The vinyl record is often seen as a traditional medium, a guarantor of certain acoustic purity if you will, but that doesn't mean we can't experiment with it. Quite the contrary! At the beginning of 2018 we shared a gallery of vinyls made with different materials and substances (some... from the human body), and one of them had three holes, with additional "sides". Today we found an even more complex version, which has six sides in total.
Investing in a vinyl (with sales that keep growing) goes beyond the musical. There's an emotional factor, and we can't discount physical possession, impossible with an MP3 or streaming. Moreover, improvements in manufacturing allow us to create discs that are nothing traditional. Some boast fabulous colors, others combine different materials. However, there's something equally rare: the vinyl with more than two "sides". Of course, we're bending the definition a bit, but it's more than reasonable to do so when we see this:
A Record with Six Sides
The disc belongs to American Monoxide, the personal project of experimental musician Dimitri Manos. It's a 16-minute composition that takes into account the limitations of the disc design. Every time the needle passes over an intersection, the speakers emit an extra sound, but the recording assimilates them as if they were part of it.
On this vinyl we find two normal sides, plus four more, with their grooves interlocked in a way similar to a Venn diagram. Playing each of those sides is a matter of using the correct hole, but you need an additional space of one inch (2.5 cm) around the platter, so the disc doesn't hit during its rotation.
A Tradition of Unusual Grooves
Now, we all agree that this is an unusual design, but placing grooves on a vinyl following alternative patterns is nothing new. For example, I'm sure Monty Python fans remember Matching Tie & Handkerchief. Its 1973 vinyl hides a "Side C", which in turn was inspired by a "puzzle vinyl" with a horse race: depending on the position where the needle was placed, three different horses could win.
Source: Reddit
Source: Another Monty Python Blog
