sound library

condition (record/cover): NM / VG (humidity traces on back)

Philips pressed this in the early 1970s to sell headphones, and a stranger commercial object is hard to imagine. It is a demonstration record with no music to demonstrate, or almost none: instead, staged binaural scenes, a barber's scissors circling the skull, a train crossing from ear to ear, rain on a roof, a hairdryer, voices whispering from behind. The idea was that a customer would put on a pair of Philips cans in a Kaufhaus listening booth and be startled into a purchase.

Fifty years on, with the sales pitch gone, what remains is a piece of accidental sound art, closer to Alvin Lucier or to the Hörspiel tradition than to anything else on the Philips catalogue that year. Play it on headphones, obviously, and note how well the localisation still works. One of the sound library entries in this sale that is fun rather than merely useful.