. Thomas and Louise Boddie provided the machinery that allowed that belief to become physical. Then the objects went out into the world.

VA - 2018 - Eccentric Soul: The Saru Label

 

Numero Group – 071  402.57MB FLAC

This particular copy already carries several different histories at once. The original Numero Group release is visible underneath Oakland Public Library labels, catalog stickers, barcodes and the circular RB classification marker. The front photograph shows four young men in matching patterned stage clothes gathered around industrial-looking metal equipment, smiling directly into the camera. The image has the confidence of a group photograph made before anybody knew which recordings would survive, which careers would continue, or whether somebody fifty years later would still care enough to put the photograph on another record.

Then Oakland Public Library places MAIN LIBRARY across the upper-right corner.

Another label says MAIN / CD / RB / ECCENTRIC.

The object has been classified.

Soul music becomes library material.

That is a particularly satisfying fate for a compilation whose entire purpose is rescuing recordings that could easily have vanished.

Numero Group’s Eccentric Soul series operates almost like an alternate map of American soul music. Instead of beginning with Motown, Stax, Philadelphia International and the other enormous institutions already permanently written into popular history, the series keeps moving into smaller cities, local labels, failed singles, regional producers, groups that never broke nationally and recordings that survived because somebody happened to keep the tape or the record.

This volume turns toward Cleveland and the Saru label.

The collection was released in 2018 as the twentieth installment of Eccentric Soul and gathers twenty-five recordings connected to Saru and the musicians and producers moving through its orbit around the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s. Bobby Massey of the O’Jays was one of the central creative forces around the label, writing, producing and developing artists while Cleveland was creating its own soul ecosystem outside the better-documented centers of Detroit, Memphis and Philadelphia.

That geography matters.

Cleveland does not need to become another Detroit for these recordings to matter.

The compilation works precisely because it preserves what happened there instead of measuring everything against somebody else’s commercial success.

The track list immediately reveals how interconnected the scene was. Out Of Sights appear repeatedly. Elements return again and again. Pandella Kelly appears twice. Sir Stanley, The Ba-Roz, The Ponderosa Twins, Bobby Dukes, David Peoples and Michael Bell pass through the sequence. And sitting among them are two recordings by the O’Jays, captured before the enormous Philadelphia International chapter that would make their name familiar almost everywhere.

The O’Jays’ “Now He’s Home” arrives as track two.

Later comes “Shattered Man.”

Knowing what happened afterward makes those appearances strange. History encourages us to hear famous artists backward, as though everything they recorded before success was inevitably pointing toward the records that finally became famous. But nobody inside these sessions could listen from the future.

At the time, these were simply records being made.

The rest of the compilation keeps that perspective alive because most of the names do not arrive carrying decades of cultural recognition. The listener has to encounter the recordings without celebrity doing the work first.

Even the song titles form their own emotional sequence.

“For The Rest Of My Life.”

“Now He’s Home.”

“Stand In For Love.”

“Bound.”

“Son In Law.”

“Are You Man Enough.”

“Just To Be With You.”

“Can’t Make It Without You.”

“The Last Time.”

“Hey Lady.”

“I Remember You.”

“My Woman’s Love.”

“Baby You Got It.”

“Shattered Man.”

“I Believe.”

“Tears Don’t Care Who Cry.”

“Prove It.”

“Come Back Boy.”

“You Made Me Beg.”

“I Was Wrong.”

“Love’s Needed.”

“Got To Make It Right.”

Read without hearing a note, those titles already create a world of attachment, masculinity, need, pride, failure, memory, pleading and attempted repair.

People leave.

People return.

Somebody needs to prove something.

Somebody begs.

Somebody admits being wrong.

Somebody tries to make it right.

That language is one of the reasons old soul recordings can remain emotionally immediate even when the production, fashion and recording technology clearly belong to another era. The circumstances change. The human mess underneath them barely does.

The Out Of Sights become almost a recurring character across the compilation. They open the record with “For The Rest Of My Life” and return with “I Can’t Take It,” “My Woman’s Love,” “Baby You Got It,” “Tears Don’t Care Who Cry,” “You Made Me Beg” and “I Was Wrong.” Their repeated appearances give the collection continuity without turning it into an album by one group.

Elements perform a similar function with “Son In Law,” “Hey Lady,” “Prove It,” “Just To Be With You” and the final “Got To Make It Right.”

That last title is an excellent place to stop.

After seventy-five minutes of love, homecoming, promises, masculinity, memory, tears, rejection, regret and pleading, the collection does not finish with triumph.

It finishes with repair.

Got to make it right.

The phrase feels almost applicable to archival work itself.

A recording is made.

A small label releases it.

Perhaps it sells locally.

Perhaps almost nobody notices.

The label disappears.

People move on.

Copies are lost.

Master tapes scatter.

Decades pass.

Then somebody begins looking again.

Numero’s work does not change what happened commercially to these artists, but it changes whether the evidence remains available. A forgotten record cannot be made into a hit retroactively, but it can be returned to circulation.

That is what this CD physically represents.

And then this particular copy enters yet another circulation system.

The Oakland Public Library barcode on the back reads 3 2141 04552 2079. The orange-red disc has another library number pasted directly across it and an OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY / MAIN LIBRARY ring around the center hub. These are not decorative additions. They belong to the working history of this individual copy.

The library needed to know what it was.

Where it belonged.

Whether somebody had taken it home.

Whether it came back.

The front cover may originally have presented Numero Group’s careful archival reconstruction, but the Oakland stickers document another stage of the object’s life that Numero could never have designed.

Somebody checked this out.

Probably many somebodies.

The disc entered different homes.

Different CD players.

Different rooms.

Maybe somebody recognized the O’Jays.

Maybe somebody discovered the Out Of Sights.

Maybe somebody chose it simply because the library sticker said RB and ECCENTRIC.

That uncertainty belongs to the object now.

The cover photography becomes especially effective in that context. These young men are not presented as mythological stars. They look like working musicians posing together around equipment, wearing coordinated clothes because being a group also meant looking like a group. The interior photograph brings four faces close together, practically filling the jewel case with them.

The image says people before history.

The back cover says songs after history.

The library stickers say circulation after both.

There is also something wonderfully appropriate about an Eccentric Soul release becoming public-library property. Numero’s entire series is built around challenging the hierarchy created by commercial memory. A record that failed to reach a national audience does not become musically worthless because fewer people bought it. A singer who never became famous does not disappear from the recording.

The archive can put everybody back into the room.

That is what these twenty-five tracks accomplish.

Cleveland becomes audible as more than a footnote between Detroit and Philadelphia.

Bobby Massey exists not only as a former O’Jay but as a producer and organizer surrounded by other musicians.

The O’Jays temporarily become one group among many instead of the inevitable stars of the story.

Out Of Sights and Elements receive enough space to develop identities across multiple tracks.

Pandella Kelly, Sir Stanley, Bobby Dukes, David Peoples, Michael Bell, The Ba-Roz and The Ponderosa Twins get another opportunity to enter somebody’s ears.

Then the disc ends.

The jewel case closes.

The Oakland Public Library labels remain stuck to the plastic.

Another archive has passed through another archive.

And the music is still available for somebody else to find.

VA - 2018 - This Is Trojan Boss Reggae (The Original Tighten Up Explosion) 2xCD

 

Trojan Records – TJDCD569  515.63MB FLAC

The Oakland Public Library gets the first word on this particular copy. Before Desmond Dekker, Harry J, Derrick Morgan, Max Romeo, Tony Tribe or Symarip can announce themselves, a huge printed OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY header sits across the top of the jewel case. A second MAIN LIBRARY sticker has been placed directly over Trojan’s original artwork, while another library classification label occupies the lower-left corner: MAIN / CD / REGGAE / THIS, finished with the familiar round RE marker.

The result is almost comically institutional compared with the music inside.

Trojan’s original design is loud, loose and celebratory. Names crowd around a central white circle: HARRY J ALL STARS, DESMOND DEKKER & ACES, DERRICK MORGAN, TONY TRIBE, SYMARIP, OWEN GRAY, THE RUDIES, THE PIONEERS, LEE PERRY and others. Stars fill the gaps. Lettering switches constantly between thick block forms and long hand-drawn curves. The central title simply says THIS IS TROJAN / BOSS REGGAE.

Then the library comes along and starts sticking rectangles over everything.

That collision is beautiful because the two systems are doing completely different jobs.

Trojan wants excitement.

The library wants location.

Trojan wants an explosion of names.

The library wants a barcode.

Trojan says THE ORIGINAL TIGHTEN UP EXPLOSION.

Oakland Public Library says 3 2141 04557 5051.

Neither cancels the other.

This particular object becomes both.

Boss reggae occupies a brief, remarkably energetic point in Jamaican music. Rocksteady had already slowed ska down, but the first reggae recordings tightened the rhythm again in another direction: hard accents, bright organ, forceful bass, clipped guitars, horns, vocal groups and tracks made to move people immediately. Later reggae would develop more spacious, heavier and often slower forms, but much of this late-1960s material has the feeling of music trying to get through the door before anybody can stop it.

The subtitle on the package, THE ORIGINAL TIGHTEN UP EXPLOSION, points directly toward Trojan’s enormously important Tighten Up compilation series. Those inexpensive collections helped move Jamaican recordings far beyond specialist shops and Caribbean communities in Britain. A generation of young working-class listeners encountered reggae through records like these, and the original British skinhead scene adopted much of this music as its soundtrack.

The first disc begins with one of the recordings that escaped every possible niche: Desmond Dekker & The Aces’ “Israelites.”

That is almost too obvious an opening until the next track appears.

Harry J All Stars’ “Liquidator.”

Immediately the compilation demonstrates the breadth hiding inside the word reggae. One track is driven by a voice recognizable around the world; the next lets instrumental rhythm become the attraction. The Pioneers’ “Su Su Su” follows, then Pat Kelly’s “Dark End Of The Street,” Tommy McCook & The Supersonics’ “Tribute To Rameses,” and Lee “Scratch” Perry & The Upsetters’ “What A Botheration.”

Six tracks in and the record is already shifting between vocal harmony, instrumentals, soul-derived material and productions carrying the personalities of individual studios and producers.

The pace of the set matters. Most tracks barely cross the three-minute mark. Many are closer to two and a half. Fifty recordings fit into roughly two hours and eighteen minutes because these were not designed as long-form album statements. They arrive, establish a rhythm, deliver the song and get out.

That produces a completely different listening sensation from the Trojan Dub collection.

Dub stretches perception by subtraction.

Boss reggae keeps throwing another record onto the turntable.

Roy Shirley actually gives the genre its name inside the sequence with “Dance The Reggay,” while Count Matchuki & Randy’s All Stars bring “Pepper Pot.” Eric “Monty” Morris’ “You’ve Really Got A Hold On Me” sits beside Stranger & Gladdy’s “Pretty Cottage.” The Crystalites contribute “Biafra.” The Young Souls give “Man-A-Wail.” The Tennors offer “Reggae Girl.”

The compilation is not interested in constructing one perfectly uniform sonic identity. It documents a moment when the identity itself was still being worked out.

That instability is part of the fun.

The Maytals’ “Do The Reggay” appears at track seventeen, another record actually naming the emerging music while participating in its creation. Derrick Morgan follows with “Don’t Play That Song.” The Inspirations, Soulmates, Gaylads and Mellotones continue the movement until Side One reaches some increasingly suggestive territory near its end.

The Versatiles provide “Push It In.”

Then Max Romeo arrives with “Wet Dream.”

Ending the first disc there feels almost mischievous.

“Wet Dream” is one of those records where sexual explicitness and an impossibly catchy rhythm refuse to behave like opposites. Whatever respectable boundaries somebody might want popular music to observe are simply ignored for a few minutes.

Flip to Disc Two and Tony Tribe opens with “Red Red Wine.”

Before the song became attached in many listeners’ minds to a later pop-reggae version, this recording already existed inside the early-reggae world. Its placement at the beginning of Disc Two is perfect because it is immediately familiar and slightly disorienting at the same time.

Then the compilation resumes moving.

Derrick Morgan’s “Moon Hop.”

Freddie Notes & The Rudies’ “Shanghai.”

Dandy’s “Reggae In Your Jeggae.”

Owen Gray’s “Girl What You’re Doing To Me.”

Rico & The Family Circle’s “Official.”

The set keeps producing names that either became enormous, remained cult favorites, disappeared into collector culture or survived primarily because labels such as Trojan kept reissuing their recordings.

That is one of the strange powers of a compilation like this.

Fifty tracks flatten commercial hierarchy.

A major hit gets approximately three minutes.

An obscure record gets approximately three minutes.

A historically famous producer gets approximately three minutes.

Somebody whose name a listener has never encountered before gets approximately three minutes.

The sequence temporarily gives everybody equal physical territory.

By the time Disc Two reaches “Morning Sun,” “Do It Nice,” “Spread Joy,” Millie’s “Enoch Power,” Clancy Collins & The Black Diamonds’ “Black Diamonds,” Brother Dan & The Down Town All Stars’ “Everybody Feel Good,” Big L’s “Family Man,” The Coloured Raisins’ “One Way Love” and The Rudies’ “Boss Sound,” the compilation has started to feel less like a greatest-hits package than a crowded street.

People keep entering.

Someone sings.

Someone leaves.

Another rhythm begins.

Winston Francis’ “Honey Don’t Go,” The Jubilee Stompers’ “Luciana,” Ray Martell’s “She Caught The Train” and The Hot Rod All Stars’ “Lick A Pop” carry the set toward one of the most inevitable possible endings.

Symarip.

“Skinhead Moonstomp.”

The track is historically welded to the British audience that embraced this particular strain of reggae, so putting it at number fifty closes the collection by pointing directly toward the culture that helped turn these Jamaican recordings into another kind of British youth music.

But the Oakland Public Library copy adds another historical layer that Trojan could never have designed.

The booklet carries a library processing sticker dated 02/19/2021. Both discs have Oakland Public Library rings around their hubs. Disc One is an enormous field of purple with white lettering; Disc Two is black, again carrying the Trojan helmet and library identification in its center. The booklet has another Oakland Public Library sticker at its upper edge and a large catalog label across the lower portion.

This object has therefore belonged to a public system.

Not metaphorically.

Literally.

Somebody could walk into the Main Library in Oakland, locate a reggae CD, take these fifty recordings home, listen to them and return the same object for somebody else.

That is an interesting continuation of the history represented by Trojan itself.

These recordings originally traveled.

Jamaican music crossed oceans.

Records moved through immigrant communities, specialist shops, sound systems, record labels and British youth culture.

Decades later, the music was compiled again in 2018.

Then this particular physical copy entered another circulation system in Oakland.

A library card replaced the record-store transaction.

The object became temporary property.

Take it home.

Listen.

Bring it back.

Someone else gets a turn.

There is something especially satisfying about seeing a public-library barcode pasted across a collection of music whose history depended so heavily upon circulation.

Records move between countries.

Songs move between communities.

Rhythms move between musicians.

Styles acquire new names.

Recordings disappear and reappear on compilations.

A CD moves between strangers.

Now photographs of that exact library copy appear again inside Private Release.

The original package is still visible underneath every institutional intervention.

So is its wear.

The corners are no longer perfect.

The plastic is marked.

Labels cover parts of the design.

The object has clearly been handled.

None of that weakens it.

It proves that somebody let the thing do its job.

Fifty boss-reggae tracks were never supposed to sit silently inside a jewel case looking collectible.

They were made to move.

So was this copy.

VA - 2018 - This Is Trojan Dub (Thundering Vibrations And Chilled Beats) 2xCD

Trojan Records – TJDCD571  580.61MB FLAC

This particular copy already has a biography before any music starts. The front of the digipak is partially covered by an OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, CALIF / MAIN LIBRARY sticker. Another library classification label sits over the lower-left artwork: MAIN / CD / REGGAE / THIS, with the circular RE category marker pasted over it. Open the package and both discs have OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY / MAIN LIBRARY rings around their hubs. Disc One even has a number written directly onto its turquoise surface in black marker. Turn the package around and another large Oakland Public Library barcode occupies the upper-right corner of the back cover.

This is not a pristine collector copy being photographed immediately after the shrink wrap came off. It is a circulating object. Somebody catalogued it, labeled it, shelved it, checked it out, returned it, handled it, opened it, put the discs into players and sent it back into public circulation again. The scratches and library additions are now physically inseparable from the commercial design.

That feels unusually appropriate for dub.

Dub itself is already a music built around circulation, reuse and transformation. A recording does not necessarily remain one fixed object. Rhythm tracks can be stripped down, voices removed or reduced to fragments, bass and drums pushed forward, instruments suddenly dropped from the mix, echo allowed to repeat into empty space, and an existing song converted into another experience through the mixing desk. The recording becomes material.

This 2018 Trojan Records compilation gathers forty examples across two CDs, running roughly two hours and eighteen minutes. The names printed into the front-cover typography are practically a compressed map of the form: King Tubby, Augustus Pablo, Scientist, Errol Brown, Keith Hudson, The Upsetters, Rupie Edwards, Prince Jammy, The Revolutionaries, Roots Radics and others. Instead of placing one heroic portrait in the center, the design lets the names crowd around a white circle containing THIS IS TROJAN DUB. Producers, musicians, engineers and studio identities become the visual field.

The subtitle at the bottom gets directly to the physical contradiction that makes dub so satisfying:

THUNDERING VIBRATIONS AND CHILLED BEATS.

Heavy and relaxed simultaneously.

That contradiction runs through the entire idea of dub. Bass can be enormous without the music feeling crowded. A rhythm can hit hard while enormous holes remain inside the arrangement. Something disappears and its absence becomes as important as what remains. Echo produces another version of a sound after the original sound has already left.

Disc One begins with King Tubby & The Aggrovators’ “Zion Gate Dub,” followed immediately by The Revolutionaries’ “The Gun Court Dub” and The Upsetters’ “Sipple Dub.” Within the first three tracks, the compilation has already moved among several of the major names responsible for making the studio itself into an instrument.

From there the disc behaves less like a chronological lecture than a long immersion. The Observer All Stars’ “My Time Version Observer Style,” Tommy McCook & The Supersonics’ “I Shave The Barber,” Scientist’s “Blood Dunza Dub,” The Roots Radics’ “Shine Eye Dub,” Sly & The Revolutionaries’ “L.S.D.,” The Sky Nation’s “Merry Dub” and Rupie Edwards All Stars’ “Wandering Dub” keep changing personnel while maintaining the underlying logic of versioning.

The word “version” appearing throughout this world is important. A version does not have to defeat or replace an original. It can coexist beside it.

That idea is almost the opposite of the modern obsession with definitive editions.

Dub asks: what else is inside this recording?

What happens if the voice disappears?

What happens if the bass becomes the center?

What if one guitar chop survives while everything around it falls away?

What if the echo becomes more memorable than the sound that produced it?

The first disc keeps asking those questions through “Queen Of The Minstrel Dub,” “Hurting Inside Version,” “Roots Train Dub,” “Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner Version,” “Tracking Dub,” Prince Jammy & Jackie Mittoo’s “Dark Destroyer Dub,” “Babylon Wrong Dub,” “Sufferer’s Version,” “Forward Home Dub” and “Opposition Dub.”

Twenty tracks and still no requirement that dub settle into one personality.

Disc Two repeats the process with another twenty selections, but the repetition is the point rather than redundancy. Rupie Edwards All Stars open with “Buckshot Dub,” followed by The Techniques All Stars’ “Stalag 17,” Errol Brown’s “Escape Affair,” The Observers’ “Headline,” Sly & The Revolutionaries’ “Collie,” and Augustus Pablo & The Upsetters’ “Babylon Police Thief Dub.”

King Tubby returns with The Aggrovators for “Goodbye Dub.” Witty’s All Stars follow with “Won’t You Come Home Dub.” The Roots Radics appear repeatedly across both discs, including “Scientist In Fine Style” and the final “Communist Dub.” Marcia Griffiths & Errol Brown contribute “Dub In Dreamland.” The Upsetters return with “Tedious Dub.” Keith Hudson & The Soul Syndicate appear with “Man From Shooters Hill.” King Tubby & The Aggrovators return yet again for “The Gorgon Speaks Version.”

That recurrence matters.

This is not forty isolated artists lining up politely for one song each. Names disappear and return. Musicians overlap. Producers overlap. Studio relationships overlap. The same ecosystem keeps reorganizing itself.

The compilation therefore becomes a network rather than a parade.

And then there is the Oakland library copy itself.

A library creates another network.

This copy was not designed to belong permanently to one person. The institution marks it, tracks it and repeatedly sends it away. Somebody checks it out, takes it home, hears King Tubby or Scientist or Augustus Pablo, then returns the same physical object so another person can encounter it.

The music circulates inside a circulating container.

That makes the library stickers beautiful rather than damage.

Collectors can understandably want an untouched cover, but this object has accumulated evidence of use. The Oakland Public Library label partially covering the original artwork tells us something the original packaging never could: this particular copy entered the civic bloodstream of Oakland.

The back cover still contains Trojan’s original statement that this is a 2CD collection featuring forty tracks, accompanied by a sixteen-page booklet with imagery and an essay on the development of dub. Beneath that information is a track list dense enough that the individual titles almost become visual texture. Over part of it sits the library barcode, another information system claiming its own territory on top of the record company’s information system.

Trojan says what the object contains.

The library says where the object belongs.

The barcode says which particular object this is.

The handwritten number on Disc One says somebody had to manage the actual physical thing.

Then Private Release photographs it again and gives the object another context.

That accumulation is more interesting than pretending the CD exists outside history.

The recordings themselves have histories.

Trojan has a history.

Dub has a history of recordings being altered into further recordings.

The compact discs were manufactured in 2018.

This particular set entered the Oakland Public Library.

Hands moved it around.

The discs acquired institutional markings.

Now the same copy appears again as photographs attached to a downloadable archive on a Private Release post.

Nothing about that process is especially clean.

That is exactly why it is worth preserving.

A perfectly untouched digital file can reproduce the audio information, but it cannot reproduce this object’s trip through the world.

The Oakland Public Library stickers cannot be downloaded in FLAC.

The handwriting cannot be extracted as a bonus track.

The barcode does not alter the bass.

Yet all of those things belong to what this particular copy became.

Dub already understands that an original recording can contain further possibilities.

This library copy demonstrates the same principle physically.

One object.

Multiple lives.

Another version.

 

Military Position - 2019 - A Woman's Work Is Never Done C30

Originally posted Oct 2, 2019 5:06PM

Private Release – none  247.19MB FLAC

There is something immediately loaded in the phrase “a woman’s work is never done.” It sounds domestic, familiar, almost harmless, the kind of inherited saying that can pass through generations without anybody stopping to examine what it actually assumes. Work belongs to women. Responsibility continues after everybody else is finished. The burden is ordinary enough to become invisible. Military Position takes that familiar sentence and places it inside industrial and power electronics, where repetition, pressure, degradation, confrontation and endurance can make the phrase feel considerably less quaint.

The cassette originally appeared through No Rent Records as a C30, six pieces divided evenly across two sides: “Roses Are Red,” “Baby Let’s Go” and “Touch Me” on Side A, followed by “We Have A Problem,” “Worthless” and “Not That Kind Of Girl” on Side B. The sequence alone moves through an unsettling vocabulary. It begins with the childhood familiarity of “Roses Are Red,” passes into invitation with “Baby Let’s Go,” then physical contact with “Touch Me.” Flip the tape and the language changes. Something has gone wrong. There is a problem. Worth enters through negation. Then identity itself becomes a refusal: not that kind of girl.

Those titles can almost be read as fragments of one conversation whose power keeps shifting.

“Roses Are Red” carries the residue of a nursery rhyme, something learned young enough that its structure becomes automatic. Roses are red, violets are blue. The listener already knows what kind of sentence is supposed to follow. That predictability matters when placed inside a record dealing with expectations imposed upon women. Cultural instruction often works the same way. A form is supplied before the individual has decided whether they want to inhabit it.

“Baby Let’s Go” sounds casual until its position beside the other titles makes the invitation unstable. Who is asking? Who decides where to go? What happens when invitation becomes expectation? The words contain no answer. They simply move the sequence toward “Touch Me,” where distance disappears completely.

“Touch Me” is credited here as originating with Lille Roger, but inside this program the title acquires a different weight because it arrives at the end of a side already moving from formula to invitation to physicality. Touch can be affection, desire, instruction, demand, reassurance, violation or some unstable combination depending upon context. The words themselves are insufficient. Intent and consent create the meaning.

That uncertainty becomes considerably less abstract when considered alongside Harriet K. Morgan’s own description of the record. Morgan has explicitly described it as being about sexual assault and its effects on her life. She has spoken about the body becoming hardened protection and about exhaustion with the male gaze. That information does not transform the record into a puzzle that can suddenly be solved correctly. It does, however, remove the comfortable possibility that the sexual language is merely decorative transgression.

Industrial and power electronics have long used sexuality, domination, bodily violence and taboo as aesthetic material. Military Position complicates that inheritance by turning the gaze back toward the conditions producing it. The imagery of submission or degradation cannot automatically be assumed to celebrate submission or degradation. Something can be presented because it is being examined, inhabited, mocked, survived, rejected or converted into a form of confrontation.

That is where Side B becomes especially severe.

“We Have A Problem” is almost bureaucratic language. It sounds like the point where an uncomfortable situation is finally acknowledged, but even that phrasing keeps emotional distance. Nobody says what the problem is. Nobody says who caused it. The sentence could belong to a relationship, an institution, a workplace, a family, a police report or an emergency. Its vagueness makes it useful because structures often become visible first through the simple recognition that something is wrong.

Then comes “Worthless.”

One word can contain an entire mechanism of control. Worth is assigned externally constantly: physical attractiveness, sexuality, youth, usefulness, obedience, desirability, labor, productivity. Morgan has discussed the way female musicians can be judged through appearance differently from men, particularly the assumption that female worth remains tied to being looked at. “Worthless” therefore does not need to function as a statement of self-definition. It can just as easily expose the language used to diminish somebody.

The final title, “Not That Kind Of Girl,” is the most interesting because it sounds simultaneously defensive, judgmental and resistant. It is a sentence historically used to organize women into categories. Good girl. Bad girl. Respectable girl. Easy girl. The kind you marry. The kind you sleep with. The kind you believe. The kind you blame. Yet saying “not that kind of girl” can also become refusal. A category is offered and somebody declines to enter it.

The cassette ends there rather than supplying a cleaner answer.

That is appropriate because Morgan has described Military Position itself as protest, specifically a protest against the experience and expectations of being female in Australia. The project’s aggression therefore has a direction beyond simple sonic extremity. Rage is not merely an aesthetic texture. It can be a response to being expected to absorb, perform, endure and remain visually acceptable while doing it.

The original physical edition intensifies that tension through its own controlled presentation. No Rent issued one hundred professionally duplicated copies, ten accompanied by a Polaroid. The original green-toned artwork presents a female figure alongside a knotted or entangled graphic form, while the title sits plainly enough that the hostility has to emerge from the relationship between image, language and sound rather than from conventional shock packaging.

And now the recording enters another object through Private Release.

That matters differently.

A Private Release version does not have to replace the No Rent edition or pretend to become an official historical artifact. It represents another encounter with the recording. The source passes through another person’s room, another cassette shell, another set of images and another moment in time. The black-and-white PRIVATE RELEASE tag marks that movement without claiming authorship of Morgan’s experience.

That distinction is important with material this personal. The recording belongs to its maker. The reaction belongs to the listener. A reproduced cassette can preserve the space where those two things meet without pretending they are identical.

That is one reason this fits unusually well among these Private Release objects. The project repeatedly takes existing music and asks what happens when it is physically encountered again, separated from its original commercial life and placed into another chain of relationships. A photograph made by somebody else touches a recording made by somebody else, handled and assembled by another person again. Meaning keeps passing through people without ever becoming exclusively owned by any one of them.

“A woman’s work is never done” can therefore keep changing depending upon who encounters it.

As an old phrase, it can sound resigned.

As an album title, it becomes accusatory.

Inside Military Position, it becomes pressure.

Inside an archive years later, it becomes evidence that somebody made that pressure audible and somebody else considered it important enough to keep moving through the world.

The work remains unfinished.

Funkadelic - 2005 - Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow

Westbound Records – WBCD 772001  281.36MB FLAC

This copy of Free Your Mind...And Your Ass Will Follow has lived at least two completely different lives. It began as Westbound Records' 2005 CD edition of Funkadelic's second album. At some point it entered the Oakland Public Library system, where it acquired a barcode, classification labels, an RFID tag and the other machinery required to make a public object circulate. Now it has been removed from that system, ripped to FLAC and released again.

The library additions are impossible to separate from the artwork. A white OAKLAND PUBLIC LIBRARY, CAEIF / MAIN LIBRARY sticker crosses the upper part of the front image. Another label identifies it as MAIN / CD / RB / FUNKADELI, with the final letters sacrificed to the available space. A large Bibliotheca RFID tag covers the lower right. Beneath all that institutional equipment is the 2005 package design: a woman in a black Funkadelic shirt stretched horizontally across a worn blue field, her arms opened so widely that the body becomes almost architectural. The title is pushed around the edges instead of being allowed a clean central position.

This is a funny object to find inside a library. Free your mind, says the record. Here is your barcode, says the library.

That is not really a contradiction. A library exists by attaching control systems to things so those things can move among people. The barcode does not imprison the disc. It records circulation. The RFID tag permits the object to leave the building and return. Even the clipped category, RB, is an attempt to give a place to music that has always made categories feel inadequate.

The open case makes the original visual joke clearer. The woman's body continues across the left panel while the disc turns bodies into a wheel. Repeated female figures radiate from the center in black, green, purple, red and blue, their extended limbs becoming spokes. The Oakland Public Library has placed another circular MAIN LIBRARY label around the hub, accidentally completing the composition. A rectangular number sticker cuts across the upper portion of the disc. Funkadelic's psychedelic multiplication and the library's inventory system occupy the same circle.

The package has been used. The clear jewel case is scratched and cracked, especially near the upper left of the rear panel, and the plastic catches light along its edges. These marks belong in the photograph. A library copy is not supposed to remain untouched. Every abrasion is evidence that somebody checked it out, carried it away, played it and brought it back. The condition is part of the edition's history rather than damage that photography needs to hide.

The rear insert calls this "the mindblowing second album from George Clinton's warped band of brothers, plus four bonus tracks." Underneath the sales language sits the original six-song program: the ten-minute title track, "Friday Night, August 14th," "Funky Dollar Bill," "I Wanna Know If It's Good to You?," "Some More" and "Eulogy and Light." Four additions follow: "Fish, Chips and Sweat," a 2005 radio advert, the 1970 single version of "I Wanna Know If It's Good to You" and its instrumental version. The package credits George Clinton as producer, Dean Rudland for compilation, notes and research, Duncan Cowell at Sound Mastering Ltd, and a new 2005 package and CD design by quazee.com.

George Clinton described the sessions as an attempt to find out whether Funkadelic could make an entire album while everybody was tripping on acid. The result does not behave like a sequence of neatly separated studio constructions. The title track lasts more than ten minutes and feels built from occupation rather than progression. Voices, guitar, rhythm and studio effects crowd the same mental space until repetition stops measuring time. The music does not patiently persuade the listener to loosen up. It establishes the altered condition first and leaves the listener to catch up.

"Friday Night, August 14th" pulls that condition into a heavier song form, while "Funky Dollar Bill" makes the album's distrust of money physically danceable. Funkadelic could place suspicion, pleasure and ugliness inside the same groove without asking one of them to win. "I Wanna Know If It's Good to You?" turns desire into an extended question. "Some More" is exactly the sort of title this album would give a piece that refuses elaborate explanation. Then "Eulogy and Light" closes the original LP by allowing speech, ritual and distortion to replace any conventional resolution. The album does not come down. It changes the language of the trip.

The downloaded archive contains ten stereo FLAC files at 16-bit / 44.1 kHz and runs 41:49.52. Every track carries an AccurateRip result marked accurate at confidence 18, so this is a verified CD extraction rather than an uncertain analog transfer. The files were encoded with dBpoweramp and FLAC 1.5.0. Their tags identify the source as "CD (Lossless)," although the embedded catalog number is 212 while the photographed package is WBCD 772001. That small disagreement is worth preserving. Metadata describes a recording according to one system; the physical object supplies another identifier.

The mastering is loud. Across the six album tracks, measured integrated loudness ranges from approximately -6.6 to -10.0 LUFS, and several reconstructed true peaks cross 0 dBFS. "Funky Dollar Bill" reaches about +0.5 dBTP; "Fish, Chips and Sweat" reaches about +0.6; the two final bonus cuts reach about +1.1. This is not a timid digital presentation. The 2005 mastering pushes the music toward the front of the available space.

It does not flatten every piece into the same shape. "Eulogy and Light" is the quietest and most dynamically variable album track at roughly -10.0 LUFS with a loudness range near 7.9 LU. "Some More" also moves considerably more than the title track, whose ten minutes measure around -8.6 LUFS with a relatively tight 3.2 LU range. The title piece therefore sustains its pressure over a long span, while the end of the original album opens and contracts more dramatically.

Stereo space changes across the edition too. The first six tracks contain substantial left-right difference information, particularly the title track and "I Wanna Know If It's Good to You?" The extras become progressively narrower. "Fish, Chips and Sweat" is strongly centered. The radio advertisement is effectively dual mono, exactly as the rear insert's "Stereo except * Mono" notice promises. The single and instrumental versions of "I Wanna Know" are also nearly mono. The bonus section therefore moves backward toward the compact spatial image of a 1970 single even while the 2005 CD adds it to a modern digital program.

There is one useful correction hidden in the physical package. The final FLAC is named "Unknown Track," but its duration is 3:12, exactly matching the rear insert's listed instrumental version of "I Wanna Know If It's Good to You." The object solves the file's uncertainty. This is why photographs belong beside audio. A rip preserves sound and carries metadata, but it does not automatically understand everything it contains.

The printed track times and measured files differ by a few seconds on almost every selection, probably because the files retain boundaries, fades or gaps not counted the same way on the package. Again, neither version needs to be treated as a mistake. One is printed catalog information. The other is the actual duration of this extraction.

A 1970 album became a 2005 remaster, then an Oakland library object, then ten verified FLAC files, then a Private Release post. Each stage added something: bonus material, louder mastering, labels, scratches, circulation history, metadata and finally another route outward. The most appropriate thing about this copy may be that it was never private for very long. It was built to move from one mind to another.

Free your mind.