I was thinking a bit about Wu-Tang's recent single-copy-pressing of their album and got an idea...it costs too much for me, but it'd be interesting to think about in a larger aspect of art and reproduction and whether the reproduction or the original is important or is it just the art existing that's important and everything else is just details...etc...

So the idea would be to treat music like paintings...an beat maker would have a stack of, in our case, SP's and they make an album with an SP then sell the SP as the original art with all of the song data, etc. The person could release the audio for free, but the original could be sold as a one of a kind original...

Like, the way I think of it, music is one of the very few artforms where the original is never distributed. Ever...

What you guys think of this? Obviously, it's not practical at all, and for people that use multiple pieces of gear or they use gear without enough memory to store an entire album would be impossible...

This is more or less just talking and thinking, different ways to think of sound as part of the larger categorization of art.

Well said.

It's like a trophy for the listener to hear. A unique and intimate experience is what I would get from that. There's always kickstarter if you ever want to make this a reality.

There's another way at looking at this too...

Where say, you've written music and you got a decent idea of how you can perform it...and you do the very first take live in front of an audience and that's the last time you ever play that track. You don't record it (unless you want to for yourself, but it's not for mass consumption) so it only existed in that one specific instant. Only it's memory in people's minds and if people brought stuff to bootleg your performance, then a tape or phone will that performance ever exist in people's consciousness ever again. You could even announce it as such so as to alert people it's a never-again moment.

Another idea I had, and cheaper than the distributing the SP, is if you use tape in your production, then selling the absolute original master could be interesting, but I suppose that's been done before...? I know several pop stars that have recently passed have had some of their master tapes on loan and sold here and there...

To go along with the original SP idea...was a possibility of kind of an installation piece...where the original gear is used to perform the music, but it's played by a mechanical device triggered by midi recorded externally when you played it originally...I hope I explained that right...Like, the MIDI isn't in the gear, it's recorded externally (or exported?) and it's used to trigger a robot that triggers the pads. It could even bank switch and all that shit. I dunno jack about building robots tho, but it'd be pretty cool because any song could be played back by the listener by skipping tracks, but it's still played live by the robot and on demand as if they're listening to you play it (minus the intangible 'soul' element).

What you guys think about this?

This weird idea I think is the essence of the musical artform (and other temporal arts, dance, theatre etc, as opposed to the plastic arts, sculpure, painting) and highlights the strange place we've ended up since the invention of the phonograph.

Now, I'm hardly closed/minded, but in many ways the phonograph and recorded sound has gradually strangled the life out of music, when you think that music used to be everywhere performed live, by people, in places... then slowly but surely it got subsumed by the industry, professionalised, "Idol"-ised etc etc. The improv-arts keep music alive in many ways (the beat-box/cipher/circle as just one example) where the point is that it is a once-only-never-to-be-repeated experience. When I go to a gig I want to hear shit get switched up/juggled/changed around... I want my expectations to be fucked with and I want to be surprised, even risk being disappointed.

No-one can put the genie back in the bottle of course, and neither would I want to, çause making 'tracks', a definitive statement, a 'work' is cool too. I'm reminded of free-imprv guitarist Derek Bailey... late in his life he moved away from commercially produced cd's on his own Incus label and started selling CDrs of his music, in editions of one, with instructions to destroy the disc after first listen...