You Can Have Your Ashes Turned Into a Playable Vinyl Record, When Your Day Comes

Even in death we are only lim­it­ed by our imag­i­na­tion in how we want to go out. There are now ways to turn our corpse into a tree, or have our ash­es shot into space, or press our ash­es into dia­monds–I believe Super­man is involved in that last one. And now for the music lover, a com­pa­ny called And Viny­ly will press your ash­es into a playable vinyl record.

You like that pun­ny com­pa­ny name? There’s more: the busi­ness lets the dear depart­ed “Live on from beyond the groove.” Hear that groan? That’s the deceased lit­er­al­ly spin­ning in their grave…on a turntable.

The UK-based com­pa­ny has been around since 2009, when Jason Leach launched it “just for fun” at first. But a lot of peo­ple liked the idea and have kept him in busi­ness.

It will cost, how­ev­er. The basic ser­vice gen­er­al­ly costs between £1000 and £3000 GBP, and it part­ly depends on how many vinyl records you pro­duce. From what we can tell, you can­not use copy­right-pro­tect­ed music to fill up the 18–22 min­utes per side. So no “Free Bird” or “We Are the Cham­pi­ons,” unfor­tu­nate­ly. But you can put any­thing else: a voice record­ing, or the sounds of nature, or com­plete silence. Get more infor­ma­tion over at the com­pa­ny’s FAQ.

No doubt, the ser­vice can pro­vide com­fort and a mem­o­ry trig­ger for those left behind. The above video, “Hear­ing Madge,” is a short doc about a son who took record­ings of his moth­er and used And Viny­ly to make a record out of them. It’s sweet.

“I’m sure a lot of peo­ple think that it’s creepy, a lot of peo­ple think it’s sac­ri­le­gious,” the man says. “But I know my moth­er wouldn’t have. She would’ve thought it was a hoot.”

Jason Leach, a musi­cian and vinyl col­lec­tor him­self, talks of the imme­di­a­cy of sound and what it means to many.

“Sound is vibrat­ing you, the room, and it’s actu­al­ly mov­ing the air around you,” he says. “And that’s what’s so pow­er­ful about hear­ing someone’s voice on a record. They’re actu­al­ly mov­ing the air and for me that’s pow­er­ful.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

John Cleese’s Eulo­gy for Gra­ham Chap­man: ‘Good Rid­dance, the Free-Load­ing Bas­tard, I Hope He Fries’

Bronze Age Britons Turned Bones of Dead Rel­a­tives into Musi­cal Instru­ments & Orna­ments

Watch Carl Sagan’s “A Glo­ri­ous Dawn” Become the First Vinyl Record Played in Space, Cour­tesy of Jack White

Death: A Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Course from Yale Helps You Grap­ple with the Inescapable

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts.