Various Artists

Featuring: John Duncan, Controlled Bleeding, Ankh, Un-Kommuniti, Pacific 231, Grey Wolves

In 1985, Gary Mundy of Ramleh sent out an invitation. He asked artists in the orbit of his label Broken Flag to respond to a single concept: morality. Define it, refuse it, occupy it, destroy it. The results arrived on a cassette, catalogue number BF41, pressed in a run that circulated through the postal networks that kept the underground alive in those years. Most of it was never heard outside those networks. The title was not ironic. It was a provocation with genuine stakes.

Morality was always a document more than an album. Broken Flag had built its identity around the proposition that normality was a convention rather than a given, and that music made from violent and abrasive electronics was as legitimate a form of inquiry as any other. The roster assembled here reflects a scene in motion, populated by names still active today and others who vanished entirely: Controlled Bleeding contributing the two-part Innocence sequence; Le Syndicat with fragments from their Argument Total series; Un-Kommuniti across three Crusade sections; Pacific 231 delivering Gravity of Mind and Set and Thot; Toll, Mundy's own project after Ramleh; The Grey Wolves with Baptism of Fire; Jonathan Briley, Pax Romana, Ankh, Croyners, Next, and others. Running through the entire compilation as structural connective tissue: John Duncan's Prostitution Tapes, surfacing between every track like a recurring transmission from a parallel frequency. The final contribution is Paroksi Eksta's Icona O La Lue, misattributed on the original cassette to Giancarlo Toniutti, corrected by a slip included with most copies, a small detail that became part of the object's mythology.

The sound across the two discs is what Broken Flag meant in practice: raw electronics, post-industrial abrasion, spoken word, feedback, and a DIY sensibility that refused both the commercial underground and the academic avant-garde. This is not difficult listening in the sense of requiring academic preparation. It is difficult in the sense that it demands something of the listener's attention and tolerance for discomfort, which in 1985 was precisely the point. The question the compilation keeps asking, through structure as much as through content, is the one Mundy posed to every contributor: who decides what is right and what is wrong, and by what authority.

The reissue presents the original cassette as a 2CD set, remastered by Puppy38, packaged in a six-panel sleeve faithful to the distinctive Broken Flag visual language of the original. Limited to 400 copies. The cassette this replaces circulates when it surfaces at all; the reissue makes the argument in a format that holds.