‘Strop’ Limited Edition – the rarest Battery 9 release

As we celebrate the release of the Battery 9 album ‘Strop’, just over 20 years ago, Paul Riekert muses on the making of the limited edition CD cover.

battery-9_strop-ltd-edition

“A month or two before the release of ‘Strop’, my friend Pieter Dreyer, an industrial designer (who played guitar in Joos Tonteldoos & Die Dwarstrekkers), showed me an idea he’d had for a CD album cover. He sculpted the design in clay and made a silicon mould, in which he poured a liquid polycarbonate resin he mixed and tinted, which set in a few minutes. He then popped it out of the mould – this thin, industrial grey plate, with a Battery 9 logo, looking like it was hewn out of a piece of rock, perfectly fitting a standard CD jewelcase. I loved it!

Tic Tic Bang, the record company, loved it too, and agreed to fund the manufacture of a limited number. I think it was 50 or so. I had four extra moulds made, and went into “production”, casting them myself. When distribution to the shops began, about a week before the official release, I got a call from the record company – “Could you make some more? They’re sold out.” And so it went for about a week, until I had cast 220 of those fuckers – and called a halt.”