For complitionists only

[Gob]

Admiral of the antediluvian Jack White had his Russian doll-style novelty release of Lazaretto last year, marking a point where the vinyl revival verged on self-parody. Artist and music producer Trevor Jackson has gone one step – well, 12 steps – further with the release in February of FORMAT: each of the album’s dozen tracks will be issued on a niche or near-obsolete physical format.



It’s as much an art prank as a keenly timed marketing strategy, mainly because much of the hardware required to play these formats ended up in skips or museums years, if not decades, ago. Tracks will be released on vinyl (7in, 10in and 12in) as well as CD, mini-CD, cassette, USB, VHS, MiniDisc, DAT, 8-track and reel-to-reel, like a This Is Your Life montage sequence for recorded sound.

The formats are incredibly limited-edition – ranging from just 10 reel-to-reels to 500 12in singles. To crank up the art side, there is a tie-in exhibition at The Vinyl Factory in Soho, where dust will be blown off audio equipment last seen in a pre-internet, or even a pre-decimalisation, age.

Jackson has put a great deal of thought into mining the past. In grand terms, it’s a comment as much on the history of recorded sound as on the nostalgia that snakes around discussions of audio quality today.

“I want the people who purchase these items to feel special; they will be the only ones who possess these tracks in any form at that time,” said Jackson. “The fact [that], culturally, everything’s become so convenient and easily accessible while in the process totally disposable is an important subject I needed to address with this project.”

His point is that it’s very difficult to have an emotional connection with a stream or an MP3. Digital allows us to listen more broadly – tens of millions of songs instantly available – but something is being lost in terms of how listener attention and appreciation is apportioned. FORMAT wants to stand, even as a memento mori, of a way of listening that is, depending on your view, being sharply reconfigured or worryingly eroded.

He is not the first to release such a limited product. There are echoes of Jean-Michel Jarre’s 1983 album Music for Supermarkets, of which only one copy was made. More recently, Wu-Tang Clan manufactured a single copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which is to be toured around museums and art galleries.

There are also echoes, presumably unintentional, of Drop the Boy by Bros, which was released across so many formats in 1987 that the Gallup chart, forerunner to today’s Official Charts Company, capped the number of formats of a single release that were chart-eligible. Given its experimental nature, FORMAT will not be troubling the top 40, so there’s little to fear in terms of it being disqualified from the chart rundown on a Sunday evening.

Jackson is also far from the first person to release music on archaic formats in the modern age. Cheap Trick put out their album The Latest on 8-track in 2009; Suede included a cassette and a flexi-disc in the deluxe reissue of Dog Man Star last year; and Mogwai released the song Tracy as a wind-up metal music box in 2004. It is, however, the range of formats that gives Jackson the competitive edge, although the formats he chose to overlook speak volumes about their white-elephant status in the world of audio archaeology.

While DualDisc (CD on one side, DVD on the other), digital compact cassette and laserdisc are still too contemporary in feel for a retro revival, maybe there’s hope for the 10th anniversary reissue of FORMAT. Who knows, Jackson could release bonus tracks on Dictabelt, SoundScriber or Tefifon and sell them to octogenarians wistful for the formats that first knocked their world off its axis. Nostalgia should know no age.

[MajGenl.Meade]

What the dickens kind of format is "complitionists"?

[Guinevere]

And here I thought you were referring to this guy:
http://www.wired.com/2015/05/area-man-y ... n-aol-cds/

WHEN VERIZON ANNOUNCED that it will spend $4.4 billion to acquire AOL—née America Online, the company that introduced millions upon millions of people to the Internet—it stirred the collective unconscious.

“Great. Now I have the sound of a dial-up modem stuck in my head,” one person said on Twitter.

“Verizon Announces Plan To Speed Up Its DSL Service By Mailing Your Data To You On A CD-ROM,” said another.

“Every time AOL pops up in the news, I have actual flashbacks. ‘DAAAAAAAAAAD, DON’T USE THE PHONE! I’M ON THE COMPUUUUTER!'” said a third.

The trouble is that, as AOL vanishes within the country’s largest wireless carrier, feeding a grand plan to put video ads on your phone, it will pop up in the news less often. That shared nostalgia will fade. Septuagenarians in Bunker, Missouri will still dial into the Internet via modem, but only for so much longer. The next generation could grow up unaware of the days when the Internet arrived in the mail, on a CD.


But not if Jason Scott can help it.

‘Yes, I Want Your Goddamn AOL CDs’
Scott wants America to send him all the AOL CDs they can find, so that he can rip them, scan them, and put them on the internet for everyone to enjoy in perpetuity. “Yes, I Want Your Goddamn AOL CDs,” he wrote in a blog post on Tuesday. “If you want to save me some time, image them into ISOs and scan the envelope you got them in and the front of the CD-ROM. But if not, send them to me. Jason Scott, c/o Internet Archive AOL CDs, 300 Funston Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118.”

This is what Scott does. In the late ’90s, he set up a public archive of his old online bulletin board chatter (an online bulletin board, as Scott explains it, was a way for lonely guys to trade digital messages with other lonely guys before they could get on the Internet). Soon, others sent him more bulletin board chatter, not to mention all sorts of other old digital stuff, like audio files and ads. Before long, he was running an ad hoc museum of the Online Age Before The Mainstreaming of the Internet, chronicling a seminal time in our history.

[oldr_n_wsr]

I still have my turntable and my cassette player/recorder. And my amp, and my tuner. And a whole bunch of LP's.

[Gob]

Whoops;

Completionist
An individual who frequently strives to have a complete set of something, regardless of whether or not the individual pieces have any importance or value.

Boy: I've almost caught every single Pokémon!
Girl: Aren't there like 700 something now? You can't possibly raise them all.
Boy: Yeah, but I HAVE to catch them all!
Girl: Ugh, you're such a Completionist!

Soz Meade, my error

[MajGenl.Meade]

My complimints

[wesw]

very fenny