BEYOND THE IMPLODE 3 - BRITISH AIRWAYS 0

Oh, fuck me - a wewwy ware power electronics EP! Wow, I guess I could get £60 for this on Discogs. Or rather, I could if I'd kept it in Mint, or even Excellent, condition. As it happens, I played it a lot, about 10 years ago.

You might have deduced from some of these pics that 'scuffed-up' is a recurring theme. It's not like a deliberate ploy to devalue records - but, let's be honest, who gives a fuck about 'devaluation' anyway? I'm not a record collector, I'm not gonna bother buying stuff that I don't want to listen to more than 20 times. This isn't some anal investment scheme; it's playing records I like!

It's a bit like Star Wars figures - I mean, yeah, if you'd kept them in their boxes, they'd be worth £50 or whatever now. But what's the fucking point? I didn't know anyone at junior school who didn't have a C3PO figure without the limbs totally borked, cos they'd been twisted, removed and reapplied so many times. At least the brats got some use out of them. Better than just keeping them sealed in some vacuum-packed purgatory, so you can sell them to losers on eBay in 20 years' time.

So, yeah...a rare record that's got one too many crackles to please yer average Austrian power electronics hoarder (don't mean to be racist, but there's a bloody lot of them on eBay, aren't there? And they're always quite rude on email). As BTi Blog pointed out previously, the bottom's fallen out of the industrial music market, and prices are spiralling down the toilet at an unprecedented rate. I doubt an Extra Virgin Mint copy of The Hand of Glory would realistically go for more than £25 these days, so fucks my chances of retiring off the back of such a 'rare' item.

If you haven't heard it, Side B sounds like a lunatic howling down an asylum air vent. It's pretty good actually, even if it's heavily Whitehouse-influenced. Well, you know as far as these things go. Scab a copy of this and you can easily dismiss 99% of the rest of the genre, at least Ramleh did it with a hint of menacing class. Then again, apparently it's been reissued recently on 12" - so, in terms of devaluation, how's it faring now? Can I get £8 for this already?