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Blood Music Unveil More Details About Mystery Release — “the first “professional” open source music release in history”

Remember a while back, we talked about the ‘mystery’ releases that Blood Music were pressing to vinyl? Well, it turns out the story was a lot more complicated than was

10 years ago

blood music mystery

Remember a while back, we talked about the ‘mystery’ releases that Blood Music were pressing to vinyl? Well, it turns out the story was a lot more complicated than was initially thought and it makes all the more fascinating.

Earlier today, Blood Music took to their Facebook page to reveal the story behind these mystery releases as today marks the first day they should begin arriving in customer’s hands. They were careful not to reveal the artist, but a bit of investigative Google-fu lead us to a very likely candidate, and it’s kind of a big deal to us. We’ll leave the artist at the end of the article so you can cut out if you don’t want to read any spoilers.

It’s the actual story behind it all that’s more interesting. Here’s a sort of reduced overview:

The mystery band has no idea (to our knowledge) about the nature of these releases and that was somewhat integral to the spirit of this project. We felt we needed to release these records without any information leaking on what they were in order to fulfill the entire scope of working and selling an open source release…

There was one particular artist whose material we wanted to purchase and/or release on vinyl but was never available. We wrote back-and-forth with the artist several times in 2011 and 2012, asking if we could press it – but they declined. More than one year had passed since the previous writing, so we contacted again, asking if the artist would press the material themselves. They told us they did not plan to repress their earlier material, due to losing access to the original files, and the fact that they only wanted to continue forward with the project and not go backwards…

A week or two later, we stumbled upon the artist’s blog by pure accident (only our second time reading the blog) and noticed a post that started:

“I’m not sure how much this really matters or if anyone has ever even paid attention to it, but I just changed all the Creative Commons licenses on Bandcamp to the least restrictive possible, or “Attribution.” Basically this means that you can do *whatever you want* with my music so long as you attribute it to me in some way…”

We submitted the project in secret to the plant and got test pressings back that were some of the best cuts we’ve ever received.

Full of excitement, we pressed the whole thing and put it for sale as the Mystery releases…

Now that we’ve broken even on the LPs – we will collect on the profits and donate a percentage of all earnings to the artist themselves, paying them through Bandcamp (so that Bandcamp gets a cut), and making a donation to both Creative Commons and Wikipedia (who made this possible). We will also be donating a good chunk of the CDs and a handful of LPs to the artist for their own enjoyment and/or sale…

It’s a long and complicated (but worthwhile) read, check it out in full here.

Honestly, this is amazing — all those people that took the risk and jumped on it, now not only have some brilliant music on vinyl but also an amazing story to tell with it. Didn’t think it was possible for a company that gave life to Strapping Young Lad in a brilliant vinyl boxset to top that, but they have clearly done it. Fair play.

SPOILERS BELOW

Okay, so with that out of the way, we’re pretty confident that at least one of the mystery releases is an early Cloudkicker release. You can cross-reference all the information (particularly this blog post that was mentioned) and it’s plain as day. There are some hints as to what release it is — never pressed to vinyl, artwork had to be redrawn — but it could very well be The Discovery. If you’re confident in our sleuthing, you can gamble and try to secure your copy here.

– DL

Heavy Blog

Published 10 years ago