From the sounds of this package, it sounds like a bit of a nightmare. The CD wallet package probably being the first mistake. I remember back in the days of the CD golden era, so many people I knew use to keep their CDs in these types of binders and they would scratch the CD every time they took them in and out of them, as all their CDs looked to have some types of minor skuffing and I know some others made more of an effort to try and be gentle, but in general those binders led to more skuffing from the many times of pulling in and out for listening. I remember some people had those CD holders that would rest upon the sun guard/mirror flap fold downs in the car, a lot of those were damaging to CDs as well and from weather too, as they stayed in the car year round, but again this was the era of CDs being used all of the time, before the CDr and music downloads, so you'd listen to the discs a lot, compared to today where you can put stuff on computer to save the longevity of the CD itself. In the case of this Merzbow release it sounds like a combination of it being packed to tightly and the compression of time making the fabric/plastic or whatever in the binder to become one with the discs. I had a similar thing happen awhile back a few years ago with the Japanese/American noise treaty 2xCD and I think had posted about this on a different thread, but the discs had taken on pieces of the cardboard. My copy of was sealed from when I got it and you got to imagine that's a lot of years later and that to seemed to of melded with the plastic of the discs itself, it wasn't too detrimental, but still crazy shit!
