Espanto Del Futuro (Live)

Espanto Del Futuro (Live) was a single-sided Man or Astro-Man? EP that was exclusively available with Volume 31 of the Fear & Loathing zine. It was catalog number RCRPA 12. Fear and Loathing was a UK-based music fanzine that came to prominence in the 1990s. Volume 31 came out in May of 1995. A blurb on the front cover announced the Astro-Man record on the inside. There were also a couple of two-sentence reviews of other Astro-Man singles on the last few pages of the zine. Other than that, there was no other mention of the band in the magazine.

There were two variations of this single. They were both single-sided. The live version of the song "Espanto Del Futuro" was the A-side and the B side was completely smooth. Both copies also included a picture sleeve that was really just a a 14" x 7" strip of colored paper, folded in half and placed inside of a plastic sleeve. There was no printing on the inside of the picture sleeve. The most common version was pressed onto opaque black vinyl. The picture sleeve was made with orange paper. The rarer variety, available only to Fear and Loathing subscribers, was on clear red vinyl. The picture sleeve for this second version was made with yellow paper.

Here are both versions of the picture sleeve:




It is also worth noting that the center labels on the actual records were left blank. Each record was packaged in a white paper sleeve that was stamped in dark red ink with a television-eye graphic. With many copies, a small amount of the red ink also made it onto the otherwise blank center labels. Here are a couple of scans of the records in the sleeves. The close-up scan shows some of this "over stamping."





And finally, here is a scan of both versions of the record. The black version came in the orange sleeve and the red version came in the yellow sleeve. Notice the small traces of ink on the A-side. Notice also that the B-side is groove-less:



The are also some interesting etchings into the dead wax on the A-side of the record. There are four etchings in addition to the catalog number. I tried to scan them, but I couldn't get it to capture very well. But here they are, with capitalization and punctuation just as it appears:

'WARNING WARNING

DOES NOT COMPUTE

"OOOO... THE PAiN, THE PAiN".

A PORKY PRIMECUT.
ORLAKE