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

Update: Mailing list.

“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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(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.)

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.

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.

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?

Given that the lyrics are by Cheese and two songwriters credited only as “HBF/RHB” (gee, wonder who that could be), you probably know what to expect lyrically. A lot of it sounds like it comes from the same headspace as www.tism.wanker.com – “I Done It With The Drama Teacher” has the same icky sentimentality of “You Gotta Love That”, “La Traviata” is a younger version of “The Men’s Room”. “Why Don’t You Get A Bigger Set Of Tits” is stripped of all meaning by the lawsuit avoidance technique of dropping the names of the players on the lyric sheet (depriving the song, apparently written as one of Ron’s diatribes, of a punchline).

Musically, it’s not the disco-schlock-meets-Malcolm-Young that TISM now specialise in, being commercial in an early ’90s Triple J way. I still liked Triple J in the early ’90s, but you may wish to regard that as a Parental Advisory. “Don’t Burn ‘Em All JD” sounds weirdly like Died Pretty’s “DC”. That and “Dave Graney’s Country Idyll” are excellent, “Up There Calisi” is pretty good, and I really like “Great Rabbit In The Sky” even though it’s the most obviously novelty song on the album. Still, I wonder what radio station would find these songs fitting in to their programming?

I guess the question I have to ask myself is “would I have even considered this album if I didn’t know it was by someone in TISM?” I’m still not clear on why these songs aren’t on TISM albums (especially considering TISM’s apparent ambition to release every single thing they have ever even contemplated recording), but it’s not bad value for the ten to fifteen bucks I’m very confident JB HiFi will soon be charging for it.