A few days after I saw Jack White perform in Pittsburgh, I was composing, with definite irritation, an email to Third Man Records describing a newly purchased vinyl that would repeat the first song continuously and skip without end. To my surprise (and delight), I was sent the below video, describing my new Lazaretto record as an Ultra LP. I won’t give too much away, but the features on this record blew me away.

The most remarkable feature has to be the hologram on side A. Still skeptical, I asked my dad (a physicist) if what I was seeing was truly a hologram. For all of your reference, he described it as more of a “simple diffraction grating.”  I’m not going to even attempt to paraphrase what came next: “The simplest of diffraction gratings are made by scratching parallel lines into a substrate.  You can get the same effect by interfering 2 beams comming out of a laser and recording it on a photosenstive plate.  The angel is a slightly more complex diffraction grating where the incoming light is directed to specific points in space to create the effect.  If you shine a laser pointer in that holographic band the angel should be easier to see.”

And there you have it, an excellent album and a physics lesson in one.

Cheers!

Sarah