The guys over at Dust Science are starting a new vinyl-only label DS:93 with the premise of releasing 9 records each by a different artist and only pressing 93 copies of each one (with no digital downloads or CD compilations of the tracks…. EVER!). Add to that their own in-house design team’s custom label and sleeve design as well as heavy 174 gram vinyl and you have one of those rare beasts: records that will appeal to collectors because of their presentation but will also be being hammered by deejays because the tracks are actually good!
They avoid the pitfalls of other super limited pressings such as the recent dub techno mutilpacks which have useless sleeves and quicker degrading colored vinyl to go along with the the 10,000 samey remixes of one song, or the Peacefrog Private Pressings series which were very expensive singled-sided records that were not even that limited in pressing size (400 each, supposedly). I’m a big fan of music being available for people to buy, especially on vinyl, so if you’re gonna do something like this, it better be done right for me to be happy. So far it seems good: the price is not exorbitant (10 GBP, about double the normal single 12″ price. I’m not even sure that it is possible to break even with the costs involved…), they’re dropping full EP’s from each artist, and the artists they chose are an interesting cross section of new and old melodic techno. Here’s the artist schedule for all 9 releases:
Mark Archer
The Black Dog
Redshape
Orlando Voorn
Vector Lovers
Fabrice Lig
David Morley
Scan 7
Scorn
I’m especially interested to hear the Scan 7 and Scorn (Mick Harris of Napalm Death fame!) releases.
None of this will matter if the music isn’t good, though. The first release by Mark Archer (formerly of Altern 8?!) is fantastic and shows off the influence Detroit and Chicago had on the early UK techno scene. The A1 cut “I Said Funky” has those classic Casio RZ-1 percussion sounds (made famous by Steve Poindexter amongst others) under a simple alien synth line straight out of the 312. Definitely a winner on the dancefloor, I dropped this one on Friday night and people were feeling it. The second cut “Dream Plant” takes things a bit more moody and melodic with classic 909 action and Detroit chords and a bleepy lead synth riff. This has that yearning melancholic feeling that many 80’s tracks captured so nicely. “Second Child” is the most uptempo and densely produced cut on the EP, evoking alien forests with its croaking bass and watery reverb. “Heifer Nation” wraps things up with a driving shuffled techno beat and big atmospheric pads in another nod to Detroit. Certainly nothing ground breaking here, just four high quality techno and house tunes that remember where all this shit started. With this as their lead single, it should be very interesting to see where DS:93 goes in it’s next 8 releases!
28 Comments
read about this label a few weeks ago. some cool music but like you said nothing groundbreaking. I also found it very expensive being a dollar payer… you have to pay pounds plus shipping… not very US-customer friendly if you ask me. Might have to wait for that Scan 7 to see if I take the plunge with them. Good concept though… big ups!
haha, in my opinion, no imports are US customer friendly at this point! though we can blame the bush administration’s economic policy for this extreme nonsense, it doesnt make buying imports any easier. which is why i do it so infrequently!
Thanks for the coverage Tom, wish we could do something about the $ but we can’t, we are hoping to break even but I doubt we will but this is more about the music than the stuff that folds.
Good job insane prices on discogs in a few years!
it’s about collector item, then maybe the music.
Wow this lookls amazing. I love dust science and their design anyway, i bet the sleeve design will be killer on these (as well as the music)
“it’s about collector item, then maybe the music”
Certainly for some it will be, but hopefully as Tom said, most people won’t be afraid to play it.
I see this as a homage to the whole vinyl process, like treating the whole package as art, from the design to the pressing up and of course the music. That they plan on posting up a video of the whole process illustrates that. Hopefully not a last hurrah type thing but just a homage to the format, which I can appreciate.
Again, I’ll echo Tom and say that if the music doesn’t stand up then the rest of the package becomes meaningless to me. But from what I’ve heard so far and with the artists to come it looks exciting.
In theory, this sounds like a nice idea, but in practice it seems like it would be much worse than the other situations you mentioned. If the music is so good, why not make it available in a way such that people can buy it and play it and hear it, without having to pay out the a$$ for it, or, not be able to get their hands on it at all without paying graft prices on certain auction sites. 93 copies is less than what some labels promo lists would be… Seems kind of “daft” to limit the music’s exposure in this way. This is all about exclusivity as a first priority, by the very nature of the experiment. Music is the first priority when the music can be bought and heard by anyone who would wish to buy and hear it…
Sorry, I have much respect for Dust Science but I just think this is a bit of a clunker of an idea, especially when the “market” is flooded with all kinds of nonsense, and the people making actually “good” music are playing exclusivity games with it. At 10GBP per each, to buy all 9 releases one would need to spend about $180 USD … I know that’s not your concern since you got the free promos.. but for others, it would be.
And on that note, I wonder how many promos they are pressing of this DS:93 series…. ?
the white label i have is numbered out of 17. so that would give a total of 110 altogether, and they noted who they sent each white label to so that if one shows up on the ‘bay or anything like that, they know who got rid of it.
and this is available to anyone who wants to buy it, unlike those Octal records that you need to be on a mailing list to know about, and theyre not the 20 GBP or whatever it was for those Peacefrog joints. especially when you consider the fact that there is the whole Dust Science label that is putting out more widely released stuff, this seems alot more like say the SID or Local 3000 joints that you could only get from Submerge. and you don’t have to buy all of them, either! just the ones you like, unless you are a collector 😉
i love music being available for people to own, but of course as a deejay i also like having things that other people dont have. there are good ways to make things limited, and there are bad ways too. this concept is certainly much better than most of the other ones.
Are they available? Suppose I wanted to buy it after reading your coverage. Well, I just checked and it’s already sold out… with 20 days to go before the stated “release” date of October 23. Looks like I’m out of luck and my only exposure would be to your copy or the audio clip on the Dust Science site. In fact if you get a few hundred readers of this in the last few days, and some of those readers wanted to buy DS:93 #1 (note, this is before it is released!), they can’t. They can only read your description, hear the audio clips on the site, and then hope to one day hear it for themselves, somewhere somehow.
Then I guess for the next ones one would need to make sure to be aware of when it is available for sale, rather than what the release date is, and snap it up quickly. This is the kind of exclusivity race that I think is just total b.s. and is even worse than the sort of exclusivity you railed against in other posts.
With some of the other things you complained about in the dub techno post, they were pressed and available on the release date. In this case, looks like the first release is already unavailable, before the supposed release date. If one cannot see that the net effect of this is one of exclusivity over everything else, then I don’t know what to say. Again, maybe a nice idea on paper. In reality, a clunker.
it only sold out this morning. had you been checking the blog when i posted it, you had as much of a chance as anyone else to get it. and my post was not even the first announcement of this series, they announced the first one on the web on september 19th. so we’re talking 3 weeks of availability before it sold out. like any other not strictly limited record, if you snooze you lose. i dont sit around waiting months to get any record by artists i like because who knows how long that will be around?
anyway, my problems with the dub techno joints that i posted about were moreso with the fact that they made sacrifices for the relases: bad packaging, colored vinyl, so many useless remixes that you had to pay for a double pack just to get one track you like, etc. go read the post again! it’s also the fact that they do EVERY release like that that bothered me.
I propose decreasing by 10 the number of pressings for each following release. That way you get nice numbers: 93, 83, 73, …, 3.
then if they decided to do 10, they could press -7 copies of that last one. talk about LIMITED?!?!!?
Could somebody explain to me how come they were sold out this morning when the release date isn’t before october 21st ??
Would have loved to get this, but hey, i didn’t check the net for 3 days and already too late. Things seem to move into the realm of complete lunacy if you ask me…but then again maybe i’m just jealous because i couldn’t get this release. Must agree btw, nothing too special or innovative about the tracks but very useful stuff.
@ Thomas: Suberb Blog you’re running here man, certainly one of the best i came across these days.
Thanks for that.
Kickmansch out, Peace!
Pipe these releases sound interesting fella, is there anywhere online that has some audio snippets of the Mark Archer 12?.
Regards.
yeah, the mark archer clips are on the ds:93 page i linked to in the first sentence of the post! under the track names, click the orange box that says “Play” 😉
No need to listen to it anymore since you can’t buy it!
Pipecock said “my problems with the dub techno joints that i posted about were moreso with the fact that they made sacrifices for the relases: bad packaging, colored vinyl, so many useless remixes that you had to pay for a double pack just to get one track you like”
Damn straight, i was in barcelona recently and while diggin i found one of said double packs with ridiculous packaging. I’ve not really been feelin most of this new dubby techno being released…I listened to this release and it did contain maybe 5 different versions of one track and 2 or 3 “limited edition remix” or some shit like that. I liked one track out of the lot (the rest sounded like bad basic channel imitations) and the vinyl was like 50 eur (maybe 70 dollars)…ridiculous stuff…. doesnt touch leo’s (lerosa) more dubby stuff
I agree with what adam has posted. I really don’t think this is a great idea. 93 copies worldwide is being VERY exclusive. And at this time, being that exclusive and collectable is kind of silly. Personally, I would be more impressed if they just did a run of 500 copies and said “No Downloads or CD Comps or Represses EVER” – Make these tracks exclusive to Vinyl.
Out of the 93 people who already purchased this, I’m sure more than a few of them have the intention to resell this on Ebay or Discogs the day they get it with an enormous mark up. And now they’ll be somebody out there that REALLY wanted this, didn’t have the chance to get it, and now has to pay a crazy price for it.
“Out of the 93 people who already purchased this, I’m sure more than a few of them have the intention to resell this on Ebay or Discogs the day they get it with an enormous mark up. And now they’ll be somebody out there that REALLY wanted this, didn’t have the chance to get it, and now has to pay a crazy price for it.”
but that is *any* record that isnt repressed continually, no matter what the initial print run is. anyone who wants one and pays any attention to what’s happening in techno music can buy one. ive watched prices skyrocket on records that people didnt pay attention to when they came out.
It can be nice to have ltd edition vinyls etc, but its still all a bit pants. put the music out – cool if only vinyl – but limiting it all the time is a bit meh. The dj side of me likes it when i have stuff fuck all others have but at the end of the day it stops being about the music when fuck all people can get it.
Isn’t the point that Dust are doing what they feel? If you don’t like it, don’t talk about it – do your own thing.
Punk might as well never have happened.
Limited edition vinyl ….. Seems one got to really be plugged in to catch these. I personally feel ‘to each his own,’but stressing tunes – that shit ain’t for me anymore. I understand those that do, however. I used to be a SERIOUS collector back in da days. Not a whole lot got by me. And this was way B4 the internet … seems one gotta stay glued to the internet to remain abreast nowadays.
i commented somewhere else on this, Dust Science do their releases normally with normal vinyl runs, mp3 as well i think…obviously for this project they wanted to do something interesting for themselves and the artists…something different and meaningful, so the name of the label itself is very meaningful to them…and they decided to be more challenging by not releasing digital, by bombing out on the quality of the vinyl and by pressing only 93 copies…it’s a total whim. a very subjective, personal and it seems heartfelt project. it would be very boring it this whole business was treated as a commodity, something you take for granted. sometimes you gotta keep people on their toes…of course you gotta have the goods to do that, the serious goods. this release sounds the proper goods(only heard the samples, my copy, paid for, is on it’s way soon i hope), let’s hope they keep the quality high with the next ones…
Then don’t promote future releases at all on several sites / boards as if it was massively available. It’s like saying loud: “hey look we have this great thing coming, but you can’t get it!”. I mean you can’t get it if you happen to not check stuff 24/24.
Some interesting points but we are sticking to our plan and if you want to hear about the releases first then the best thing to do is join the mailing list, people on the list will hear everything first. The next release is nearly ready to go and we’ll be shipping the first 12″ soon.
We knew this project would divide people, but everyone has a chance to get one if they are into the music and project.
i’m feelin’ tracks a1 and b2 a lot. can’t believe this is 1/2 of Altern-8!
Altern 8 were the schitt!! If you listen to their stuff as Nexus 21, it makes a whole lot of sense
heads up for anyone interested, there’s 2 up for sale at cost on discogs right now (7th Nov)
http://www.discogs.com/sell/list?release_id=1121945&ev=rp