Recently been thinking the sense of many of the re-issues. This topic is already 3 pages of stuff, but one thing what seems to need to be addressed again would be:
Quote from: ARKHE on February 15, 2012, 10:37:31 PM
What I dislike the most is when the original liner-notes & artwork isn't featured at all. Not that a gatefold compressed into a cd booklet spread gives away much; rather do a completely new layout, with the original information still present.
I was looking into Mauthausen Orchestra tape box. 12 tape box was once done by Slaughter productions. All tapes with individual artworks. Needless to say: Explicit artwork, what made old Italian power electronics/noise stand out like utterly vile & exploitative. While many older UK acts would be subtle, band like M.O. would just put straight forward anal sex close-up in front cover. That's crucial element of it.
When Slaughter prod reissued the stuff, it was not replicas of the old. Not at all. It was made to look like Slaughter productions style, but still, had many of the original rough artworks slightly re-done. Typically just uniform typography applied to uniform lay-out based on (mostly) original artwork. So what's with the new Urashima re-issue of 12 tape box? Technically perhaps more professional. Silver silkscreened box, and factory dubbed tapes with silkscreened artworks. But what the hell?! No j-cards with artworks?! Box artwork is just saying "M.O." in font that band never used. It looks like more of assemble-yourself furniture kit from IKEA than honoring the utmost explicit power electronics masterpieces.
And I appreciate Urashima for his great cultural works for the forgotten tapes and satisfying the needs of vinyl listeners. But, and that is a big BUT, I'm heavily questioning what is the sense of revisionism? Original tapes look AMAZING. And now when you strip them down to factory duplicated bulk tapes with no artwork.... what's the point?
Same could be said about S&Q reissue of two first albums. There albums are among the very best of S&Q discography. Not only musically, but jesus christ, have you seen the debut album artwork?! It's such an brutal item, that to do justice for the album, it felt really lame to be presented in format of "two for price of one" type EMI reissue, where you have like 4x4cm thumbnails of album covers printed on front sleeve. You know, I may be wrong, I may not be expert in all fields, but my gut feeling is that people wanted the album. Not document of album. Not cover what documents how album looked like in little pictures, but presenting those masterpieces as-it-was.
I'm sure, some of these releases are in climate we live today, over-the-top. Some of releases are also often displays of craftmanship of fanatic teenagers, not professional graphic designers. But I tend to think, fuck the "professional designers". I always rather choose personal and crude over someone who is misguided about supremacy of Helvetica fonts or at worst, absolute garbage of photoshop glow effects and whatnot.
All these releases, I of course recommend to get - for sake of greatness of their music. It's about time S&Q albums got reissued. Not all things I did in past are perfect by any means. Be it old releases I'd hope to "revision" (haha, but hope I can avoid such temptation), and reissues which could have turned a notch better. But nevertheless, I'm fully aware of few mistakes which I hope not to repeat again. I'd hope other labels could learn to respect the works what made such an impact on them that they'd present it to next generation as it was. Not tainted too much by vision of current aesthetic of "outsider".
