There’s the sound that creates loyal record listeners, but the album artwork, and the physical object of the record itself, are also creators of record devotees. The album artwork became a language of symbols, standing in for the names of albums, the songs they contained, the band, and events that occurred, for which they had been part of life’s soundtrack. The LPs themselves had to be carefully handled, held by the edges in open palms and the track selected by angling your line of vision until the light caught that thicker line separating songs.
The song, Down Boy, was performed by Bobbie Gordon, an up and coming singer/songwriter, and produced by Kele Okereke, frontman for Bloc Party. Gordon performed the piece at a release party where the limited edition album was also for sale. Having an in depth understanding of what makes records so appealing meant they couldn’t short the album artwork, and so they released four sleeves designed by London based art director and illustrator Kate Moross.
The record itself was printed on a Stratasys Objet500 Connex Multi-material 3D printer using Amanda Ghassaei’s algorithm that converts the audio data into the 3D geometry data. More than a gigabyte of data is required to print an entire song, and so the album is printed as the standard 12” LP, while still being a single. Ghassaei admits that the resin residue of printed albums will ruin a turntable’s needle, but enthused: “It’s really cool to kind of push the technology and see what you can get out of it.”
“It’s really stripped down, it’s down to the bare essentials. It’s never going to be as good as vinyl. It’s not really set up for that. But, it’s cool because you can really be creative with it.”
The 3D printed albums are thicker and stiffer, more like the old-school 78s than the latest version of vinyl recording, and it may be that 3D printing never becomes the standard way of releasing albums. It wouldn’t be at all that surprising, however, if this is just the first step down a pathway that will lead to something amazing in its own right.
Would you like to be able to listen to a 3D printed record? Do you think this will ever become the norm? Discuss in the 3D printed record forum thread on 3DPB.com