For your delectation: The Kitten Covers.

It’s always heartwarming when someone gets really pissed off and channels it into documenting something that sorely needs it. Kirrily Robert is about to start a project to document the lost past of Australian music. You realise there are ten-year-old records that are effectively orphan works?

Needed: co-conspirators. Preferably ones in the same country. And a good name for the project.

Update: Mailing list.

TIME, Dark side of the moan, Wednesday (N! News) — Both remaining members of Pink Floyd have announced the launch of the “Why Pink Floyd?” reissue campaign, wherein literally every tape containing a detectable grunt or squeak is pressed onto CD, SACD and 5.1-channel DVD-audio.

“This is the last chance for really nice packaging,” said drummer Nick Mason, “because even in 2011, it’s remarkable what you can charge for a physical object rather than a download. Even a FLAC. You could make the complete collection, which of course you’ll be wanting, into a ring of standing stones for the lounge. You’ll have to rebalance your speakers to compensate for the gravitational pull, of course.”

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Saturday the 16th of April is International Record Store Day, but this photo essay documents the ones that are no longer with us.

Paul Harding emails to tell of his blog Perthmusic (and earlier version), a pile of unavailable CDs, records and tapes from no-longer-gigging bands of the past thirty years. The gratuitous mention is also just fine. I would contribute except that I left almost all my tapes with Ross Chisholm when I moved to Melbourne in 1994. So instead I’ll just binge on the soundtrack to my youth.

You’re young? Never got into the Australian mainstream in the ’80s when it was happening? Annoyed that most of Mushroom’s output is not available anywhere because Warner are idiots? You’d like to catch up? Sassbandit points out our dear friend “nzoz[year]” on YouTube — a different username for each year. 1983, for example. A good start for stuff that was at least slightly popular with someone that you can then try to track down unavailable vinyl of, given Warner are too stupid to rerelease it even digitally. Did I mention that Warner are fuckwits enough times yet?

(For the indie stuff of the day, the canonical compilations are Tales from the Australian Underground and Do The Pop!, both of which are pretty much essential.)

It’s been a wonderful month of house-culling. We’ve thrown out a veritable mountain of shite and regularly overfill our bins with just culls of crap. It’s amazing how easy it becomes to clear stuff when you learn to distinguish actually useful things from the pseudo-useful things you think “Oh, that might come in useful” when it really never has and really never will.

So, what do I do with my vinyl records? I’ve had a USB turntable for four years and ripped zero records. This suggests I never, ever will. Even when I have a vinyl record I want to pull out and play, I seek out and download someone else’s rip.

They divide into various categories:

• Australian indie records where the master tapes are long lost and this music literally exists only on five hundred or a thousand pieces of vinyl. This is material of cultural significance that needs preservation. I have vague ideas of sorting these out and sending them to an Australian state library (the Western Australian one was enormously happy to get my fanzine collection, for example). At my expense, of course.

• Other rare material that isn’t widely available. Rip and sell?
• Stuff that is currently available on CD. That vinyl is superfluous and can just fuck off.
• Stuff that has previously been available on CD. That vinyl is probably not useful to anyone. There are exceptions, e.g., quite a lot of popular stuff on Mushroom or Festival is not available on CD because Warner, who own most of the catalogue, are fuckwits and won’t reissue it.
• Music that is or has been available but the vinyl item is a collectible to some degree. There used to be a slight market for this stuff. Some money for it would be nice, but it was hard enough work selling this stuff ten or twenty years ago and I know nothing about the field in the present day.

So the big win is culling the readily available — is there even a market for this? — and the big unknown is the market for the theoretically saleable.

Suggestions are welcome for how to dispose of this shite in a manner that preserves culture where it’s worth the effort, doesn’t throw away stuff worth money and — the absolutely key requirement — is not a major pain in the arse to implement.

With thanks to the fabulous Kallisti of blastmilk.com for the heads up, album covers as Ikea catalogue pages on Flickr.

“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?

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