Paper + Plastick Records have issued an interesting update summing 2012 and presenting some of the most original releases they had last year. Take some time with us and take a look and these fancy formats and cool ideas how to put out a record.
Hello everyone! We hope that you all had a rad new year’s celebration and a fun holiday break. We are getting settled back into our warehouse this week, shipping you guys all the awesome shit you ordered during our 12 Days of Christmas sale, and we wanted to take this moment to shed a tear and look back on some cool stuff we did in 2012. We included a few things below which we felt were our personal highlights, and maybe something you guys might have missed, so check this all out, and we hope everyone has a great 2013!
We used two screen-printed mirrors for the front and back covers of Jr. Juggernaut’s Wake instead of a normal LP jacket sleeve.
We put out Jr. Juggernaut’s sophomore LP, Wake, on August 28. For the physical vinyl product, we decided to do one of our craziest packages yet. Instead of housing the vinyl record in a typical paper LP jacket sleeve, we screenprinted hundreds of 12″ x 12″ mirrors to serve as the front and back covers. What you see above is the front – if you hold it up to your face, you can see your own reflection in that creepy old baby man’s face. And don’t blame me if the pictures look weird, have you ever tried to take a picture of a hand-screened mirror? It’s hard.
We made a cool Flatfoot 56 insert and paired it with baseball cards and pennants.
Flatfoot 56’s record is definitely one of the best we released in 2012, but we were also stoked to bundle up some cool packaging with the sweet music. The Chicago-based Celtic rockers are big baseball fans, so we made baseball pennants and cards into a package bundle. We also made unique baseball jerseys – limited to 56 – which had the names of the people who ordered them on the back. You can’t get those jerseys anymore, but you can still purchase a vinyl / pennant / cards pack if you want.
We put actual fucking coffee grounds into a record.
We put out Anthony Raneri’s solo EP, New Cathedrals, back in the early part of summer. The record had already come out digitally, but we wanted to give it a special vinyl treatment and we did so by putting real coffee grounds into the wax. It was a clear record so you could see the coffee, and it smelled like coffee too! We don’t have any more of that variant left, but you can still pick up the 12″ in our store.
We released our first cassettes.
We actually released quite a few cassettes this year! We put out Foreign Tongues’ self-titled EP on cassette and then Sparrows’ Goliath EP. But the two most recent releases are The Dopamines’ brilliant LP, Expect The Worst, which is available now for the first (and last) time on cassette tape. We also are doing Junior Battles’ new two-song EP, Wow, That’s Really Cool!, but that actually hasn’t even been announced yet! Congrats on you getting some insider info.
We released 20 sets of specially screened records for The Fest (but then they came out on Black Friday).
These aren’t available anymore at all, since we only released 20 for Black Friday, but this was still one of our favorite projects so we wanted to include it. This was a set of six different records that got special screened jackets, and the backs combined to make this image. Someone even sent us a picture of the jackets on his wall, and they look rad!
We reissued Red City Radio’s To The Sons and Daughters of Woody Guthrie EP on a bunch of weird-colored records with a screen-printed B-side.
I don’t know why that picture is facing that direction, but I can’t fix it, so there you go. This is Red City Radio’s first EP, which we repressed in a few different colors and the B-side is this awesome image from the cover art. These are still available.
Cool, huh? :)
