Remember the days when you’d sit with a CD, or record in hand, studying the artwork and digging deep into the liner notes, credits and any other accompanying detail to do with the record? Now, the majority of people are getting to the point where an album or track is played within a playlist, often on their phone, without seeing any accreditation at all - not even a label name is visible unless on the artwork, let alone the people who were behind the creation of the record. Today’s consumption of music is fast-paced and shallow, and it’s why ASIP focuses on physical objects and the presentation of music.
We’ve always preferred to create gatefold records for this reason, giving even more focus to the artwork and making it a piece to study and hold, and where possible I’ve always tried to encourage artists to add any text or elaborate on their record, but that isn’t always easy or wanted.
Moving forward, however, we’ve created a new way to inject more context and story behind the record. Each release, starting from ASIPV022 (also including ASIPV021 & ASIPV018 which were delayed) will have a separate piece of thick-stock paper with printed liner notes. It will be placed into one of the sleeves (outside of the poly-sleeve). These liner notes will come from the label’s perspective.
Why the label’s perspective? Because it offers consistency and is in my hands to create instead of hoping other artists are OK to contribute - more often than not, they want to focus on the music!
Each liner note will consist of four sections which, by chance (or not…) make up the ASIP acronym.
A - Art - the story behind the artwork, why it was chosen, what was the brief etc.
S - Story - how artist and label came together, was it a demo, how did they meet etc.
I - Insight - an interesting, or deeper detail about the release or artist you might not otherwise have found out.
P - Press - I thought it would be interesting to document the actual press of a record (manufacturing) where possible. Sometimes this might be very boring (with a successful press) but others might express some added pain, adventure and learnings.
If you find yourself wanting to post any of these physical liner notes online, I’d like to very kindly ask you not to. So you won’t find them online with any of my doing at least. They are meant to be received and read by the listener with the record in hand. I have an ambition that one day I can pull them all together and document each release in a book or something to help chronicle the label.
Now, going against exactly what I just said… but (blurred a little), below, you’ll find a sample of what to expect.
