Jaap Vink – Jaap Vink

The easiest 5 stars one can give for a record. Outstanding and then some.

It's so ridiculous to re-release such a masterpiece on vinyl, it's totally counterproductive. This music with such extreme frequencies cannot be listened to other than in CD! But try to make Mego understand this .. And this goes for the whole series recollection, shame and pose.

Don’t expect typical electroacoustic music with this release: instead, the pieces it compiles are similar to Roland Kayn’s cybernetic music, meaning constantly flowing masses of continuously morphing electronic sound, often with a dark and alien atmosphere. Vink worked with Kayn for a while, so the similarity is not surprising. His music, however, was not made the same way as Kayn’s: while Kayn produced his cybernetic music by programming networks of electronic equipment and not interfering with the compositional process after starting the program, Vink improvised in the studio and then worked these recordings into final pieces.

In my opinion Kayn’s cybernetic works have more depth, power and variety than Vink’s music, but that’s not to say this double LP isn’t very good! I’d love to see more releases by Vink, assuming he made more music than what’s featured here, of course.

About the pressing: I cleaned my copy before playing it, and track 1 on side A still has some flaws, but it’s nothing really serious. The rest of the album is nearly completely free of clicks and pops.

Another poor quality pressing from this label with scratches on 2 sides. This music and the composers deserve better!

A bit of research shows that these are the correct playing speeds and running times, so it certainly was an "interesting" decision to cut three of the sides at 45. Maybe it was possible because the original masters had a relatively restricted frequency range but that's speculation.

The run-out grooves say sides A, B and C play at 45 but there's no way the track lengths listed would fit at that speed, so I assume it's a mistake.

I'd like to know why it was cut at 45. Seems like a strange decision to me.

Would have been better on CD. This is my third and final release from this label I will buy. They've all been lousy pressings.

How's our pressings on this? Noticed it took three test pressings on side A alone.