Locked Grooves: Classic or Dud

you can't be serious that my favourite record has a locked groove i'm unaware of. i'm checking that when i get home tonight. i doubt it though. i've played that record all the way through without lifting the needle myself many times.

anyway, i'm surprised the classic locked groove on metal machine music hasn't been mentioned, the one sy sampled for "society is a hole."

Shame there's no obvious way to do this with CD 'hidden' tracks (except making them track zero). My copy of "Kid A" skips badly on the final track - the first time I played it I was semi-convinced it was deliberate tech-fuckery by Yorke & co - y'know, don't just sound a bit like Oval, actually *damage* the CDs on their way out of the manufacturing plant. I'd have been so much more impressed with Radiohead if they'd done that.

My copy of Ege Bamyasi has a cool skip in it right on the bass drum on one of the songs on the second side, but that's something else entirely...

I just found that Blast First comp in the used CD bin, and I thought I got a good deal. Now I know there's no locked groove, and I feel cheated!

Now that this thread has been revived, can I mention the Tigerbeat6 "$" trilogy of 7-inchers that came out a couple of months ago. Volume 1 at least has three or four locked grooves at the end of each side of the disc, which are arguably even better than what precedes. I didn't even realise they were there the first few times I played the record!

and Thomas Brinkman has a cd called Click in which he digs a groove into the end of various records and creates his own lock grooves which he then effects the fuck out of and records it. they actually sound like minimal techno tracks. perty cool

The first Black Dice 7" has one of weird noise.

One of my favorite encounters was on a skullflower 7"...
I lay there listening to that side of the record for a good 15-20 minutes before I began to wonder how much sound you could put on a 7". The record is etched w/ "it never has to end....."

On the annoying front, I think it's a stars of the lid record which has 2 tracks on one side, but the first is a lock-groove. I don't like getting up out of a mellow. Dunno...last track fine - first no.

does anybody know this fellow IRL? i bet he is an interesting guy.

oh yeah, on the front of the LP, he wrote RON (some squiggly lines)RON in felt tip pen!! i interpret this as the squiggly path of this record from one ron to another.

There are great locked grooves on the new Meerk Puffy LP. One in the middle of side two that takes a good long time to get noticed. Awesome drone/thud thud/beatz.

That'd be 'From Here to Infinity'...had a great etching (by Savage Pencil maybe?) on one side also. A friend of mine had a copy that I used to try to steal from him on a regular basis (that and his vinyl copy of Soul Discharge 99).

I have a great DJ Swamp battle record which features fifty locked groove breakbeats on each side of a double LP. I think it's called 'Neverending Breakbeats' or 'Timeless Breakbeats.' The label Shot did a couple of 'Techno Toolz' and 'Electro Toolz' 12s that are in a similar vein. Some of the grooves on Techno Toolz Vol. 2 are just begging for the Jeff Mills treatment.

The double LP that accompanied Richie Hawtin's 'Closer to the Edit' mix also may have featured a bunch of locked grooves. Either that or it just played a bunch of loops for about five minutes each. However, like Closer to the Edit, it is only interesting if you are not actually listening to it.

There was a 12" by Pan_sonic and Alan Vega from a few years back that had some really nice locked grooves on it. Better than the actual tracks on the record as I recall.

That would be Pagan Musak (1979?). I think the off-center holes were less for seasickness than for destroying your stylus and the record itself. Extra points as well for packaging the 7" in a 12" sleeve. I can't believe how much time I actually spent listening to this record way back when...

Bah, I drill extra holes in my shitty 7"'s - It makes even the FYS's 'She Drives Me Crazy' and the 1990 MTV various artists cover of 'Peace a Chance' extremely listenable.

I've fallen victim to the end of Evol as well, I remember thinking at the time "mmm, Sonic Youth can get onto a good drone when they want." Of course, this wasn't as retarded as having Faust's 'Krautrock' play four times through when I had the CD player on repeat...

How do inside out (or backwards -- you know, starts in the middle, moves toward the edge) locked grooves fit into this? I was just playing side two of a Gerhard Potuznuk electro-whatever EP called The 20th Door on Interdimensional Transmissions from 2000, and it took me forever to figure out what was going on. At first I just thought it was really, really repetitive, but then when I put the stylus down on the next track, it kept winding up back at the beginning. I don't think I've ever had any other records like that -- are many out there?

there was an LP edition of Spacemen 3's Dreamweapon that did that, but mostly it's a novelty thing I think... I also have one self-made acetate that plays that way.

Locked Grooves would be a cool band name

Classic, especially when they're done well like the one on Heaven 17's Penthouse and Pavement and that Def Leppard album. One of those things that just wouldn't be the same on CD. Having said that, hidden tracks/rewindies were the CD equivalent, I think.

not a locked groove but my copy of steve reich's Drumming has a really pleasing skip, timed perfectly with the phasing phrasing, so that a long period of time can pass before you notice it's skipping

The RRR record is brilliant. You could have it for 100 years and never heard everything on it, b/c it takes a microscope to find the same groove twice.

it is one of my favorite records, but it's not too hard to listen to individual grooves on it! i remember testing each one out the day i got it, one by one. i'm sure my housemates really loved it too that day

Went looking for this on eBay, found this..

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/PRIVATE-REGISTRATION-RRR-500L-MERC-FIAT-/121962396607?hash=item1c65867bbf:g:o0MAAOSwjVVVp2Hs

Strange that the opening post mentions Two Lone Swordsmen. Didn't they release a record of locked grooves (locked swords?) some time later?

Apologies if this has been covered elsewhere, but does listening to a locked groove for a long time negatively affect your needle? Like many of you upthread, I tend to let the lock groove play until I get tired of it (which usually takes a long time), wondering if this is fucking up my needle (which, on my turntable, is a major pain in the butt to change)

Every time you put a needle to a groove, it wears down the needle as well as the record that's playing... so I'd guess yes.

No more than playing (eg) 20 minutes of one side of an LP.

Then again, letting a turntable play the inner groove for ages don't atf wear out the inner groove!

One side of SPK Leichenschrei ended with

boom-bang-clank boom-bang-clank boom-bang-clank boom-bang-clank

The Joan Jett "Fake Friends" b-side "Nitetime" had a locked riff at the end. The 1992 CD reissue of Album adds "Nitetime" with an actual ending, then a dance mix of "Everyday People," then about 4 minutes of the "Locked Groove" with a slow fade out at the end.

Moses Boyd's Dark Matter has one at the end of side 4.

I've got a thing atm for puzzle plates, which I'm surprised go back as far as they do (a George V coronation record beating Monty Python in the 'where will the needle land' games by over 60 years),but one of my favourites, which is also one of the more distinctive, is this one

https://www.discogs.com/release/9938970-Claude-Hulbert-Limerick-Puzzle-Record

It's like a choose your destiny adventure except you don't get to choose

That limerick thing sounds cool!

Every track on Follakzoid's I album has a locked groove.

I wish more albums had locked grooves. I was thinking of this specifically in regard to Wolf Alice's Blue Weekend album, where the final track (The Beach II) ends with a bunch of glitchy synth nonsense that could have just droned on forever, imo.

how does that work? i've never heard of a puzzle record

shout out to house artist "locked groove", he did some bangers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5klvHscM5w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st7Go7p7SQw

which did not involve locked grooves, sadly

i've never heard of a puzzle record

Most of them are ancient 10" shellac 78s. They're multigrooved with each track on its own groove, so when the needle is placed on the record there is no telling which song is going to play. Having researched a bit (by which I mean looking at discogs, ebay listings, youtube) a lot of the oldest ones tell you the songs on each side, but then in the 20s and 30s there are some which play up the 'puzzle' element by saying quizzing things on the label like 'This side contains 3 tunes. Can you find them?', or ones which may list the songs in bulk but not tell you which side to find them on, that's for you to trial and error repeatedly.

The limerick one is the only one I can find so far to contain both and inner and outer grooves with their own parallel grooves. 'Puzzle' indeed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIPHT3R1Dsg

Some puzzle plates were also non-musical, instead being games with different horse racing or football results in the grooves and you play along with an accompanying playing card to see who will win, effectively like a board game. These were around in the 20s and 30s and then - as mentioned upthread - the horse racing style was revived as a proper board game in the 70s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRRsweVLv-c