Requiem for a record label

Although not billed as a limited edition the fate of the newly released 'Klaus Tennstedt: the great EMI recordings' must surely be a racing certainty. There can be no reason not to buy it today for around £25 unless every one of the fourteen CDs, which includes Ein deutsches Requiem, is already in your collection. While in France I read the recently published 'Nick Drake: the Pink Moon Files', a compendium of writing about Nick edited by Jason Creed. The subject of the 1975 obituary by David Sandison quoted below may have been an English folk rock singer, however the message is both timeless and universal.
But in a world full of bullshit, hype, and glittery horrors with the talent of dead oxen and the integrity of starving rats, Nick Drake was a man of sincerity, an artist of tremendous calibre and one of the few entitled to be called unique. But what the hell do they care?
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Comments

Andrew Morris said…
It does smack of desperation on the part of the Big Beasts, though it was pipped by Sony’s reissue of Stravinsky’s recordings of his complete recordings a few years ago – 22 CDs for just over £20. I looked at it in the shop and considered that a) I already had some of the volumes in Sony’s more attractive previous issue; b) I will never listen to them all; c) as much as I would like it to be, my house is not an archive and I can’t own all of the milestones of recorded history. Having spent some time working for a Huge Music Vendor straight out of university, my love of boxed-set was dulled by over exposure and I much prefer the idea of coming across an individual volume of Stravinsky or Tennstedt tucked away in a charity shop or Grammex.
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