On December 12th we released the latest Obliq Recordings record.  This was the inaugural 7″ in a series of four celebrating the Earth’s wobble by my latest project, Chillout Enforcement Crew.  We have been wanting to release  a flexible record or lathe cut for a while, and so this idea hit me.  Why not do another floppy diskette release?

For those not in the know, back in 2000 my other project Multicast released Sympathen, a limited edition of 300 7″ records in a retro floppy diskette–the single from our forthcoming LP Rural Sessions.  That time was the height of electronic music distribution, and the unique packaging sold this release out immediately; mostly to Europe.  We really had fun with the design of that release, so I decided to research to see if we could pull that off again, this time in a very limited run.

I looked around for the contact information from the manufacturer of the 8″ floppy diskettes (they were new from a firm still making them for mainframes, but they were trash from being tested for Quality Assurance, so I worked a discount!), but I couldn’t get a hold of that firm anymore.  I ended up finding a vintage computer collector on Etsy that had some for sale.  Luckily he was cool as I told him about our project and he sent me four different manufacturers in quantity of 25 each!  Perfect for our “Earth’s Wobble” four seasons theme.  They also came with cool original blank sleeves so I could print upon them!

For the design, I downloaded some free fonts with an arcade style vibe.  I ordered some small labels and laser printed the design on them.  I used one label for the diskette label (like old-school diskettes had) and then another for the back of the picture disk record.  I used a rubber stamp that we made for the original floppy release so we could have some consistency between the 17 years between releases on our label.  I decided to stamp on the sleeve and also on the back of the record.  Finally I found a nice gold outlined sticker tab at a local craft shop for the write protection, which will seal the record inside the floppy and retain the 80s vibe I was looking for.

Looking forward to the next three releases, all earmarked for 2018!