suzanne ciani: voices of packaged souls

The inquisitive minds behind Pre-Cert Home Entertainment and Finders Keepers combine to bring you the results of some of their most subaqueous vinyl, tape and film excavations yet for this brand-new label: Dead-Cert. Taking the combined obsessions of all its collaborators and applying it to an intensive research model investigating vintage outsider music, sound sculpture, spoken word, ethnological documents, Art-Trash, early computer music, Neotantrik music, tape manipulation, non-pop and vinyl voyeurism, the label aims to investigate and recontextualize previously un-heard recordings from sources that transcend and eclipse the limitations of the record-collecting trend and the commercial music industry. All scheduled recordings are pressed on vinyl LPs mastered in accordance with the original creators' instructions and cut at the most relevant volume and playing speed, duplicated in modest quantities and housed in a variety of bespoke or homemade packaging, faithful to the original pressings. The first archival release on the label is a new pressing of an original vinyl run of around 50 copies only made in 1970 for an art gallery exhibition in Brussels documenting a sound sculpture collaboration between hard material artist Harold Paris and fledgling electronic composer Susan (Suzanne) Ciani. This original limited gift/art-artifact is officially the rarest tangible recording of Ciani's music, who is now recognized in the press as "The Delia Derbyshire Of The Atari Generation" on account of her groundbreaking developments in the commercial evolution of synthesizer music as one of a small number of female composers in the field. Paris created an original Mylar cover for the album, which is now an almost impossible-to-find collector's item. Ciani produced this, her first album, at radio station KPFA in Berkeley, CA, where she was given access to the tape machines from midnight until 6 AM, gratis. She owns only one copy of this work in its original vinyl form. Vinyl cut at Dubplates & Mastering and made in an edition of 1,000 copies only, housed in individually screen-printed silver foil sleeves faithful to the original pressing.