MU - Press Kit (1971) + Promo Video (1987)

There is no vinyl restoration in conjunction with this blog post, because one is not needed; the MU album (and successive Hawaiian sessions) have already been reissued from the tapes by Sundazed with excellent sound quality (Discogs link here / Rockasteria link here). However, I felt it necessary to share these scans of the demo kit, which was sent with some white-label promo copies of the LP, since they are very cool to see and provide some interesting reading. 

Simultaneously, I am providing a digital transfer of the MU (pronounced like "moo") / Merrell Fankhauser promotional VHS tape, which was manufactured in 1987 but contains some nice footage of the band from 1972-1974. Towards the end of the tape is Fankhauser's music video for "Don't Give Up The Rock," which is a bit cringe... but the MU stuff at the beginning/end is great, and some home-video-quality Maui shoreline is included to nice effect.  

You can click on the photos below to bring up the full-screen versions for easier viewing & reading.

The original promo VHS tape was transferred to DVD at XP speed using the equipment outlined below. The video was then ripped losslessly to MKV, and deinterlaced using the YADIF method (mode=1) with ffmpeg. The original audio of the video consists of studio-recorded tracks with some minor edits. For this project, two different audio streams have been muxed into an MKV container with the deinterlaced video stream. The first (and thus default) audio stream is a lossless WAV with the audio reconstructed from master-tape CDs, where available, and offers the superior sound quality, and is in stereo; the second audio stream is that which was originally included on the DVD untouched, and seems to be in mono. For YouTube I upsampled the video to 1080p in order to minimize reencoding artifacts; the video file shared here is at the original 480p resolution (originally 480i). 

Video tracks:

1) "Nobody Wants To Shine"

2) "One More Day"

3) "The Land Of MU"

4) "Make A Joyful Noise"

5) "Children Of The Rainbow"

5) "Don't Give Up The Rock"

6) "Calling From A Star"

Video lineage:
- VHS machine: Toshiba W-605
- DVD Burner: Panasonic DMR-E80H (at XP speed)
- DVD ripped to lossless MKV using MakeMKV v1.16.3
- ffmpeg (with options -vf yadif=1 -preset slow -crf 16 -c:a copy)
- MKVToolNix (splitting off beginning/end, de/muxing audio)

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MEGA: https://mega.nz/folder/R0JTVK4b#N6UqybEN21qOZj8RiV1U5Q

Enjoy! :)

 

Promo photo, horizontally flipped to match album cover orientation. (Colorized)