“When we were, like, 15, 16, me and my best friend Trig used to go record shopping. And it was weird. Our local record store had this counter with all the cassettes behind it. The goods! You had to ask to see them,” a gregarious voice announces.“Trig was always after Buttery Cake Ass’s Live in Hungaria album. Week after week we’d ask, only to week after week be disappointed. Truth be told, Trig much more so than I. I didn’t know anything about Buttery Cake Ass. But that’s the beauty of music, of any sort of artistic creation — that another’s excitement for it can infect you like this.”
So begins The Ballad of Buttery Cake Ass, a 2023 comic novel by Aug Stone about two record fanatics’ search for an album that may or may not exist. Inspired by a teenage prank back in the 1990s at Cutler’s Records and Tapes on Broadway, the novel has now extended its media presence — in a way that fits the theme of the novel itself — by becoming an audiobook, recorded at the Sans Serif studio on Chapel Street by the author, in character as someone else.
