Old Art Never Dies
How a record that flopped over thirty years ago got a new life on the internet
In 1987 I released an album of original music.
It was an electronic/space-rock concept album, very ambitious for a 21 year old working in a home studio in his parents garage. I was convinced that I was Canada’s answer to Pink Floyd and Tangerine Dream. This album was going to be the beginning of a long and brilliant career. I had locked myself in that studio for months and dreamed my dreams and laid down my sonic brushstrokes on 12 channels of half inch analogue tape in order to be a part of rock history.
Apparently, the world was not ready for my particular brand of genius.
I knew nothing at all about the workings of the music business. I sent out copies of the album with a finely crafted cover letter to my favourite record labels; Capitol Records, Elektra, MCA, Island, Virgin. . . any of the labels that I found on the back of my favourite records. I was certain that one of them would hear my vinyl masterpiece and aggressively claim me before anyone else could.
My heart sank like a stone with each rejection letter I got. I still have a few of them as a reminder. I told myself at that time, “this shit is hard, you are not special”.
I did what I could to sell and promote the record locally, I managed to get it played a few times on local radio, but I was not known and I was not connected, so once I had sold a couple of hundred to friends and family and curious buyers at the local record shops I was done. It was time to move on to bigger and better projects and chalk that one up to experience.
Over the years I continued to write, perform and record under a variety of names. I also started a second career as a filmmaker. I have continued to produce music and films to this day.
But the short lived story of my first album was surprisingly not over.
One day around 2017 (30 years after making the album), I received an email from a person asking if I was the guy that produced the album “Cybernation: The Dark Plane”. This guy was a collector and he was hoping that I still had some copies. I told him that I thought I might but I would have to check - many years back I had thrown out almost all of the remaining boxes of that record to make room in my storage, about 700 copies in total. I had to actually check to see if I had kept a box for posterity. Well, it turns out I did still have two boxes of 25 left in storage.
I decided to go online and Google the album to see what came up. I immediately found a used copy of the album that had sold to a guy in Texas for $175 USD! I was stunned. . .WTF is happening here?
I did some more searches and found a few more albums that had all sold for over $100 a pop. I also found the album listed on a few different collector sites as a very rare and sought after Canadian electronic music album. I was once again stunned.
Then I started getting more emails from different parts of the globe.
All sorts of people were telling me they loved the album and wanted a copy of their own. This was starting to feel like my own weird little version of “Searching For Sugarman”. Now to be fair, it was not a massive flood of people, but enough people to qualify as a small resurgence of this old record I had made and forgotten about 30 years ago.
Then I was contacted by a record seller that not only wanted to sell whatever remaining copies I had, but also wanted to add a track to a compilation album of retro electronic music. We struck a deal and he sold every one of my remaining albums to collectors for $100USD each. Records that I could not give away 30 years ago.
I had made thousands of dollars from a couple of boxes of albums that had been gathering dust in my closet for decades.
It was at this point that the idea of a re-issue became very feasible. I had received offers already from a few different indie record labels, but being that I have my own record label I thought that I may be better off doing it myself. I had digitized the old analogue multitracks of the album and I got to work on remixing and remastering the old recordings for a fresh release. I also began working on new artwork.
Unfortunately it was right about this time that the pandemic hit, the lockdowns happened and my world turned to shit. I could not get any work, I was going through my savings and the idea of putting out thousands of dollars to manufacture a re-issue was way too high risk.
So the re-issue died right in its tracks.
Until now.
I have recently received another offer from an indie label to do a re-issue and they are willing to allow me a degree of creative control over the final product.
I will say it again; old art is never dead. I thought this album was obsolete, not just once, but twice. Yet I still get emails regularly from people around the world who want it and I get offers from labels who see the value in a re-issue. All of this from an album that I thought was a very weak effort, an album that I still cringe when I hear certain parts of it, but for whatever reason it resonates with people to this day.
Never give up on your art. Put it out there and let the world decide if they want it or not.
It may take years or decades before they make that decision. . .Be patient.
If you enjoyed this, here’s another great story of old art from Will Kelly:
Well, most of my favorite visual artists only became famous many years after their deaths.. UGGG, It's all about society conditioning.. not about death of course.. so don't worry about that correlation. Obviously here you are and your work is getting noticed, and actually was all along.. Where can we listen to it? Another great post btw.
is this you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCxG4dGrgeE
absurd machine records? I am listening to tracks 8 and 9
time slips by so slowly now!... All this time and you didn't know people have been playing your music