The Digital Domain: A Demonstration

I found this late last year in a used record shop in the electronic music section. It stood out with it's extremely dated artwork, it's target label on the actual CD, a variation on the old Elektra Records logo, it's year of production being 1983 and a familiar named listed as a producer, Elliot Mazer, known for producing many of aural obsessed musician, Neil Young. It didn't hurt that the price was right at $2.50 so the piper was paid and I made my way to the car.

This is definitely not a CD to be listened to for pleasure, it's meant as a tool for setting up home or studio equipment. Of course I tried to give it a listen but it's simply not engaging in that way. Nonetheless, I knew it wasn't something I would get rid of, it might have some potential use in my life. Better yet, it might have use in someone else's life, so I decided to feature it here.

I'm not featuring this as MP3s, only in FLAC as I'd imagine it wouldn't work correctly in a compressed format. I've also scanned the complete packaging and liner notes as they're rather detailed. The full contents are also a representation of their time, with mentions of state-of-the-art 16 bit technology. In fact, you should read this excerpt from the description of the CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics), it's quite entertaining:

The facility at CCRMA includes a Foonly F2 computer (emulating a DEC PDP-10) with 1 Mword of 36 bit memory, a 16 channel Grinnell display system, 12 high resolution video terminals, the Systems Concepts Digital Synthesizer, a special auxiliary processor called the "poly", 16-bit D/A converters, and 16-bit A/D converters. In addition there are the usual complements for a large time-sharing system such as three disc drives (12 Mbytes total), magtape drive, line-printer, a Versatec printer plotter, etc.

12 Mbytes? That's 12 megabytes, right? 16-bit audio is overly standard these days but it was considered a big deal in 1983, but 12 megs of storage space? Over 3 drives? Glad technology has evolved so steadily since 1983!

I hope someone finds this of use or at least as a fascinating relic of the early eighties and digital culture. I ripped this with EAC and compressed it to FLAC though the rip was not perfect, giving me errors on three tracks although they play back fine. I didn't add any metadata to the FLAC files as I didn't feel they were terribly important in this case. Seriously, how many people other than myself would want to listen to a 1khz Square Wave test? For pleasure? Anyway, I hope you find this as interesting as I do.


The Digital Domain: A Demonstration
NOTE: Make certain you download both parts, you will need them to extract all the files. Please leave me a message in the notes if there are any problems extracting any of the files and I will re-up the individual problem files.

Part 1
Part 2

WTF??? Rosebud wants you to Have A Cigar

I had an awesome day all things considered! Went to work, got done early, got paid really early, picked up some new vinyl (PiL reissues on 4 Men With Beards and Rhino), was on the radio for a minute (Comedy By Request on XM Raw Dog) and then found a piece of utter weirdness. I noticed what looked like a late seventies Warner Bros. disco 12" by a "group" named Rosebud with a song named Have A Cigar on the A-Side. I figured there was no way that it could have been Pink Floyd's Have A Cigar, but upon seeing the song was credited to Waters I assumed I could be wrong. Just to confirm, I flipped the record over to find the B-Side was labeled Money, also credited to Waters. I had just found an obscure disco 12" of Pink Floyd covers. WHAT THE FUCK?

When I returned home I did a quick google search and found a page for Bill DeYoung who wrote the liner notes to a 2008 CD reissue of Rosebud's full-length album, Discoballs - A Tribute To Pink Floyd. Turns out a fellow named Gabriel Yared, now much better known for his award winning score for The English Patient among other films (Madonna's bomb, The Next Best Thing, is one of those other films), was the force behind the project, producing and arranging the bizarro Pink Floyd disco covers with a cast of session musicians backing him up. Officially, the production credit went to a team known as ARENA, but ARENA may have been no more than the financiers.

What really matters when it comes to novelty records like this one is how it sounds, and having not heard the whole album I can now assume that it's less than essential, but might be interesting for a few laughs. The version of Have A Cigar, listed as a Special Disco Mix by Michael Graber, is boring as hell, with the unidentified female vocalist merely repeating the first line of the song over and over. The version of Money fares quite a bit better though, with the first two verses sang completely, curse intact! The verses get repeated once, but it's not so annoying since the track continues to weird-out throughout it's four minutes. If there is a winner here, Money is where it's at.

I linked the page with Bill DeYoung's liner notes for Rosebud's Discoballs reissue above, but you can access it here too. As for sharing my musical find, you can download my rip of this ridiculous platter of wax below, but if you want to test your mettle with the full-length Discoballs, you'll have to look elsewhere. It was apparently available via Collector's Choice in 2008, but I don't know about it's current status.


Rosebud - Have A Cigar

01 Have A Cigar (Special Disco Mix)
02 Money