Safety Valve

As I wrote in a previous post , I did some extensive audio restoration of an old live recording by Brainbombs, that eventually got published as an LP by the small American punk label Richie Records, in a limited run of 500 copies. Well, in the end, one of those copies made its way back to me as a thanks for my efforts, and I'm very glad for it. It is actually quite a strange feeling, to hold in my hand a vinyl disc that holds the same recording that I mailed to the States on a couple of master CD:s over a year ago. The main thing, I think, is that this is so obviously a finished artefact, while mostly everything else that I create tends to be of a very fluid and nonphysical nature: digital representations that one can always pick up later and resume working on. This one, however, is very much "done". (Yes, you could remaster it and cut new vinyls, but the point is that this particular record isn't going anywhere. And no, burning a CD does not give you the same feelin...

Over two years ago, I was handed an audio cassette containing a somewhat legendary live recording from 1993 by the Swedish underground rock band Brainbombs , at the notorious student society Smålands Nation (in Lund). The tape was entrusted to me by a friend (the illustrious David Liljemark) who also happens to be acquainted with the band, and it was a direct copy from the original DAT recording from the gig. From that you might expect that the sound quality was pretty decent. It was not. In fact, it was absolutely terrible. Lots of rumble and hiss, all volume levels at 11, bad microphones, awful acoustics, and on top of that, shoddy wiring caused several drop-outs, twice losing the entire left channel for a couple of seconds. And of course the levels varied during the gig, as the (probably drunk) person in charge of the sound equipment adjusted them back and forth. Considering that the actual performance consisted of lots of guitar feedback and heavy riffing (and occasionally some r...