Line Out Music & the City at Night

Slog

News & Arts

@SEAshows
Twitter feed of Seattle shows on sale now

« New Justin Bieber Video, Guys, and&… | J.Pinder Leaves Seattle »

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

Gear How About a Totem With That Album Download?

Posted by Dave Segal on Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 11:33 AM

If you're a hardcore Matthew Dear fan with much disposable income, you may be interested in this item that's accompanying the techno producer's new Black City album (discussed on Line Out yesterday). Ghostly International is offering, for the reasonable price of $125 (plus shipping), a totem designed by Constantin and Laurene Boym of Boym Partners, which holds a code that allows purchasers access to matthewdear.com for downloads and streams to Black City from any computer. This is taking "tangibility" in the music industry's digital age to a new level of extravagance—well, except for Merzbow's Noisembryo disc, which came sealed in the CD player of a BMW.

The MDBC Totem is both a sculptural representation of the themes explored in Black City and a symbolic conduit to the music itself. Vaguely reminiscent of one of the soot-blackened skyscrapers that might populate Dear's creeping, nameless city, the stacks upon the totem also call to mind the many shaped prongs of a universal power adaptor. In this sense, the totem is not simply a miniature building, but an abstract key to an unknown door. The branding of the totem has been purposefully reduced to its bare essentials only the letters MDBC and unique four-digit suffixes are included so that the totem's meaning remains discernible only to its beholder.

Hurry—quantities are limited to 100. Oh, Dear...