Monthly Archives: March 2013

In the Works – Black Tango’s Album Reissue

The first Normal Heights Records project is a re-issue of the 1986 cassette-only release of Black Tango‘s 7-song album, Maggots in the Icing. If all goes well, the album will be available via all the digital outlets (iTunes, AmazonMP3, etc.) and Amazon CD On-Demand in mid-April 2013.

The tracks were recorded at Normal Heights Studios from January through March, 1986. A Tascam 38 half-inch 8-track recorder was used, mixed on a Studiomaster 12-2c mixing desk, with a few external effects — delay, reverb and compression. The DX drums were synced on one track and recorded direct to the stereo cassette master.

Analog to digital conversion was performed using the original stereo cassette master. Other than typical normalization, no changes were made to the overall sound.

Nearly all the original cassette sleeve artwork will be incorporated into the new CD sleeve design, with the addition of a few photos from the period.

Artifact Dating Tool Added

Ever find yourself digging through old flyers, ads, photos and other old artifacts, and things dated like Saturday, April 27  turn up? And you scratch your head wondering what year that was in? You can fiddle around with your computer’s calendar to figure it out, but that can be time consuming.

A handy tool has been added to this site that lets you quickly see a list of years in which any DAY MONTH DATE combination occurs. Give it a try — it’s on the TOOLS menu.

Let’s Get Started

Normal Heights Records is a new record label based in San Diego. The focus is on the post-punk era in this region, roughly 1979 to 1989. The aim is to get currently unavailable material out via streaming, downloads, and CD on-demand.