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A Heavy Record, Made of Concrete

German scientists have developed Ultra High Performance Concrete, a new building material that can do some amazing things—so they made a record out of it.

A 7-inch record of The Rolling Stones, made out of Ultra High Performance Concrete.
A record of The Rolling Stones, made out of Ultra High Performance Concrete.

Vinyl has made quite the comeback in recent years, and if you like listening to the hard and heavy stuff, you might want to get your hands on a record made out of concrete.

Well, actually only one concrete record exists, recently created by German engineer Ricardo Kocadag and his team at the Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung (Federal Institute for Materials Research and Testing) in Berlin. It’s playable on a regular turntable and sounds surprisingly good, all things considered.

The 6 mm single was created to highlight the flexibility of Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC), which Kocadag and his team developed for building bridges, high-rise skyscraperrs and roofs. UHPC is a mixture of cement, aggregates, additives, admixtures and water, and reportedly it can hold five times more weight than traditional concrete, requires less water to make and is up to 50 percent lighter—plus apparently you can make records out of it.

The real reason for making the record was to show that concrete can be used for more than just its traditional applications, as UHPC allows molding of structures—be they buildings or records—with precision down to a microscopic level. As we live in an increasingly data-driven society, use of concrete as data storage is plausible, if still a ‘thinking outside the box’ concept.

Considering that the record is essentially made of stone, perhaps it’s only appropriate that it plays “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”—by the Rolling Stones. Catch a video of it HERE.

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