March is tech month at the Flexibition and I’ll be featuring discs relating to music-making hardware over the next four weeks along with a special guest post. This week’s entry was a precursor to Joe Mansfield‘s beautiful book about drum machines, ‘Beat Box: A Drum Machine Obsession’, released for Record Store Day in 2013. The small 7″-sized, 20 page booklet comes with two flexi discs that feature Schoolly D tracks, ‘Gucci Time’ (Demo) and the classic, ‘PSK’, both remade on the Roland TR-909 by Mansfield.
Schoolly also narrates and highlights the various sounds of the machine in what comes across as the ultimate nerd-out instructional demo. The booklet is packed with photos, schematics and history relating to the famous drum machine in the same style as the book it accompanies and it’s one of the best designed flexis I own. The cover states that it’s volume.1 but as yet there don’t appear to be any more forthcoming aside from the 808 7″ featured with the deluxe edition of the book, let’s hope Joe at least manages to produce flexi’s of the DMX and the Linn at some stage too. You can still find copies of this beautiful item, try Rarekind Records in the UK or Turntablelab in the States.