“Today is not much skilled craftsmen capable of creating a truly awful cover for a vinyl disc. This art, alas, almost lost. When we look to come down to us … Well, I’m sick of this stylized idiocy.” Jaroslav Sviridov went through LP Cover Lover and picked his favourites: 1, 2, 3. (NSFW for deeply unstylish exposed breasts.) This never gets old.
Saw a girl on the tube with a Get Hip Records bag. I told her I approved. I’m contemplating my own half a ton vinyl albatross rather less cheerfully. I’ve lugged this thing behind me for fifteen years. I want rid of the damn thing.
This involves (a) a lot of ripping vinyl to digital (b) getting rid of the physical objects.
Quite a lot of it is indie rock which literally exists in the world only on a thousand pieces of vinyl, so the right place would probably be a library who cared, which would mean in Australia, with me donating the shipping as well. Anything in the vinyl pile that exists on CD can bugger off. A few things (not more than a few crates) I’ll want to keep.
There’s a lotta cassettes to rip too.
The CDs, of course, go to FLAC then get used for, I dunno, skeet shooting.
That takes care of most of it, I think. I’m sure I’ll get all this done before I die.
Festival had a truly spectacular decline and fall. When it finally died, it seems it was bought by Warner, who, being helmed by the Godlike genius Edgar Bronfmann, deal with back catalogue by sitting on it and never allowing its rerelease under any circumstances whatsoever, because that’ll definitely beat the MP3-spreading hordes on their home turf. This is why you can’t get hold of a damn thing released by Mushroom or Festival ever, except what Michael Gudinski took with him to Liberation.
Prisoners can’t have CDs, they’re too easy to make into shivs. They don’t have Internet. So selling them cassettes is a lovely business. See also Boing Boing comments — cassettes retain their popularity in Saharan Africa, where CDs die of dust.
Disclaimer: I host a site called TISM Self Storage, and Jock Cheese is the bass player of TISM, and I could therefore be considered to be inappropriately well-disposed to this CD. However, I was just as horrified as you would have been to find out that a TISM side project was actually coming to fruition, and only bought the CD because it was heavily discounted AND came with a Big Day Out bonus disc. The press release for this CD acknowledges the fear and loathing that the words “side project” bring to mind in connection with anyone who isn’t Mike Patton, parodying recent statements by Pete Townshend and arousing pleasant memories of the era when TISM were vicious and tasteless.
So is it any good? If you’re a TISM fan, will you like it? If you fucking hate TISM and wish they’d fuck back off to their fucking Camberwell Rotary meetings, will you like it because it doesn’t sound like TISM?
