Boris released präparat on March 6, 2013, exclusively on vinyl. As shown in the images attached to the release, there are no printed track times, so tracks were split by vinyl rippers in the ways that they thought made sense for listening, and distributed this way on the Internet via BitTorrent, forums, etc. Boris finally made the album available on a digital format for the first time this past Friday, October 2, by releasing it for download on their Bandcamp page.
We can see that the original vinyl release has track lengths entered based on the owner’s discretion (edit #21310280). On the digital release, there are many differences in track length, especially for most of side B (tracks 6–11).
The biggest differences are due to perforated line and コップの内側 -castel in the air-. “perforated line” is primarily a 34-second-long instrumental piece; it’s a sort of shoegaze-inspired, lo-fi, noisy jam. This is followed by around 7 seconds of an electronic beat that abruptly ends. I’ve heard several vinyl rips of this album and the rippers have always split these tracks so that the electronic beat section is either the end of “perforated line” or the beginning of “castel in the air.” Either way, “castel in the air” was an instrumental song, just over 2 minutes long, followed by mirano – one of only 2 songs on the album that features prominent vocals. On the digital release, that electronic beat is actually a 7-second-long “castel in the air,” and mirano becomes the 2.5-minute-long instrumental song, making the following track カンヴァス -canvas- the song now featuring vocals.
I’m bringing this up here because with these track length discrepancies, some of the performance relationships attached to these recordings are now incorrect according to the digital release. “mirano” doesn’t have vocals, “canvas” doesn’t have gong, and now the final track maeve does feature guitars.
I would fix this by clearing all track lengths from the vinyl release and adding/removing relationships from the recordings based on the digital release because I believe that the digital release is now the “correct” version as Boris intended. The track lengths on the vinyl release were manually entered by a user and thus unofficial. So I’d change mirano to [No lyrics] and remove the lyricist, change カンヴァス to Japanese and add the lyricist, remove vocals from Takeshi on the “mirano” recording, and so on.
Do you guys agree that this is the way to solve these problems?