Want your love of music to live on past the grave? If donating to a local music program or other charity doesn’t do it for you, there’s an alternative. Your cremated ashes can be pressed into 1 – 30 vinyl records containing the audio of your choice, including your rant about how Nickelback really is a great band.
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Is pressing the ashes of the dead onto records an odd novelty or tender remembrance?
When it first made headlines in 2010, Jason Leach’s UK-based company And Vinyly – which presses the ashes of the deceased into vinyl records for loved ones wishing to hold onto their memory – appeared to be something of a macabre novelty. But there might be more to preserving the departed (quite literally) on records than first meets the eye – and ear.
“Hearing Madge” explores how Leach’s venture was given new meaning when he was approached by a man looking to save his mother’s recollections that he had recorded shortly before her death. Surprisingly touching, Andrea Lewis’s short documentary is both a profile of an unusual business and a thought-provoking contemplation of the ways we chose to remember the dead.
Doing this isn’t cheap. The basic package is about $3750 USD and gets you 30 copies of the memorial record, each of which contains some of the provided ashes.
H/T to A Journal Of Musical Things