Subversion – Anomaly Index

The Gerogerigegege – 不安な演奏 [Anxious Performance] 10xCD box (Urashima, 2020)

Listed for over one hundred Euros apiece, this 10-CD set comes in a custom wooden box, and is one of the most preposterous releases in the Gerogerigegege catalogue — which is saying a lot.

The Gerogerigegege is the project of Toyko residents Juntaro Yamanouchi and Gero 30 (a.k.a. Tetsuya Endoh), who have been performing together since 1985. In the past, they were famous for their live performances, in which Endoh, who is an exhibitionist, would masturbate and perform other indecent acts on stage — a spectacle all the more noteworthy given that, when they met, Yamanouchi was apparently just 18 years old, whereas Endoh was in his forties. Fittingly, these first performances took place largely in BDSM clubs.

After releasing a very lo-fi debut tape on Merzbow’s ZSF Produkt label — a collage of guitar noise narrowly ranging from feedback to squall — Yamanouchi started up his own Vis à Vis Audio Arts label, which released the Senzuri Champion LP. That release captured the core Gerogerigegege aesthetic: there is feedback noise, sure, but also a rhythm section, which allows them newly to pound out noisy punk assaults. The release ends with a final jam, in which Endoh is heard moaning in onanistic pleasure over a funky beat.

That aesthetic would be amplified with further exploits, with many critics encapsulating the Gerogerigegege concept with one word: obscene. Indeed, the band’s name is reportedly an onomatopoeia for the sound of someone vomiting and discharging diarrhea at the same time. And yet Gerogerigegege’s approach to obscenity is just as much about subversion as it is perversion. Showa, the follow up to Senzuri Champion, starts with a fuzzy recording of the Japanese anthem before transitioning into 30 minutes of porn audio; the cover image is a profile photo of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito. Ai-Jin, a 1988 flexi disc, is a recording of Yamanouchi “singing” over a pop song song by one of Taiwan’s most famous singers, Teresa Teng. (Notably, though 2000 copies were reportedly pressed, almost all of them were burned in a performance at Enoshima Beach, meaning surviving discs sell for hundreds of dollars to collectors.) And 1993’s 0 (Zero) Song EP was a clear flexi disc with no grooves on it: its liner notes insist that “silence is the best music” and instruct the listener to play at “75 rpm or any speed.”

To contextualize this combination of perversion and subversion, look to Yamanouchi’s 1992 interview in RRRecords’ RRReport magazine, which has been transcribed online. There he identifies as a gay man who is in support of gay rights, but not prone to political action. He reflects on the absence of a pride movement in Japan, and argues that “If they try to hide who they are and to avoid associating with straight people, it is kind of natural that they are discriminated and looked down.” Elsewhere, after describing Gerogerigegege performances in which the two of them them consumed one another’s feces as middle-aged onlookers masturbated along, he boils the band’s ethic down to two ideas: “Do not copy others” and “Human feelings.” Aware of Japan’s stigma around queerness, but seemingly comfortable with his own sexuality, Yamanouchi’s goal for The Gerogerigegege appears to involve both iconoclasm and unfiltered self-expression.

The band’s most famous record, Tokyo Anal Dynamite, came out in 1990. Despite its name, it is among the more conventional of Gerogerigegege’s records, albeit perhaps that isn’t saying much: in approximately 40 minutes, the band fits in seventy-five songs. Each track starts with a “1-2-3-4!” count-off and then descends into a chaotic blast of noise-punk. The sound was inspired, as Yamanouchi says in a 2001 interview, by the noisecore scene, an obscure international genre devoted to short blasts of guitar/drum/vocal noise. Specifically, he describes being enamoured with a rare 1986 demo tape by Australian band Seven Minutes of Nausea, which crams in 102 tracks.

Seven Minutes of Nausea’s *Karen’s Edge* demo from 1986. (Source: Discogs)

Mysteriously, The Gerogerigegege disappeared in 2001, not to reappear until 2016, when a flurry of releases followed. It is unclear if Endoh is still contributing to the project (in a 2001 interview, he was reportedly ill in hospital), though Yamanouchi has issued a characteristic stream of noise assaults and concept records.

Enter, then, the behemoth 不安な演奏 set, whose title translates to Anxious Performance. This is ten CDs’ worth of audio culled from dusty old “ero-tapes”: pornographic audio recordings of men and women engaged in explicit activities. These cassettes were reportedly sold primarily in the sixties through the eighties in the back corners of adult bookstores. According to an essay written by Eiji Yaginuma for a related Gerogerigegege release, these “dark tapes” often featured hand-written labels and were frequently advertised as having been recorded surreptitiously in private locations. In some cases, they were referred to as “eavesdropping” tapes for this purpose.

Here, The Gerogerigegege presents 10 CDs worth of these tapes, seemingly unaltered. The audio is just tape hiss and people’s voices, which are often indistinct due either to the poor recording conditions or the age of the source material.

The box set’s name is borrowed from the title of a book by Seicho Matsumoto, a Japanese detective fiction author very popular in the sixties and seventies. (It appears that the book’s title is more commonly translated as Uneasy Performance and has yet to be translated to English.) The novel itself tells the story of a magazine editor who is investigating several “eavesdropping” tapes recorded at a “love hotel,” only to discover that one of the recordings seems to capture a murder being planned.

As a result of the degraded audio and disembodied voices, there is little about these recordings that is erotic. (I will concede that I have only listened to parts of two tracks.) Instead, they feel dirty and more than a little eerie. Yaginuma, writing about another similar release in the Gerogerigegege discography, observes that the original ero-tapes were not designed to be art; in fact they were deliberately artless. “…there is no such thing as ‘sophistication’ in the existence of the ero cassette,” he writes. “It is simply a vulgar, disreputable, and indecent project that attracts viewers and listeners alike. It is an act of creation that is not pursued, improved, or aimed at in any way, but simply made because it was thought that customers might bite, because it would sell.” For Yaginuma, it was this directness — or, as he puts it, “barbaric”-ness — that makes it such a pure form of expression.

Indeed, the barbaric candidness of these obscure source cassettes is what makes this such a disquieting listen, what Yaginuma refers to as “the creepiness and stench that can appear only because there is no artifice, intentional design, manipulation of information, or any unnaturalness at all.”

Source: Urashima website (https://www.urashima.it/ushi015.html)

The Gerogerigegege would follow this box set up with a vinyl “reissue” entitled “Naomi’s Masturbation and Wakakusa Dormitory Guide,” which was yet another untouched dub of an old “ero-tape,” this one featuring the sounds of women masturbating. Reportedly, he had obtained this tape decades ago, and, upon returning to an erotic bookshop in search for cover artwork, was shocked to find an advertisement in an old pornographic magazine for the exact same (deeply esoteric) tape.

Only 300 copies of the 不安な演奏 box were produced, and they are already sold out from the source. Surely, many have fallen into the hands of collectors who are conscious that other limited edition Gerogerigegege releases now sell for hundreds of dollars. Yet, this is an undeniably true realization of the band’s vision. It is obscene, discomforting, and virtually impossible to take in.

This release was originally available on the Urashima website.

Nocturnal Emissions – Blasphemous Rumours CD (Staalplaat, 1992)

“I thought, ‘What the hell have you done?'”

In 1992, a CD was released that was contained inside a metal box filled with salt. That alone was unusual, but the story behind it was even more unlikely.

Nigel Ayers is the main mind behind the long-running experimental music act Nocturnal Emissions, a stalwart figure on the underground music scene. In the early 90s, before Blasphemous Rumours came out, he was already an established figure, but times were tight. “I was living very preciously, struggling with debt, rent, food, and pretty desperate really,” he explains to me. “I didn’t have any other income other than music. I was working solo by then, and very focused on creating music and visual art, and working very hard at it.”

The year prior, Ayers had released the infamous Mouth of Babes, which was recorded exclusively using infant “singers” — recordings of babies that were sampled, looped, and collaged into oblivion, the result imbued with a sinister quality. Each copy came inside an (unused) infant diaper.

Mouth of Babes’ diaper cover. (Source: Discogs)

He had also done Magnetizdat, a series of audio zines on cassette that explored unusual religious sects, collaging audio produced by strange religious groups. The occult samples came from tapes obtained through his international mail art network. Back then, he explains, you could put out a request for cassettes on a certain topic, and people around the world would send you relevant items.

Insert for Magnetizdat 4: Serpent At Your Breast (Source: Discogs)

Amid this productive period, Staalplaat, a record store and label based out of Amsterdam, pitched the idea of releasing the next Nocturnal Emissions CD in a metal tin. But there was a detail they didn’t mention in advance: the tins would be filled with table salt.

“Staalplaat were very odd the way they went about things,” Ayers tells me. “They said they’re going to put it out in a steel container. So I say, oh yeah, alright.” It was only when his artist copy turned up in the mail that he discovered the full concept and was left to contemplate Staalplaat’s intentions. Perhaps the goal was for the salt crystals to abrade the surface of the CD, adding a bit of randomness to the audio? Or maybe the hope was that the CD would physically decay over time?

Ironically, because Ayers was expecting a metal box, he themed the music around the idea of permanence and sturdiness, trying to create “music that stands the test of time.” And although the salt did not cause the CD to decay, it did catalyze the metal box’s rusting process. “What happens is the packaging rusts away,” he describes. “There’s a sensational one from Brazil that looks like there’s some kind of moss or lifeform growing on it.” He tells me that it took about six months for copies to rust so extensively that they were trapped shut.

One owner’s copy of *Blasphemous Rumours*, rusted to oblivion (Source: Nigel Ayers)

Ayers didn’t learn the full story behind Blasphemous Rumours until just recently, when Frans de Waard published his memoir of working at Staalplaat. Titled This Is Supposed To Be a Record Label, that book tells a number of anecdotes about the controversial label, including the tale of this disc.

As the story goes, the Staalplaat crew knew the experimental composer Tom Recchion, who had been involved in designing the packaging for the 1989 film, Batman, whose Prince-oriented soundtrack came in a special metal canister. Through Recchion, they connected with the company that produced the cans and were quoted a minimum order of 2000 units. “Since we had to buy 2000 cans, we’d have to use them for something we knew would sell,” De Waard explains. They chose Ayers because he was a well-known artist, then pulled their prank. “We filled 1000 cans with salt that we bought at the supermarket. Our entire premises became extremely dry and it made us very thirsty. We sealed the tins with tape we’d had specially made.”

But before he learned all the back story — on the day that his copy arrived in the mail — his immediate reaction was more visceral. “I thought, ‘What the hell have you done?'”

Amsterdam being notorious for its lax drug rules, he wondered if the crystalline powder might have been a reference to narcotics, or perhaps to Amsterdam’s moisture problem. “It’s a very Amsterdam thing to do. In our pubs they put sawdust on the floor, in Amsterdam they put salt on the floors to absorb the moisture… I was used to their sort of pranksterish ways at Staalplaat. I thought, ‘Right, okay, I put all this work into this CD and it’s going to be ruined in this salt. Put it down to experience,'” he laughs.

Indeed, since he was originally intending to produce a work of art that would convey permanence, he had put a lot of work into Blasphemous Rumours‘ audio. Ayers’ typical production style is to make acoustic recordings, then process them electronically. “It might be musique concrete, or it might be played music. But it all starts off with a real world source.”

For Rumours, he used recordings he had made of oboist/flautist Charlotte Bill, a Manchester-based musician and filmmaker. That source audio was recorded to a Greengate sampler then channeled to a reel-to-reel recorder.

Had he known what Staalplaat had in mind, he tells me he would have taken things in an entirely different direction. “I would have done something with salt, for a start. I would have worked with salt as a physical medium, the qualities of salt. Dealt with the idea of eroded sands — and if the idea was that it was to decompose the record, then I’d look at music that would rearrange and decompose. It would have that in mind when I created it.

“As far as it went, I would have been happier had Staalplaat told me that they were going to put it in a package that was going to decompose. Because I had been discussing that sort of idea with Ben Ponton of (fellow experimental group) :zoviet*france:. We were discussing putting a CD out in a Petri dish and various ideas that never came to fruition.” That idea, a play on Ayers’ own Sterile Records label, was to attach a record to a sterile Petri dish, which would, when opened, pick up organisms from the air and organically bloom. (In fact, the CD art on Blasphemous Rumours was an image of mould in a Petri dish, submitted by Ayers as a remnant of this idea).

The CD art for Blasphemous Rumours, depicting mould in a Petri dish (Source: Nigel Ayers)

For Ayers, this Staalplaat prank was somewhat against his ethic of artistic creation. “I do think that artists and curators ought to take one another into consideration, take their feelings into consideration.”

Ayers believes that artistic ideas are not the miraculous work of auteurs, but instead the result of people working together. “In creating art, it doesn’t always go smoothly from some sort of artist’s genius vision. Most of my ideas have come up from the people I live with, the unsung people, my partner, my wife, chatting with friends…”

He raises Marcel Duchamp, whose famous readymade artpiece, Fountain — a ass-manufactured urinal intended to be exhibited in a gallery, as a lampoon of high-art elitism — is speculated to have been the work of a fellow avant-garde artist named Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

Blasphemous Rumours is a bit of an anomaly as a piece of art, since it came about as a result of imperfect communication. Ayers knew only part of the story, and his audio reflects only a partial picture of the overall concept. In a sense, it is a microcosm of the dynamics of real-life human interactions, where misunderstandings are germane. Still, for Ayers, it would have been nice to have been told about the payoff in advance.

—

There is a funny postscript to the Blasphemous Rumours story. “Amsterdam is under sea level, it’s all based on canals. So [Staalplaat’s basement-level record store] was damp. They were storing these metal boxes full of salt in this damp basement. I think they sold quite well, but after awhile they moved the store to Berlin, and they called me up and said, ‘Oh we’ve got a few hundred of these left, do you want to buy them?'”

“I said no thanks.”

Thanks to Nigel Ayers for the interview, as well as Frans de Waard for communicating via email.

Kathy McGinty – Kathy McGinty Collectors Edition CD (Hamburger Records, 2005)

“I had to be fast with the buttons to make the conversation seem natural, but then I’d realize there would be a guy, you know, going at it on the other end.”

When I was in high school, one of my favourite albums was Kathy McGinty, which quickly became a hit among my friends. A cult phenomenon that first spread via the Aquarius Records shop and mail order, it had an irresistible concept. The ever-excitable Kathy McGinty prowled for love-hungry men in chat rooms, luring them with sexy talk and asking them to call her on the phone. When they did, they met “Kathy,” who was nothing more than a Yamaha sampler that rotated through a handful of phrases, sexy and not. The sampler was manned by Derek Erdman, and featured the vocal talents of his friend, Julia Rickert. Kathy’s treasury of expressions ranged from the mundane (“This is Kathy,” “So, what’s up?”) to the outrageous (“Your dick tastes like bacon,” “Taco Bell tastes so good,” “I think I might be having a miscarriage”), with not much in between. The men would eventually figure out the gambit, but not before a few minutes of awkward back-and-forth.

Derek Erdman’s personal copy of *Kathy*.

I speak with Derek Erdman by email to learn more about this legendary disc.

“Julia and I were roommates, living in a neighborhood that was a utopia at the time,” he tells me. “It was slightly desolate on the outskirts of downtown Chicago, and a lot of our friends were living nearby, so it was a fertile time for doing things. I can’t really think of a reason that Kathy happened other than boredom. I was into the internet then — 2002 or so — so I spent a lot of time on it. Julia didn’t care so much about it, she watched a lot of Passions and Family Feud. I clearly remember her being very critical that the first two rounds of Feud didn’t matter at all; if they won only the third round, that family would take it all.”

Erdman’s first forays into the exploitation of male desperation were low-tech. “I used to place local ads for people to show up to have sex, but I’d give them the address to the house across the street,” he remembers. “I’d tell them to honk their car horn and yell for Tammy because the doorbell was broken. I’d ask them to bring eggs or a gallon of milk as a nice gesture. Dudes would show up in groups with milk yelling for Tammy, and see others doing the same. Truly awful stuff.”

At the time, he was spending a lot of time in chat rooms, “pretending to be somebody that I wasn’t, probably acting like a jerk.” Since he also was a lifelong enthusiast of prank calls, it was only a matter of time before he merged the two interests. At first, this involved pretending to be a woman and instructing men to call the house to leave sexy messages on an answering machine – promising to call them back if they were “sexy enough.” (Some of these voicemails ended up on the CD).

Erdman says that, when these calls started coming through to their answering machine, they were impossible for Rickert to ignore. “It was her idea to interact with them in a way that we wouldn’t actually have to, and Kathy was born. I had a Yahama SU-10 sampler (still do!), and we programmed the sayings into it, spliced some wires to a phone, and away we went.”

Schematic of the Kathy McGinty apparatus, drawn up by Derek Erdman.

Some of those samples are classics, including lines like “You sound like a child molester!” and “I think you might be racist.” Erdman says they were the result of inspired improvisation. “Julia and I came up with them on the fly, going for whatever would be the most jarring while callers were all worked up. It’s funny, ‘You sound like a child molester’ elicited a vague response, but when you’d call somebody racist, they didn’t like that at all. ‘I think you might be racist’ is such a funny thing to say, like the sex talk gave Kathy some clues to their racism.”

Finding men was hardly a challenge. “I’m sure we went for whatever chat rooms seemed the most explicit, ‘creeps for teens’ or whatever. There was no nuance to it whatsoever. We’d get right in a room and say something like, ‘Who wants to phone bang?’ and we’d get five takers right away. I have no idea what we called ourselves. Probably teen_for_creeps or something similar.”

Erdman says he was at a place in his life where he wasn’t worried about giving away his phone number or being traced. “What were people going to do, come to our apartment and admit to being a sex joke?” he pontificates. “This was right around the time when I first got a cell phone, so the landline was treated as a castoff. I hardly ever answered it seriously. The prefix was 666, I still remember the whole number.”

The tape recorder used to commit Kathy’s calls on tape. (Source: Derek Erdman)

I asked Erdman to paint a picture of what it was like handling those calls. “[It was] usually late at night, usually just the two of us huddled around a beige 1980s Bell Systems phone on a red dining room table. I was usually the one to control the sampler, because it was a hassle to cycle through four banks of samples. There are 12 buttons on that sampler, so you’d use them up pretty fast. Especially with time buying responses. We figured out pretty early that we’d need something like, ‘Sorry, I’m on speaker phone so I can touch myself’ or ‘Hold on a second.’ I needed that just to catch up sometimes. I had to be fast with the buttons to make the conversation seem natural, but then I’d realize there would be a guy, you know, going at it on the other end.”

On one occasion, one of those men “finished” before giving up on the call, something that apparently left Erdman with a bit of a stomach ache.

Sometimes, callers “finished” before Erdman and Rickert had a chance to alienate them.

One of Erdman’s favourite calls is “Very Large Hands.” On that track, the caller is immediately suspicious about Kathy’s phone, then cracks up and asks if the audio clips are being transmitted via computer or a keyboard. He then can’t stop laughing as Kathy commands him to “suck the shit out of my ass” and “drink my cum, fuckface!” Another Erdman fave is “I Have Somebody Else in the House,” in which a whispering caller stays on the line for over six minutes, persisting through Kathy’s cycle of absurdities (“I wanna jam my thumb in your dick hole,” “I can’t feel your dick, it must be teeny”), even when she starts speaking in reverse and a man’s voice blurts out “Kathy Robot version 2.1.”

These calls have left an indelible impression on Erdman. “I can still hear their voices echoing in my head,” he says. “They’re kind of like boyfriends of mine, in a way!”

The physical Kathy McGinty release started off life as a homemade CD-R. Erdman says that this disc was first championed by the San Franscico shop Aquarius Records, whom he commends for their honest business ethic and commitment to promoting Kathy. As that CD-R was selling like hotcakes, he learned that Kathy had been bootlegged and was being peddled at stores in Los Angeles. Michael Sheppard, who also put out the infamous Celebrities at their Worst on the Mad Deadly Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God label, was responsible. “What a stupid thing to bootleg,” Erdman says. “But, also, he probably thought it was just an impossibly obscure thing that nobody would find out about. Also, the first versions we made were so homemade looking, why not just make your own? I guess that sort of makes sense.

“I think we had a phone conversation with Michael and he agreed to stop selling them and also send us money, but he never did. I really liked those other CDs that he did, I can see the connection to what he was selling with those and what McGinty was, so really, it makes sense. That Van Morrison CD is a revelation to listen to. ‘Want a Danish’ especially!”

Erdman also mentions setting a modem to call Sheppard’s 1-800 number on repeat “for a week straight,” but it’s hard to know if he’s being serious.

We discovered, in conducting this interview and browsing through Discogs, that someone also did a cassette bootleg at one point. Erdman also mentioned that an indie record compilation used one of the calls between songs without permission. And a band called Bell sampled it without permission on an album that came out on Soul Jazz Records. “We asked them to give us some money and went to Haiti with it,” he tells me, possibly joking. “Ethically questionable on our part, because we didn’t have permission from the callers.”

Erdman eventually pressed Kathy in an edition of 2000 professional CDs. He put it out on his own label, Hamburger Records, which was named after his “lofty house” at the time, which he dubbed Gallery Hamburger.

There were actually two releases on Hamburger Records; in addition to Kathy, there was a disc called 75 Voicemail Messages, by Simone Waters. “Simone Waters (not her real name) was a girl I dated briefly, I really liked her and she was waaaaay out of my league,” he says. “She used to call me way too much and leave messages, and they all sounded EXACTLY the same. So that CD is that. Probably so dumb that it shouldn’t exist. Very disappointing for fans of McGinty.” (He says now that he thinks this was a mean thing to do.)

Yet Kathy and Simone were hardly Erdman’s only forays into telephony. “I was a MAJOR prank caller as a kid — and, uh, adult,” he says. “Calling strangers screaming, anything non-sequitur, etc. I’m a huge fan of Longmont Potion Castle, Tube Bar, & the Screamer.” There are some other prank calls up on his website. He also ran a 24/7 psychic hotline for ten years:

“Derek Erdman’s FREE PSYCHIC HOTLINE, call 24/7 (206) 324 6276 for a pre-recorded message or a live psychic. Pre-recorded message changes weekly and includes upcoming celebrity news, impending disasters, lucky lottery numbers & other information. Talk to a live psychic about any subject that you desire. ABSOLUTELY FREE.”

Erdman learned, through Aquarius Records, that both Dan the Automator and Matt Groening had bought copies of Kathy and liked them – something he is rightly proud of.

The Yamaha sampler used to give life to Kathy. (Source: Derek Erdman)

Today, Kathy is a fond memory, although not one that he returns to often. “I don’t think about it much, but it is a funny thing we made a long time ago. It seems kind of early internet to me. Kathy is definitely more of a character, not a reflection of us, and she said some stuff that there’s no way we’d say now. I guess that comes with age, self censorship or empathy for other people in the world. It’s unfortunate in a way that I wouldn’t make something like these days, but I guess that’s a part of growing up. And Taco Bell does taste ‘sooooo good.’”

He does offer a teaser for passionate Kathy McGinty fans, however. He still has the old tapes in a box in the basement, and he estimates that there are about 30 minutes of calls that weren’t included on the original CD. He figures that the best calls are all included on the CD, thanks to Rickert’s curatorial discretion. But he’s happy to send the rest of the tapes to anyone who wants to digitize them…

—

Thanks to Derek Erdman for the interview. Visit Derek’s website, where you can learn about his paintings and various other exploits.

Various Artists – Handle With Care (Sabotage Recordings, 1996)

Sabotage Recordings was an electronic music label run by Robert Jelinek from 1995 until 1999, at which point its remaining inventory was melted down and used for the dance floor at Vienna’s nightclub, Flex. As that stunt might suggest, apart from releasing electronic music of various stripes, Sabotage also acted as a form of conceptual collective known for insidious pranks.

Jelinek and co. have concocted several past social experiments. Once, they concealed microphones in a private members club and broadcast the conversations publicly via speakers posted outside the building. On another occasion, they swapped out the guided-tour audio for an exhibition at a local art museum with audio about various art heists. They also once replaced the telephone book in a phone booth in Linz, Germany with ones from Linz, Austria.

The Sabotage Recordings label has also been home to its fair share of experiments. One particularly memorable occasion was a compilation, Handle With Care, which came out in 1996.

The back tray insert, complete with subtle warning regarding the virus.

Featuring a few artists affiliated with Sabotage and some one-offs (Zink and Line, for example, were obscure pseudonyms of a producer named Markus Brand), Handle With Care was, by Jelinek’s description, “very repetitive, loop-like” electronic music. What was interesting about it was that it came booby-trapped with a “friendly virus” which, when played in a CD-ROM drive, prevented the listener from opening the drive up to remove the CD. According to Jelinek, this virus was created by “local hackers from the Chaos Club Berlin” and was set to deploy once the first track was played. He also tells me the only way to rescue the CD was to find and trigger the manual release button on one’s CD-ROM drive. “There was no menu, no manual, no preparation,” he explains. “Program started automatically.”

Jelinek compares this booby-trapped CD to Merzbow’s famous, limited-to-one-copy Merzcar release, a fabled CDR of noise that came inside a car! According to the story, the owner of the Releasing Eskimo label, which put out Merzbow’s Noisembryo album, owned an out-of-commission Mercedes that the police had ordered him to move. So he decided to entice Merzbow fans to take his problem off his hands by rigging up the car’s CD player to play Noisembryo indefinitely, modifying the stereo to prevent users from turning it off or removing the disc. He then promoted Merzcar as an ultra-limited-edition Merzbow goodie. The interested customer was required to buy the whole car in order to obtain the CD, representing the apotheosis of elaborate packaging feats! Jelinek reflects that, much like the Merzcar, which is locked into a car stereo, doomed to be played on repeat for eternity, Handle With Care has “a romantic motive behind it: a piece of music inseparable, forever. Implemented with the technical know-how of the time.”

Jelinek tells me a bit more about customers’ experiences with the album. “It was often a nasty surprise for the ignorant and there was a need for explanation. The handling of computer viruses was new at the time and accordingly one was awkward but also careful.” He explains that people who knew that track one was booby-trapped would know they had to start the CD at track two.

“Handle with Care was also given as a mean gift,” he recalls. “And some club owners contacted us because DJs played this CD and they didn’t know how to get it out of their devices. And again, it was about our patterns of action in dealing with technology, trust and manipulation.”

It’s no coincidence that the label’s name was Sabotage, and it’s an idea that Jelinek has carried forward long past the end of the formal imprint. In 2003, he established a sovereign state called State of Sabotage:

The State of Sabotage (SoS) was founded as a sovereign state in 2003 on the unpopulated island Harakka in Finland by the Austrian artist ROBERT JELINEK. Even before it had existed the end of the state had already been planned and set for August 30 2013. Exactly after ten years. Independently from the exhibition date the validity of all documents such as SoS passports and ID cards ends with August 30th 2013.
from Jelinek’s website, sabotage.at

That state, destined to be sabotaged from the start, was, indeed, shut down on its intended date, but not before issuing passports and ID cards, and corresponding with the United Nations.

Though Handle With Care was one of many Jelinek-initiated acts of sabotage, it’s a particularly pithy one. A CD that commandeers your computer and plays itself endlessly — in today’s era of unlimited musical choice, such a state of sabotage is almost unthinkable.