Sunday, July 23, 2017

Have the record companies lost the origianl LP artwork?

I was absent-mindedly browsing in a record store yesterday, somewhat bemused by so many of the racks being full of re-issues of 70s LPs, all around £20, boasting in many cases heavy weight vinyl, but nearly all with terrible reproductions of the original artwork. One wonders if during the CD phase record companies lost or threw out the original LP artwork? Perhaps they scanned it all to save space, and used some low resolution, or maybe it is contemporary printing techniques? Whatever the cause, many LP re-issues have a bootleg quality as if the sleeve was copied not from the original artwork but an old LP sleeve. The colours are forced (a little like colour photocopies - remember those) and the images ever so slightly out of focus. For something that is meant to be all about the tangible, many are poor. Why should I care? After all I'm not in the market for vinyl re-issues of old Floyd LPs. Well it feeds into a sense that vinyl and the resurgent stores they support are a kind of simulacra. Standing at the racks and flicking through, I feel like I'm re-enacting a ritual from the back in the 1970s when records were the medium. The LPs all shrink wrapped (which the originals never were) and with their dodgy artwork make the original mass produced items seem like originals, itself a pleasing twist on Benjamin and Baudrillard.

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