hearpen.com

PODCAST
Beginning Tuesday June 16, and then every other Tuesday an episode from Part 1 of Pere Ubu's ground-breaking project "Bring Me The Head Of Ubu Roi, The Radio Play" will be podcast. Click image to the left.

The cd "Long Live Père Ubu!" can be pre-ordered.

In North America click here (tba soon).

For the UK:
Cooking Vinyl Store
Play.com - best deal
HMV - almost the best deal
Amazon UK

What We Are

hearpen.com exists to sell soul. It's not merchandise. It's not content. It's called music. We offer downloads of recordings for which a commercial release is not deemed practical, as well as rarities, live recordings, limited releases, and anything else of note by Pere Ubu and bands related to Pere Ubu or Ubu Projex.

Be clear on this point: we're not fans of the download audio market as currently constituted. But, here we are living in the sort of world we live in. It's not our fault. It's your fault. You. Personally. You allowed this to happen. You are here looking for this sort of thing. You create the marketplace. We simply react to the marketplace.

How We Got To Where We Are

Download audio has constricted the marketplace. We must find our proper niche. That niche will be the place where we can control our output and offer it on terms that we can live with. It is not possible to enter into a commercial contract without negotiating download rights. It is intensely frustrating to hear sound that we've spent months meticulously constructing being reduced to a dog's dinner with lousy encoding ratios. If it's going to be out there we want it reproduced in such a way as to adequately convey the meaning of the sound. So we'll do it ourselves. Follow this link for a detailed explanation of the technical and aesthetic decisions made.

Every medium is a compromise but given the years we struggled under the extremist regime of Vinyl Production it's not a stretch to use the MP3 medium when the marketplace has made the commercial release of many kinds of music production effectively impossible.

So, for studio recordings we use the highest quality MP3 encoding possible. At the cost of relatively large file sizes, we can deliver a Quality Listening Experience to our customers. We wouldn't bother if we didn't believe it. We don't sell what we don't endorse. And there ARE some advantages to the medium from an artistic POV.

A Note on Sound Quality

It behooves you to check this link for our attitude towards live recordings. We toyed with the idea of rating technical sound quality, and soon gave it up. Clearly, cassette tapes from the 70s and early 80s - or any era - are not going to be hi fi experiences. If you want to hear Pere Ubu from the Pirate's Cove in 1976 it's going to be... ambient. That said, cassettes can yield pretty good quality. (See if you can spot the track from the Raygun Suitcase Director's Cut which is actually sourced from a cassette recording of an early test mix.)

The Physical Object vs. The Virtual Subject

In spite of running a virtual record company, we remain passionate about the aesthetic virtues of the physical object. We are therefore dedicating some effort to enabling the consumer to hand-make their own physical object from downloadable audio and artwork files. In 1975 Hearpen Records was one of the first of the DIY labels. It was gloriously amateurish - we hand assembled and glued together the record sleeves. We shlepped packages down to the post office. 33 years later the market has cycled round to the same place - the only difference is that now we get the record buyers to hand-make their own records and their own sleeves - that's what we call progress! (And there's no more shlepping!)

Hopefully all releases from approximately August 2008 will link to printable booklets and tray cards in a PDF format. (We've decided, for the moment at least, against providing printable art for releases which already exist in a cd format - for example, Dub Housing.) We have no experience of this process so feel free to comment on things we can improve on.

The Transaction Process

hearpen.com accepts major credit cards in payment as well as PayPal transactions. In most cases you have the option to buy individual songs or the entire album. Some songs are only available via an entire album purchase - these songs are marked with an "X" on the release page. After the purchase phase of your transaction you'll be presented with a page listing your downloads. Click on each song-link to initiate download. (This is a bit fiddly, we agree, but seems to be technically necessary at this point.) The links will expire after you've downloaded the files five times or 120 hours after your order is placed. The downloads will appear on your computer in your default download location. The filenames will be an alphanumeric sequence starting with "USKFA." Drag the files to your iTunes window or import into your MP3 player. Once imported the song files will display song titles, band names, proper running order, any artwork and album titles.

LIVE ALBUMS: They are presented in their original running order. We toyed with the idea of leaving in all between song noise, nothingness, talk and applause but given the increase in file size this would yield, and the various opinions on the value of this approach, we decided against it. Nevertheless, for some live releases, we have included some of the "better" ambient bits. You may want to set your MP3 player preferences to "gapless," according to your own tastes.

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Ubutique, etc.

Pere Ubu cds, t-shirts and misc items are available via mail order from Ubu Projex's sister company Ubutique, as well as Smog Veil, Cooking Vinyl and Glitterhouse.

NEW RELEASE:
Mirror Man Act 2
David Thomas & The Pale Orchestra

Pere Ubu Live Exclusives