Oswald’s Last Plea

The first band I was in, Oswald’s Last Plea, released our demo (and only release) in 1996. We did not play out a ton, as many of our peers did, yet still made a bit of an impact on the local scene.

In the boredom of the early days of the pandemic, I digitized all my old bands’ releases and put them up on Bandcamp to download for free. It was (and has been) wild seeing a different generation of people find the music and connecting to it so long after it was created.

Cut to 2021, and a person with a label in Russia (Polar Summer) reaches out saying he’d like to re-release a limited cassette version of the demo we released 15 years prior. Absolutely.

What made this project especially fun for me was that I didn’t lay out the original cut-and-paste artwork from the original run. Our singer, Jay, did. I think maybe at that point back then, I wasn’t the de facto “art guy” in bands yet. So, for this re-release, I re-worked many of the original elements, as well as creating new parts in the spirit of how it was originally conceived.