Aidan Moffat has announced details of his last ever L. Pierre record, set for release in April. You can check out a teaser video above.
The record, entitled 1948- , will be released exclusively on ‘naked’ vinyl with no sleeve. Moffat explains his decision to release the record in this way as "a self-destructive dialogue on the value of music and its new platforms, culture’s cyclical nature, the supposed death of the album – and the seeming immortality and inherent nostalgia of vinyl".
He continues: "I don’t want a pristine, digital document that could last forever; I want the music left to the elements, I want it to live and scar, with each record’s acquired crackles, pops and scratches making them unique and identifiable to their owners. And while the natural thing to do with a naked record is protect it, I think it could be interesting to see how folk respond when we hand that responsibility over. Also, the sleeveless LP will look like one of those dusty, vulnerable strays you find in charity shops, which is precisely where L. Pierre began."
All samples used on the record are taken from Nathan Milstein’s version of a Mendelssohn concerto, which was released on the very first 33 1/3rpm long-playing 12” record in 1948. The samples were all ripped from a YouTube upload of the recording of Milstein’s piece.
The record ends with a locked groove, which Moffat says adds "another wee element of interaction – the album won’t stop until the listener decides it should (which also works as an analogy for the resilience of vinyl in our digital age). And because the death of the album is proclaimed every few months these days, I wanted it to sound like a sort of ironic requiem. The title’s an unfinished tombstone with no date of death: 1948 – .
Below you can find a scan of the original letter Moffat sent to Melodic, which accompanied a dubplate demo of the full LP. The record will be released on April 28 and can be pre-ordered here.
