The Vinyl Project 09.28.09

Ok so I'm at the swap meet yesterday attempting to track down a certain specific and not-available-in-stores item from my brother's birthday list, when out of the corner of my super vinyl-spotting bionic eye I notice, on the ground towards the rear of a crowded single-wide swap meet space, a long double-row of boxes containing probably two thousand records in total. A daunting task now presented itself - it was going to take a super-human effort to kneel down on the pavement (my body was simply not designed for working on the ground) and flip through these dusty albums, but this particular situation had two incentives going that prompted my commitment to the cause: The price - a smokin' fifty cents per album (that's fully half my impulse-purchase threshold of a buck!) and, even better, the entire row of record boxes was sitting in the shade thrown by a nearby box van. I was goin' in!

Most of the record sleeves were in pretty rough shape, which is usually a good indicator of the condition of the actual record within. Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover. Nothing was organized according to music type - there was Julio Iglesias next to a Benny Goodman box set and music from 2001: A Space Odyssey next to The Go-go's, with loose records and empty record sleeves mixed in for good measure. Was this going to be worth it? I pressed on...

And after a while a few gems did turn up. Hmm, a Jethro Tull greatest hits album. I'll try it. Music from the movie 'The Stunt Man'... I have no idea - but it's 50 cents! Some 80's pop looking thing I've never heard of - but it's produced by Thomas Dolby! - so why not? ELP's 'Brain Salad Surgery' with a creepy-beautiful sleeve by H.R. Giger? Check. Then there was this:

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I grabbed it purely for the sleeve artwork. I haven't seen the movie in ages, so I don't recall Jerry Goldsmith's score at all. But no matter - the cover art is pure 70's pop sci-fi genius! Here's a close-up of the center panel collage made up of scenes from the film:

And yes, that is Farrah Fawcett over there on the right. The album cover artwork, taken directly from the Logan's Run movie poster, was illustrated by Charles Moll. I couldn't find much information on him, but a couple of his other movie posters can be seen here.

Now I'm totally in the mood for 'TRON' which just arrived from NetFlix over the weekend...

City Center Las Vegas

Just got back from Vegas on Saturday. I was at the Sands Expo and Convention Center (in the Venetian) with my brother for InterBike - the bicycle industry's annual trade show (thanks for the passes, Dad!). The turnout was a little smaller than last year - understandable considering the current economic situation, which hasn't spared the cycling industry any. Many of the larger bicycle manufacturers were showing not even close to full product lines in greatly scaled-back booth spaces, or were conspicuous by their absence from the show floor altogether.

For me the show is less about business - I'm in the motocross industry now (which is having its own set of problems!) - and more about catching up with friends I worked with during my many years with GT Bicycles. It's like an annual high school reunion for me where I never know who I might run into.

I always take my camera with me to Vegas - I finally got to the famous neon sign graveyard a few years ago and I'll share some photos in a future post - and before leaving town I had to stop and get some in-progress pictures of the incredible City Center going up right across Las Vegas Blvd. from the now completely lackluster Harley Davidson Cafe.

Billed as the largest and most expensive construction project currently underway in the world, the $11+ billion ultra-modern City Center, located on 67 acres at the heart of the Las Vegas Strip, looks to not only live up to, but completely blow away its massively hyped expectations.

Here's a shot of the main street entrance to City Center I shot last year:

:: as always, click on photos for a larger view ::

This year I took multiple series' of shots to stitch together in photoshop, using the new 'photomerge' feature to create some amazing panoramas. Here's the same location as the above photo, one year later:And here's another panorama shot from across the street, showing the scope of the entire project:More photos and info on the City Center project can be found at their official site here. If you're heading to Vegas, check it out. It's supposed to be open sometime this year.

Swap Meet Gold

I've often said I'll buy anything for a buck. And I think most people's impulse-purchase threshold also probably hovers right around the magic dollar mark. Apple must think so too, as most of the songs available in their iTunes music store, as well as the majority of apps available for the iPhone, go for 99 cents. So it'll come as no big surprise that little brightens my day at the local swap meet more than a huge stack of CDs with a hastily-scrawled-on-cardboard sign reading 'CDs $1.00' leaning against the pile.

In these days of iPods and MP3 files, a lot of people are dumping their CD collections - just like in the 90's when they dumped their vinyl record collections once they had replaced everything with CDs - so there have been a lot of compact disc collections showing up at swap meets lately.

Sometimes the stuff is even worth risking a sunburn on the back of my neck to take the time to flip through, and that's just how I came across the two Korn CDs I'd like to share with you here. They're both multi-disc albums and for me what really made the sale was the high-quality creative package design. It isn't often that a band will spring for non-standard (read: more expensive) packaging for a CD release - the form factor is just too small for impressive design to have much of an impact.

Lucky for us, the boys in Korn, a multi-platinum selling hard rock outfit originally from Bakersfield, California, decided to make the investment on these two albums.

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1. Korn - See You on the Other Side - Cover and back coverInside the front cover there's this pop-up book style flap......and the whole thing slides out of this slip-case style clear sleeve.The amazing paintings for See You on the Other Side were done by David Soupakis. More artwork from this deluxe CD release, and some work-in-progress photos, can be found here.

2. Korn - Untitled (yes, that's the name of the album) - Top and bottom sides to the 3/4" tall box that holds the CDs and other cool bonus stuff.3 insert cards (front and back sides) featuring the band members.
Printed CDs and their disc sleeves......and the opened box with some of its contents.Richard Kirk did the illustrations and design for Korn's 'Untitled' album, released in 2007. You can see more of his strange and beautiful artwork at his website here.

HB Sunset Pano

Eye Candy - Took a ride up to the pier on Friday after work. The sky was on fire - awesome! This image was assembled in Photoshop from 8 shots taken with my iPhone. Click for larger version.

The Vinyl Projekt 09.09.09

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Meat Beat Manifesto :: Subliminal Sandwich
Double-LP w/bonus disc :: 1996

I'm in the middle of ripping this one into the computer right now and I thought it would make a good first look into some of the cooler record sleeves from my collection. The artwork and design was done by Rich Borge out of New York City. I love his style - combining photos of creepy dolls and other 3D elements he makes himself with distressed typography and other grungy graphics.

The high-quality artwork definitely lured me into purchasing this album, as at the time I was not too familiar with Meat Beat Manifesto - and this was back before there was any real way of sampling an album before purchasing it. I know, sounds crazy now doesn't it?

If you'd like to see more of Rich Borge's work, check the links below:

www.richardborge.com
http://altpick.com/borge
www.gravityworkshop.com

The Vinyl Projekt

If you're under 20 years of age, and heaven forbid you get dragged to a swap meet by one of your apparently clueless, nostalgia-obsessed parents, you're bound to see a lot of ratty cardboard boxes, and sometimes plastic milk crates, scattered amongst the sad and sun-faded framed family photos, Big Wheels with missing seats and chipped lead-glass ashtrays. These boxes will often have a youngish hipster in torn jeans, worn black Chucks and a well-washed Pennywise t-shirt painfully hunched over them, eyes darting left and right to ward off any interlopers as they peruse the rare bounty within.

The thin, colorful alien artifacts in these boxes, so prized and sought after by bargain hunters, disgruntled audiophiles and well, just plain crazy people, are in fact vinyl records. And before the advent of the MP3 file and the iPod, before the near prehistoric CD format and even before the completely deceased cassette tape, records were the only delivery system for purchased music throughout the world.

My own history with the vinyl record began - well, I'm not going to tell you when because then you'd have to classify me as an old nostalgia-obsessed parent or a crazy disgruntled audiophile or maybe even both - so I'll just say it involved my father's enrollment in Columbia Record Club (12 albums for a penny!) and choosing albums from Elton John (Goodbye Yellow Brick Road), The Who (Tommy) and KISS (KISS Alive II) from the catalog, and waiting not so patiently for them to arrive in the mail so we could wear them out on our trusty B•I•C turntable.

I was by no means very knowledgeable musically and by high school pretty much all I had was the entire Led Zeppelin catalog on vinyl. All that was about to change though my first year in college - my roommate had a massive music collection and I was about to catch the bug bigtime.

Fast forward to today. My record collection has grown to a modest size by some standards, ridiculously large by others. I've been hauling this stuff around, from place to place, and its been easily over a decade since any of it has seen daylight on a record player. I've decided that's about to change.

No, I'm not determined to hook the turntable up to the surround sound system in the living room and go all analog crazy. Our listening habits have changed so much: When CDs came out suddenly fussing with records was way too much trouble - and it was! Then, even more quickly, now audio files and computers have made dealing with a CD seem inconvenient and slow.

For some time now I've thought about recording all my vinyl into the computer, but have been put off by the enormity of the task. I have over 800 records - granted most of them are 12" singles, not LP's - but still, everything has to be recorded into .aiff format (CD quality audio) in real time (no ripping a full CD in a minute or two like with iTunes). The individual tracks must then be manually identified, separated and named using the waveform, filters run if the audio isn't so hot (as with some older records or if the record is scratchy) and finally saved to a backup drive before importing them into iTunes as MP3 or AAC files for listening.

I'm calling it The Vinyl Projekt - and it has officially begun as of a couple weeks ago. It's going to take a long time but the rewards are there too. Not only will I get to hear a lot of stuff that's been buried in my collection, unheard for years - and a lot of it not ever available on CD, but I'll also be experiencing the one thing that has elevated the 12" vinyl record above every other retail music format: The cover artwork!

As I work my way through my record shelves I'll scan and/or photograph record sleeves I find particularly cool, and periodically post them here. Stay tuned!

Fire Engine Red

Watercolorized - I got up early last Saturday (yes, a small miracle), grabbed my camera and headed a few blocks up to the weekly Donut Derelicts hot rod meet in the parking lot of Adams Donuts in HB. I don't know if it was all the fire trucks on the freeway headed up to the massive Station fire north of L.A. that injected the color red into my subconscious, but this freshly painted, impossibly red GMC pickup really stood out to me and I managed to snap a few shots before it rumbled out of the lot.

I think I mentioned before I'm your basic shoot-on-automatic amateur photographer. You'd think I'd be decent at it, considering I pay the bills by being a designer, but even the most basic points of composition, technique and exposure seem to elude me as soon as I put my eye behind the camera. This particular shot looked great on the itsy-bitsy LCD screen on the back of my trusty-but-aging Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, but when I brought it up on the screen at home it was . . . big sigh . . . out of focus!

Ok I still really liked this shot but there was no way I could use it 'as is'. It was just too soft. Time for Plan B. After messing with the posterized technique in Photoshop for the Ford GT image I covered a couple of weeks ago (in my very first blog post ever), I thought it might be just the thing to salvage this photo and turn it into art.

First I ran the 'posterize' filter on the original image. Photoshop lets you choose the level, or the number of color steps used, to get the look you want. I think I chose level 5, primarily looking at the way the red paint areas and the chrome broke up into steps...

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Holy funky color range Batman! - I then converted the image to CMYK, to have precise control over color value selection, and, creating numerous 'coverup' layers in Photoshop, began to adjust colors and clean up various areas, particularly the reds and all that weird stuff going on in the asphalt. Here are all the coverup layers isolated and merged together...

The final posterized image (with coverup layers) wasn't bad...

...but I thought I'd try one more step and messed around with the watercolor filter, which really produces some amazing results (final version is at the top of this post). What do you guys think? Here's the original photo with the soft glamour-style focus...