{"id":3571,"date":"2008-10-06T01:26:45","date_gmt":"2008-10-06T00:26:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2008\/10\/06\/old-music-and-old-technology\/"},"modified":"2020-07-03T15:33:56","modified_gmt":"2020-07-03T14:33:56","slug":"old-music-and-old-technology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2008\/10\/06\/old-music-and-old-technology\/","title":{"rendered":"Old music and old technology"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"autobahn1.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Clearing junk today turned up some obsolete artefacts one of which (the Kraftwerk) has been kept for purely sentimental reasons. It’s been amusing the past few years watching the vinyl disc refuse to crawl onto the scrapheap of history despite its death having been announced many times over by journalists who should know better. Several of the CD releases I’ve designed recently have also been brought out in vinyl editions. Meanwhile the audio cassette really is on the way out: “Sales of music cassettes in the U.S. dropped from 442 million in 1990 to about 700,000 in 2006” says Wikipedia. I certainly won’t mourn its passing; portability aside, I always hated these things. Music sounded shitty unless the tape was chrome or some other high-quality format, and whatever the quality they were all subject to mangling by cheap cassette players.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"autobahn2.jpg\"<\/p>\n

What struck me looking at the Kraftwerk cassette next to the BEF one (below) was the difference in presentation. The Kraftwerk release is a good example of perfunctory jobbing-out\u2014the type inside looks like it was applied using Letraset\u2014and as such is quite representative of the way record companies treated cassette releases. And the small size did nothing for the artwork, of course. I remember being transfixed when I saw the vinyl sleeve of Autobahn<\/em> in a shop window. This was the first time an album cover struck me as being an arresting design rather than merely an interesting illustration. Subsequent releases reverted to a variation on the original German sleeve<\/a> but the band seem recently to have accepted the traffic sign design as the ideal one.<\/p>\n

\"autobahn3.jpg\"<\/p>\n

\"bef1.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Music for Stowaways<\/em> (1981) was the first release by BEF (British Electric Foundation), aka Ian Craig Marsh and Martyn Ware, post-Human League and pre-Heaven 17. Marsh & Ware were keen on the audio cassette as a future listening medium, especially in portable cassette players; “stowaway” was apparently a name (which I never heard anyone use) for what Sony called the Walkman. They intended this to be a cassette-only release although it did appear as a vinyl version entitled Music for Listening To<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"bef2.jpg\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In a rare reversal of the usual state of affairs, the packaging for the cassette was a considerably better than the vinyl edition<\/a>. This is still one of the best cassette packages I’ve seen, hence the reason for keeping it. (Click on the images above for larger versions.) The design is credited to BEF with Bob Last.<\/p>\n

\"bef3.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Printing on the plastic was a more durable solution than paper labels. <\/em><\/p>\n

This short instrumental album, pitched musically between the Human League’s avant garde electro-pop and Heaven 17’s white funk (Groove Thang<\/em> was (We Don’t Need This) Fascist Groove Thang<\/em> minus vocals), remains a great collection of analogue electronica and, together with Heaven 17’s Temptation<\/em>, I reckon it’s the best thing Marsh & Ware did. Anyone interested in the more intelligent music of this period should track down the CD which might lack the smart design but which does contain two extra tracks.<\/p>\n

For more on the early Human League and Marsh & Ware’s projects, there’s the excellent Blind Youth<\/a> site.<\/p>\n

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The album covers archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clearing junk today turned up some obsolete artefacts one of which (the Kraftwerk) has been kept for purely sentimental reasons. It’s been amusing the past few years watching the vinyl disc refuse to crawl onto the scrapheap of history despite its death having been announced many times over by journalists who should know better. Several … Continue reading “Old music and old technology”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4,29,3,15],"tags":[170,122,2624],"class_list":["post-3571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-design","category-electronica","category-music","category-technology","tag-a-clockwork-orange","tag-kraftwerk","tag-the-human-league"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-VB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3571\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}