Showcase

Gimmicks

Friday, 24 October 2008

I collect records for all kind of reasons. The music on the records is just one of the possible reasons. I had to wait a few decades until there were computers, an Internet and blogs to show them to anybody, but now that I have the change I will grab it too.

Here is a Spanish 45 with flamenco music. The reason I bought this record is that there is a pop-up in the fold out sleeve. A rather cheap gimmick, but this is the only pop-up record in my collection.

The people who read paper edition of Showcase that I am very interested in loops, the Ouroubouros, and other related symbols and effects. I will not try and explain here why all this fascinates me so much, but I want to show you my only record sleeve with this effect, also known as the Droste effect:

This sleeve is empty. I have found this sleeve several times and it was always empty. Does anybody knows what was originally in it?
There is a lot of interesting info on the Net about the Droste effect. Herehttp://escherdroste.math.leidenuniv.nl/index.php?menu=intro is for example a site that made some spectacular animations of the works of Escher, in which he used this idea.

This 45 record by the German singer Gisela has a little lock in the corner of the sleeve for a gimmick.

There is no key, at least not with the copy that I have, but you don’t need it: the record easily slips past the locked sleeve. I wonder why they used this gimmick on this record, because there little porno about the three songs that Gisela sings. Maybe ”Die Gurke” has some hidden erotic meaning to it that eludes me, but even then: I have heard far more appropriate.

Finally (but don’t start cheering, I mean only for today; there is a lot more to come!), here is a Japanese 45 with a song about Mon chi chi’s.

Unless you are too young to read this blog anyway, you will remember this hairy little monsters.

And here is today’s soundtrack:

It is a Dutch advertisement record, made by the organisation of Dancing Schools. On this record the orchestra of Wim Jongbloed plays four songs. I was pretty surprised by this unexpected song called ”Bingo”. Bingo indeed!

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Comments:

Milan

2008-10-26 07:11:19

One of the best Dutch beat tracks!