Opothecary wrote:donq wrote:overlaying the high res against the 200x200 jpeg album art that's been around forever, I noticed something odd- the ".97" on the camcorder/vcr timestamp seems to have been doctored out on the album art in every individual photo that features it. Whether this should be interpreted as another reason to be skeptical of the album's existence I'm not entirely sure of yet, it just seems like a strange extent of "covering their tracks" for an album that was given to people who would know it was first released in 1992 regardless.
Good find, but maybe they didn't want to tie their album artwork to a specific date and time, since a large part of their mission statement has been to create music that is "timeless" if that makes sense - even if they don't say that themselves, it's fair to say that they want their work to mean something personal to everyone who listens to it, and the less concrete specifics known about the music or artwork, the better. I'd think they'd try to remove references to specific years in that case, for sure.
I've always felt that these very small private represses of Catalog 3/Closes Vol. 1 were to commemorate being signed to Warp. Knowing that these photos are from the second half of 1997 really ties into that idea.
Let's try to fill in the blanks (as people tend to do when all the facts aren't known) but I'm sure that they had quite a Redmoon party with their friends and family in late summer or fall of 1997 once the deal was done, or at least imminent, you know? I feel like that's a pretty good guess as to why these exist. It would not surprise me at all if Catalog 3, Acid Memories and Closes Vol. 1 all had very rudimentary OT style artwork in their original cassette incarnations.
that feels very much like reaching. The fact remains undeniable that the photoset is from a PIC project about kosovan refugees in the red road flats, and so these are 1999 photos of a 1997 home video. The video cannot have been viewed, and therefore this artwork cannot have been assigned, earlier than '99. Its ez. I'm pissed on cheap Thai booze so don't listen to me by all means but it seems obvious to me.
It was a Glasgow reflex of mine to always pronounce (in my head) closes as the plural of the synonym for near, rather than the synonym for shut. This, at least, feels vindicated.
Ultimately, in summary, I don't give a shit. All I want are r35tt track titles, not mythical secret albums or anything. I enjoy the music we have and that of many other artists, so I won't waste any more of my time on earth discussing "mibbies real, mibbies no" album and track titles.
