Archive for the ‘Culture’ Category

Jimmy Edgar unreleased album artworks + story

Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

Back in early 2003, hot on the heels of the success of the first Kristuit Salu vs. Morris Nightingale CD by Jimmy Edgar, we began work on solo second albums from each alias (”Kristuits Salu - re:design district” and “Morris Nightingale - I’m It’s Easy” (changed later to: Easy Like Ginger)). Jimmy had a slew of new tracks from each alias, both coming along strong and pushing the edges of the two sounds he established on the first record. He began work on art for them (he had done the art for My Mines I), which came out interesting, but fortunately he started to link up with Jesse Magicpatch, and he did two further revisions of the art that came out quite awesome. In the meantime I had flown to Japan to network and have a licensing meeting with my old friends at P-Vine, because they were excited to get a follow up from Jimmy as they had already released My Mines I in Japan. Unfortunately, shortly after that I found out it was all for naught, as big brother (Warp) stepped in, signed Jimmy exclusively to their label, and demanded that he not release any other music with anyone else (and thus why Jimmy has had several aliases since then that have been hush hush). Nonetheless, this was an important early lesson on the label side of why to sign contracts with people. Ultimately I was happy for Jimmy, because someone I had discovered and nurtured was on to bigger and better things, a much bigger audience, and hopefully some just monetary rewards for his talent. But I had definitely wasted a lot of efforts on this, and to make it worse, Warp only ended up using 4 of the 20+ tracks that we had slated for release on the two new albums (Access Rhythm EP). [.... to make it even worse, Warp basically dropped Jimmy a year after his first album, and they still owe me almost $1000! I guess you can be dicks when you're that 'big'......]

So here is the original artwork that Jimmy created in March of 2003.

The 2 new versions by Magicpatch in May of 2003 (you can click on em to see em bigger).

Shame that art never got used, and the music was never heard. Its nice to be beyond all these kinds of headaches now, back to listening, and not releasing. More artwork and maybe some more drama to come in future posts, but thats enough for now from “Gabe of the Mountain” (nickname Jimmy always called me, I don’t remember why though!).

CD Manufacturing

Wednesday, March 24th, 2010

I made CD’s for 8 years, with over 75,000+ discs I am responsible for in circulation (plus all the vinyls, and CDs still in my garage). But I never actually saw the physical process for making them. This video that my friend Rob sent me via Discovery Channel finally shed some light on that.

Percussion Lab Interview

Tuesday, March 16th, 2010

Here is a little interview I did a few weeks ago on the excellent Percussion Lab Radio show up here in New York. Conducted by none other than the main man Praveen, with the indoobidable (sp?) Travis Stewart present as well.

Check it out here.

Enjoy!

Calculus needed?

Friday, December 11th, 2009

Can someone explain the math behind this?

http://www.last.fm/music/Proem/Socially+Inept

2000 edition CD, of which there are about 100 left
+
less than 500 digital album sales… (though it is #2 best selling digital album for Merck)
=
50,000+ unique listeners??

hmmmm?

Just when you thought turntablism was dead…

Thursday, September 3rd, 2009

Sorry for the lack of posts… here’s a clip in the meantime:

Neurosonics Audiomedical Labs Inc. on Vimeo.

Multilink Magazine

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Just had to share vocally that this is my favorite art/music magazine, by far. It makes Beautiful Decay look like a community college zine. Usually in any magazine or art show that I see around, there is like 1-2 artists work that I enjoy, and the rest are kinda interchangeable. BUT each Multilink issue is constantly good art/music. I always finish reading it and have about a dozen names I need to check out more. Admittedly I’m a bit biased towards them due to some connections, but seriously, I can’t get over the quality of the artists/photographers/illustrators/designers that they feature in there (that’s why I’m involved!). Usually people I’ve never heard of, and always amazing work.

Their site/blog has just been reinvigorated, and they got a webstore and book in the works too. As a side note for the Merck fans reading this, they did the most involved and detailed article on Merck ever. You can find it in issue #6. Also they have this badass flash based online pdf viewer for those of you who don’t want to leave your browser.

I highly recommend you check out the magazine if you have eyes, here.

Merck Scene Release .nfo file

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

I’ve been pirating software since about 1993. Probably when I still had my first Hayes 2400 modem. I mostly went for games back then to give them a good preview before buying (well before the days when a “game demo” was common, or even pc gaming was common). Did a lot of BBSing, and saw the piracy revolution developing well before it hit the mainstream. Hell, I even made the welcome ANSI for the biggest Razor USHQ. Of course later into the 1990’s I got into downloading MP3’s of the obscure music I was hearing coming from far corners of the globe that I couldn’t get in our limited record store markets in Miami (bleep bloop anyone?).

So of course a couple years into Merck we started to get annoyed by the weak ass Scene releases of our CDs. Barely even listing the name ‘merck’ on the release, but smearing their crappy half-assed group name all across every damn file in the release. We decided to do our own scene release of the Lackluster, Adam Johnson, and Mix 2 cds, complete with a wickedly done .nfo file, and all the proper scene crap. Was entertaining for the few releases (gave up on it after that), I even remember some kind of ‘backlash’ from the scene about it, like we were somehow hurting them. Quite funny. Nonetheless, I spent several hours the other day trying to track down that original .nfo file on my hard drive, but unfortunately I think it may have gotten the chop some years back by accident. Fortunately my friend Shawn had one laying around, and Esa had a version of an Ascii done for us by reanimator from iCE for potential use as well. Here they are.

lackluster-showcase-cd-2003-merck.nfo

merck nfo by reanimator-iCE

Lost web content….

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

Sorry for the lack of posts, I’ve had a busy last few months. I hope to be doing 1 post a week for the spring, and hopefully endeavoring into more personal territory as well. So here goes….

I think everyone (including me) nowadays kind of always assumes that things that are put on the net, will always be around. There are 2 such things that I have always regretted not ‘grabbing’ for myself off the net. As they have since disappeared from the time I first discovered them.

First off was the original website and designs of Vir2l. Some of you may remember them as THE ILLEST web design company in the late 1990’s. They did some simply AMAZING graphics. Very inspirational to visual styles I would later strive for on Merck releases. The company of course split up over differences amongst the various cocky designers (is what I’ve been told), and now the name seems to be somehow involved in cell phone games. Nonetheless, its nearly impossible to find ANY pics of any of the amazing stuff they did back in the day (even on pages and pages of google image searches).

The second thing is this website i found many years back that was someones detailed personal exploits, stories, and adventures in the world of Ultima Online. For the most part they were all griefing stories, and boy were they awesomely hilarious. He had dozens and dozens of well written out tales of various exploits he’d been involved in of torturing, stealing, and causing general strife in the world of Ultima Online (the first major MMORPG, and wild west of sorts as far as those kind of games go), most of them with great screenshots to illustrate. I can’t express how entertaining it was to read these things (and I never even got to play Ultima Online directly either!). Once again the sites content has seemingly disappeared from the internet (I don’t even know what the URL was). I spent 4 hours one day scouring Google, but was left with nothing.

The lesson, if you find a site with content you really love. Your best friend may be a wget or a lot of right click and saving.

-G

Another loss this month… Charlie Cooper (TTA) R.I.P.

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Sad to say the IDM scene has had another more permanent loss this month. Charlie Cooper, 1/2 of Telefon Tel Aviv was found dead yesterday… apparently of suicide. News story here.

Rest In Peace…. you will be missed.

The Designers Republic is no more….

Saturday, January 24th, 2009

TDR, the wonderful people who graced us with so many completely ridiculously great album covers (mostly through Warp), has officially closed their doors. Apparently they got a bit too big and corporate. Here is an interview with the bloke who runs it explaining more. You guys will be missed, but of course you’ll live on in all our record collections.

PS. If anyone has an original TDR book (the spiral bound one I think) they want to get rid of, I’ve always been looking to get one.