Boyd Rice

condition (record/cover): NM / VG+
Released in 1977, with only 86 copies, and reissued on the Mute label in 1981, Boyd Rice’s self-titled release, otherwise known as The Black Album, pioneered sampling, collage art, the album as an artistic object, martial industrial music, and is the birth of transgressive symbolism. The first album by California conceptualist Boyd Rice (one of the first avant-garde “musicians” to use turntables as a creative tool) offers no information beyond the artist’s name (embossed on the all-black cover), that it was recorded in the mid-’70s and is “playable at any speed.” The droning noise slices, which are not audibly ascribable to any specific instruments, seem to consist of short tape loops layered over one another to create repetitive but varying textures (like Frippertronics, but without the guitar) that slow down and speed up on their own.