I seem to be a bit late with this one, but last December Gabe Koch explained on his blog the mechanics behind Mercks output, and the effect the changing industry had upon the label.
As of Midnight this Sunday, you can pre-order one of the 360 limited editions of the new B12 album. This seems to include the standard 2xCD set enclosed in a signed and numbered tin with a couple of stickers and a few postcards. More information, plenty of photos of the set itself and even a YouTube video of the tin being unpacked can be found on the news section of the B12 website. Looks like B12 have sussed the collectors mentality. Depending on the cost of the actual thing I might pick one up myself and give it the Hardformat treatment.
Hardformat is back, sort of. For anyone wondering where we went, my host (and ex-employer) decided to delete the database for the site with no warning. I’m not entirely sure if the act of deletion was malice or stupidity, but either way I didn’t have a backup to hand, and things looked fairly grim.
Thankfully all of the images were safe, and so here we are on a new (hopefully more professional!) host with as much data manually retrieved from archive.org as possible. Over the next week or so I will be relinking all of the releases on the front page – so please bear with me whilst I put it all back together, and work out how to force WordPress to do what I want it to do.
A big thankyou to anyone who commented on the posts, sadly all of those comments are gone but not forgotten. Also anyone who contributed photos if you could resend your information so we can credit you for your work that would be great.
On the plus side; inspired by the number of emails we recieved containing interesting snippets of design info we now have this news blog to cover anything outside the realm of the photographed releases.
Justin.
Artist: Autechre
Album: Quaristice
Label: Warp
Year: 2008
Designer: Designers Republic
Type of music: Electronic
Notes: Lovely, limited edition: card and steel.
Artist: David Sylvian
Album: When Loud Weather Buffeted Naoshima
Label: Samadhisound
Year: 2007
Designer: Art direction: David Sylvian, Yuka Fujii, design: Chris Bigg, artwork: Sachiyo Tsurumi
Type of music: Site-specific installation soundtrack
Notes: About to be released at time of writing, this is a rather gorgeous limited edition CD clothed in a horizontal DVD digipak. Drawings of bowls of feathers and clouds of bees (a lyrical touchstone for Sylvian) almost obscure photographs of water and coastline. I haven’t quite screwed up the courage to listen to the music yet – the prospect of an ensemble comprising Sylvian, Clive Bell, Christian Fennesz, Akira Rabelais and Arve Henriksen is such a mouth-watering prospect that I’m afraid of being disappointed!
Artist: Eivind Aarset’s Electronique Noir, Bugge Wesseltoft
Album: Light Extracts, Moving
Label: Jazzland Recordings
Year: 2001
Designer: Hakon Kornstad
Type of music: Electronic jazz
Notes: When it comes to Norwegian new music, most of the attention’s paid to Rune Grammofon and Smalltown Supersound. Which is unfair because Jazzland Recordings, run by pianist Bugge Wesseltoft, has been responsible for some brilliant hybrids. Guitarist Eivind Aarset melds breakbeats, electronica and ambience with Eno-esque cloudform guitar and occasional, delirious freeform noise squalls while Bugge’s delightful mix of house and jazz is as infectious as the day it was released. But I’m forgetting that this is a design blog… We’ve featured Hakon Kornstad’s work before, this is some of his earlier work. I particularly like the front covers which only reveal the titles when the light hits the spot varnished text at the right angle, while the imagery of urban, neon-lit underpasses suits the music to a tee.