The music industry’s ever-raging war for format supremacy might have an unlikely new contender with the revelation that Marilyn Manson latest album, ‘The Pale Empire’, was released on Playstation 1 discs.

As discovered by Kill Screen, Manson and his creative team enshewed regular CD-ROMs for the release and instead burned the LP onto black polycarbonate discs originally manufactured for the first generation Sony PlayStation back in 1994.

While the discs are thicker, more durable and tougher to illegally copy than regular CDs, the move was apparently made by Manson for purely aesthetic reasons. A thermal texture was added to the black discs so that the heat generated from being spun now turns them white. As the CDs cools down, the black returns. The contrast between light and dark supposedly reflects the themes of ‘The Pale Emperor’.


The album’s art directors Hassan Rahim and Willo Perron had their production manager, Brian Schuman of Concord Music, source the CDs from Sony directly, meaning the hardware the duo worked with came from the exact same plant as the first PlayStation’s discs.

‘The Pale Emperor’ was released in January. Speaking to NME in advance of the record, Manson claimed he felt more confident about it than any of his releases since 2000’s ‘Holy Wood’.

“The album feels tied in to the fable of Mephistopheles, where life is fated,” he said, referring to the demon that features in German folklore. “I haven’t felt this way since ‘Holy Wood’, where fate has brought things together for a reason. It feels as if things were meant to fall into this exact place. This isn’t the ultimate of what I can achieve, but I’m showing proper respect for myself and what I’ve created in the past. It’s what was meant to be.”