Proposal

Corpus Companion is a system for creating a complete Companion body of work, based on the parameters of an Original body of work.

Background and Procedure

The American band Nirvana was active from 1987 until Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994. I will use its body of work as the example for Corpus Companion’s working procedure, as it is well-known, well-documented, and “complete” (ie no additional material will be created).

Nirvana’s Audio / Visual discography includes:

3 Studio albums

3 Live albums

4 Compilation albums [mostly preexisting material]

3 Box sets [mostly preexisting material]

2 EPs

11 Retail singles

8 Promotional singles

3 Splits [with other artists]

8 Music videos

6 Video albums [Inclusive of live concerts]

… as well as a large collection of (for lack of a better term) apocryphal material such as demos, home-recorded cassette tapes, and concert bootlegs, some of which have been released in post-1994 albums or leaked online.

Naturally, we will run into some grey areas here; such as 3rd-party artwork which was specifically commissioned by Nirvana for use in official releases. Also in question are materials such as official correspondence (both personal and legal), interviews, and works which were created but remained unused (such as alternate cover photos for Nevermind featuring a female baby).¹

Along with this, a massive amount of promotional material (such as posters, T-shirts, and other merchandise) was — and still is — created in support of the band, by non-members of Nirvana (but are inclusive or derivative of their works). There also exists a parallel and ongoing stream of criticism, analysis, and documentation specifically instigated by Nirvana’s work… which I am considering a distinctly separate entity.²

For the sake of expediency, in this example I will be limiting the concept of Nirvana’s “body of work” to the list of A/V materials detailed above.

A Single Work

Once we have limited Nirvana’s body of work in this way, additional questions arise as to the variation in medium and intratextual aspects of a single work. I will use Nevermind as the example here.

The Discogs master page for Nevermind lists 360 separate versions(!) of this album; covering international releases (which sometimes have different record labels or distributors), different formats (such as cassette, CD, vinyl, or digital), promos for radio stations, and even sketchy bootlegs.

Polish bootleg cassette of Nevermind from Acomp records. Note the track titles.

This dizzying variety of releases creates variance in the musical and artistic content of the work itself:

Some releases end with Something In The Way, without including the 10-minute silence and “secret song” Endless, Nameless. Digital versions tend to include this song as a discrete track, but without the 10-minute gap. Cassette tape versions include different amounts of silence to even out the length of the sides — and some (presumably) might include the test tones common to cassette manufacture at that time. More recent Deluxe, Super Deluxe, and Anniversary editions include an enormous amount of additional material — sometimes eclipsing the total runtime of the original album. Remastering, format-specific mastering (such as for vinyl), and different digital encoding formats change the character and technical aspects [such as the avg. RMS and frequency content] of the audio.

As for artwork and packaging: some re-releases have completely different artwork from the first pressings. The covers for promo versions are sometimes template-based and text only. Some CD releases had additional longbox packaging. Japanese versions include Obi strips. The color and marbling of the vinyl releases are highly variable, and there are at least three different official picture disc releases. These intratextual differences can be as minute as weather the inner sleeves of otherwise-identical LP releases are 90° or rounded; or even completely identical packages save for a different UPC or catalog number to indicate a repressing.

In order to proceed, we will need to select a canonical version of each work, and limit the scope of which aspects will be considered for replication. At this point, I decided it would be prudent to obtain a copy of Nevermind to use in the following examples.