Sometime during that hiatus, Matt Jones, sales manager for the San Francisco label Pirates Press, was talking with his girlfriend’s father, an engineer, about what it’d take to bring them back. “He said, ‘Well, they’re not really that hard to make. You’ve got to do this, this, and that.’ We started experimenting and prototyping another machine to make these things.”

Pirates Press began producing flexi discs again in 2010, quickly ascending to the position that Eva-tone once held. However, unlike their industrial-scale predecessor, Pirates takes a boutique approach that prioritizes creative uses over mass quantities. Jack White’s Third Man Records hired them to produce just 1000 postcard records that were literally distributed by balloon (talk about release events). Third Man and other clients have been knowledgable enough to request some of the more obscure flexi formats from history such as the old Russian bootleg “bone records,” made from discarded x-ray film.

Jack White’s Third Man Records used innovative approaches for releasing flexi discs, such as “balloon distribution” and printing them on real X-rays

Pirates Press founder Eric Mueller chuckles, “the real problem is that to make X-ray flexis, you use real X-rays, and nowadays, X-rays really aren’t being used very much. We had a lady who got into a motorcycle accident and had 10 years worth of X-rays that she had been saving in a closet, and then gave us that for [a flexi for] her band.”

Boston-based Get On Down! has used Pirates on several occasions, including last year’s postcard reissue of Run DMC’s’ “Christmas In Hollis.” Get On Down!’s Welch says that “people have actually emailed us little videos of them doing DJ routines with the flexis, doing doubles and stuff like that, which is pretty cool.” Ironically, as the ubiquity of digital music has made files and streams feel disposable, the flexi disc has become more of a keepsake.

We’re not likely to see anyone making ten million flexis of whale ballads again, but at a time where record fetishism feels at an all-time high — even if sales are not — the flexi is well-positioned to reap the benefits. Their desirability has always resided in that novelty factor, in the power of a flexi to surprise us, delight us, with their strange shapes and content. After all, a “gimmick” is expressly designed to catch your attention, to make a mark in your memory and there’s decades of evidence that flexis have succeeded in doing just that.

As Pirates’ Jones points out: “You’d never have a kid pull out a magazine from their closet and show you an ad that was put in six months ago. But a flexi is something that people would put with their other records and pull out once in a while and play.”