splitsecondfeeling

Margit Carstensen

Margit Carstensen

Virgin Prunes - Bau-Dachöng (2023 Remaster) (Official Visualiser)

40th Anniversary Edition of '...If I Die, I Die (40th Anniversary Edition)' - OUT NOW

This 40th Anniversary Edition of the album sees a full remaster housed in a Limited Edition Special Finish Gatefold Sleeve on Transparent Vinyl. This Deluxe LP also comes with a 16 page booklet featuring sleeve notes by Dr. Jonathan Wood exploring the writing, recording and production of the record. Plus an exclusive 12x12 Art Print. The album is also available as 2CD Mediabook & Digital Deluxe.

The album was recorded at the Windmill Studios in Dublin in the summer of 1982 and produced by Wire’s Colin Newman. Rather than adopt an A/B format, the sides of the 1982 vinyl and album cover, which was designed by Steve Averill, were given brown and blue colours, signalling earth and sky respectively. The art work on each side of the sleeve was also inverted so that either side could be read as the front cover. Ursula Steiger’s photography captured, on the brown side, the band running through a forest like a nomadic tribe. On the blue side we then find them in different costumes, performing with fire and mannequins within a derelict building.

If I Die, I Die contains nine tracks. The brown side is evocative of distant mystical lands and brings to mind Iroquois culture. It features ‘Ulakanakulot’ (referring to ‘the imaginary land of the Kuli Bird from where the Beautifull People come’), ‘Decline and Fall’, ‘Sweethome Under White Clouds’ and ‘Bau-dachöng’ (meaning ‘secret inner wisdom’). The blue side showcases the slow and frenzied paces of their music, while highlighting the ways their highly visceral songs switch subjects and registers from the ancient and historical, to the social tensions and dysfunctions of a late twentieth-century present. It features ‘Baby Turns Blue’ (which was a very successful Indie single), ‘Ballad of the Man’, ‘Walls of Jericho’, ‘Caucasian Walk’ and ‘Theme for Thought’, which includes spoken passages of Oscar Wilde’s poem ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’

BOR-T69 by Nick Schleicher, 2019