Such a shame - R.I.P. Mark Hollis

I sincerely loved Talk Talk and Mark Hollis' music... own and cherish all their discs, bought new as UK pressings when nobody was after vinyl, anymore, back then... 

Maybe the most beloved of all is Hollis' solo album, now worth around € 500 for the die-hard collector... much more for the soul-seeker. 

A note from DiscoGs about the pricing the late Mark Hollis' solo disc reached:

About the hideous price - Take note that a large part of this pressing (which came out five years after the album was released), has manufacturing defects. There was paper (or something else, it was white) pressed in the beginning of side A; the amount and how much it extended into the record differed from copy to copy. Back then, I haven't seen a copy without these problems. I know for sure that a large part of the pressing was destroyed at a garbage dump near where I live on which a lot of defective pressings from Universal were buried under the supervision of guys from the label to avoid theft (a large part of the original pressing of the Cardigans 'Long Gone Before Daylight' was dumped there also around the same time). I saw copies on a fleamarket shortly after which escaped this transaction somehow (I bought three of them) and they all had the pressing defects.I also found two copies in a shop years later, when it was already rare and expensive, which had lots of rare 90s records as shop stock, and both also had these defects. Obviously, this guy had not returned them whereas most other shops gave them back when they discovered the flaws. That's why it is so rare and pricey.

The quality of recording - Two Neumann M50 omni pattern microphones were placed at the front of the studio, about ten feet apart. There they remained for the duration of the recording session, one panned hard left, the other hard right. To control balance and level, musicians positioned their instruments around the room, drums in back, vocals up front. With the noise reduction disengaged, each performer records their part. About as minimal as a record gets.

The above hard, cold facts to someway avoid deep sadness about sudden passing away of Mark Hollis which hit the world yesterday... 

... as a musician never dies as his music lives forever.

Yet... such a shame!