Thursday 16 January 2014

Renaldo and the Loaf - "Play Struvé & Sneff" (Rotcod Productions Rc1) 1979






Residents worship abound, in this slightly irritating ,over-clever ,everything but the kitchen sink tape collage-ish home recording,with silly voices atop. This is the tape that got them signed to Ralph, and the opportunity to make a Record with their heroes.

Brian Poole (aka Renaldo Malpractise)writes:
In all, about 250 copies of Struve and Sneff were made from 1979 to ( I guess) 1982 or 3. Each one was run off in realtime from the original master which was a 7" reel to reel 4 track tape made on an Akai 4000DS. The songs were mastered onto 2 tracks in one direction and we found an old improvisation going in the opposite direction on the other side. This sounded neat when it spun into and between the songs, so we kept it in.

The original copies were (invariably) recorded onto TDK AD tapes, the back 'spine' foldover should note this. But the labels stuck on the cassette will probably cover up the TDK logo leaving only the graphic stripes to identify it. I don't think any tapes were chrome .

The covers were photocopied onto different colour papers, after each batch of 10 tapes the colour would change. There was no record of the colour sequence except that the first 10 made were on golden yellow paper and the accent over the E of STRUVE on the spine foldover was accidentally left off. The next batch of 10 were on grey paper and the accent was put on. The cover was a folded sheet of (almost) A4, folded first lengthways then inwards into 4 panels. (Hope this is helpful, it's almost sounding archaeological !)

Track Listing:

A1
Meanings Of W.E.I.R.D.

A2
16 Going On 17

A3
Absence

A4
120 Before Zero

A5
Brittle People

A6
Dying Inside

A7
Kimbolton Gnome Song

A8
Bathroom Song

B1
Untitled

B2
Letters From Lee

DOWNLOAD Struve and Sneff HERE!

6 comments:

Jonny Zchivago said...

Theres a copy of this for sale now on eBay!
check it out:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=171231473167

Anonymous said...

Please remove this cassette from your blog. This cassette edition has been re-issued by Klanggalerie on CD and is still available as a legal download. Thanks.

Klanggalerie said...

Sorry, I wasn't meaning to stay anonymous - Walter Robotka here from Klanggalerie. Please remove. Thank you.

Jonny Zchivago said...

ok,walter robotka,as you askied so nicely. any freebies going as thanks?....probably not. remember if i t wasn't for us blogs all this stuff would have next to zero audience. I will delete this post in 24 hours.

Walter Robotka said...

Thanks! Don't worry, the audience for Renaldo & The Loaf is big enough. I don't have anthing against sharing out of print stuff, but stuff that is available is unfair. To the label and especially to the artists.

Judas Vigilante said...

I agree with johnny. I have heard of alot of obscure stuff and thanks solely to johnny, I,ll now probably buy this. I see you,re point Walter too as a musician myself. But honestly anything to help spread the word that was released in 79 on 250 cassettes must be good. There are lots of blogs and the like that suck the life out of artists and labels, but I,d say this one is doing the opposite. And for the record, I,m not a friend or family member of jz. Just applaud what he does most of the time.