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.
“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.”