Merck Fragments

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).

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

The 2 new versions by Magicpatch in May of 2003 (**Make sure to click on em to see the full res).

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!).