Policies regarding re-issues

I’m happy and grateful to be working with the labels that distribute our archive material. In order of their relationship this includes LTM (CDs from London), Medical Records (Vinyl from Seattle), Dark Entries (Vinyl from San Francisco), and now Klang Galerie (CDs from Vienna). These labels take on risk and effort to make our music available and we couldn’t reach listeners without them. When working with a variety of partners I try recognise their individual strengths while safeguarding a coherent identity for our products.

I appreciate your feedback, and will at times ask your opinion to check we’re going about things the right way. But this feedback can only be part of guiding principles that I would like to clarify for you.

It’s very important to distinguish music from memento. Music is a living, growing, forward yearning energy. A memento is a reminder that this energy exists and has been part of life, bringing happiness, solace and other value to our lives. Nilamox is primarily a forward looking label that develops music as sound, games and other physical forms. It maintains a Severed Heads museum which handles memento objects and low cost downloads.

Quite a few people post images of their CDs and LPs laid out on the floor. That’s fun – but it’s got nothing to do with music. It’s a museum of objects, and this should be acknowledged and the objects be understood for their purpose.

It’s my policy that – where possible – the mementos be true to their mnemonic purpose. The re-issue of Since The Accident was (and may again be) a facsimile of the original release with vastly better sound quality. Some improvement to the memento is OK – the re-issue of The Big Bigot is better than the original but very close to it. In a few cases the label makes justifiable changes such as making Eighties Cheesecake as if it had originally been an LP. A lot of careful discussion goes into these releases!

For this reason the re-issue of Blubberknife must be in a package of electronic gizzards. That’s how it was originally made by Garry and Meredith and their torment needs a monument! Whether it is a cassette or a CD or even a USB drive is not known yet. This will take time.

And for this reason some items I will prefer to be on facsimile CD, although allowing some changes to improve their value – as a memento. A CD is not a common music container these days and must therefore hold some other mnemonic value to be viable.

There’s a whole class of early recordings (e.g. One Stop Shopping) which I have been supplying as downloads at no cost. They were made by young people for fun, were not about profit, and it would be wrong to inflate them into costly items. I particularly don’t like the idea of Terse Tapes material being reproduced except as part of a proper historical documentation (for example the Magnetophonics box on Vinyl On Demand). But frankly most documentation is best performed online these days and a web site is the best and most appropriate place for this material. This can be added to the Museum here, it will take time.

I don’t see the point of Blu Ray. They are a complete pain in the arse to make and the videos are on Vimeo. Maybe I could sell an empty case? You see the point.

I hope this clarifies my stance on re-issues. The partner labels can and will disagree with some of it and we always talk deeply about it. Not everything can or will be remade. The future waits, it calls for my attention and next time I’d like to describe some of the more unusual ideas for Nilamox objects coming in 2021!