35 minutes, 32 seconds

Lucus
Cantiones Filicatae

More fun with the anniversary of the CD. (And, yes, I'm shamelessly trying to wring out as many posts as I can from this topic.) Yesterday's New York Times arts section featured a blurb titled "Happy Birthday, CD" in which it stated (citing the BBC as its source) that the first CD to be pressed was not, in fact, Billy Joel's 52nd Street but rather Abba's The Visitors. And that it was manufactured at the Philips plant near Hanover, Germany, on August 17, 1982.

This jibes with Wikipedia's entry on the history of the CD, However, it doesn't match what Philips states on its own Web site, which is that the first CD to be pressed was a recording of Herbert von Karajan conducting Richard Strauss's Alpine Symphony.

So where does Sony get off citing 52nd Street as the first CD? Maybe it was the first one the company released on its CBS/Sony label, but not necessarily the first CD pressed. And maybe Sony merely elides over that fact in an effort to puff its chest over rival Philips.

In any case, I'm not about to get all Encyclopedia Brown on you. Suffice it to say that one of these three recordings was the first CD pressed. And I promise this is the last post on the subject. Tomorrow, back to writing about obscure recordings that neither Sony nor Philips would ever have allowed on their factory floors, much less pressed into CDs.

Also today:

35:31 Pimentola & Dead Man's Hill, Pimentola & Dead Man's Hill
35:23 Vomito Negro, Shock
35:22 Lycia, Wake
35:19 Cocteau Twins, Blue Bell Knoll
35:19 Kill Memory Crash, When the Blood Turns Black