JEREMY DELLER / THE KLF (2K) — ***K The Millennium, Blast First / Mute Records, 1997

Blast First / Mute Records, UK, 1997. Catalogue no. BFFP 146 K. Audio cassette single in clear plastic case; black-and-white printed fold-out J-card. Includes ***K The Millennium (Radio Edit) and Acid Brass / What Time Is Love? (Version K).

A Jeremy Deller work hiding in the pop charts.

In 1997 Deller’s Acid Brass put the Williams Fairey Brass Band to work on acid-house anthems, collapsing two apparently separate British musical histories into the same repertoire. Among them was The KLF’s What Time Is Love? Deller describes the project as growing directly from the connections mapped in The History of the World.

Then the circuit reversed. Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty returned as 2K, taking the Acid Brass version of their own record back into ***K The Millennium. The commercial release consequently arrives under the wonderfully unstable credit “Jeremy Deller Presents 2K,” while the sleeve identifies its producers as “the artists formerly known as The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu.” Deller’s artwork had entered pop music and come back out as a cassette single.

That makes this modest object particularly exact: not documentation of Acid Brass but evidence of what happened after the idea began circulating. Artist, band, cover version, original recording and commercial commodity fold into one another until authorship becomes difficult to locate.

The artwork makes something happen. The thing that happens becomes another object.

Condition: good to very good. Visible surface rubbing and scuffing to clear case; light handling to printed insert. Playback not tested.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.