9.0 or Higher On My Weird-Shit-O-Meter Summary

I apologize for no postings in the last week; it's been too hot to do a damn thing. My brief visit to New Orleans was met with pants that never quite dried out and wondering when I'll get to the next air-conditioned building like a Siberian wondering when the electricity will come on again. I visited a few record stores there–the first was a classic stoner shop that made me wonder, given the stacks of used Lindsey Lohan CDs (she made a record?), tattered posters and overpriced bongs, how they made rent. Maybe they sell a lot of proud "I got Bourbon-Faced on Shit Street!" shirts. Or weed. Whichever. I think there was one homemade jacket there. Evidently forgettable, though. The second was the Record Shack, and had a few cool items. Sorry to sound lackluster, but after seeing thousands of homemade covers, I don't really feel like talking about just the above average ones today–therefore, to break up the monotony, I will finally write the blog I've been dying to write–the exotic tales, the spectacular far-out ideas, the stuff that sort-of fits with what I'm doing, but kind of doesn't; the legendary weird shit of homemade covers. So here goes…

• Let's start with elaborating on that enigmatic band I foreshadowed in "record of the day," Caroliner Rainbow Bluembeigh Treason of the Abyss. Try finding anything about them online. The first link that Google gives is, "Help me understand Caroliner Rainbow." Don't click on it–it doesn't really help. Their MySpace page is nearly as incomprehensible, but I also hear their shows consist of sensory overload, like their album covers, a collage and barrage of every technique and material out there (hand coloring xerox, screenprinting) and every possible goodie they could stuff into a record sleeve (Thriller liner notes, leis, SF Metro passes, old newsprint). When I ask record store clerks if they have any handmade records, they always point me toward the new Caroliner Rainbow albums if they have them. They always seem to have "just got them in, and they sell like hotcakes." Lori says they're just a bunch of vegan folks in a commune in the Bay Area who grow their own veggies. Nat from Berkeley and Chris from Austin basically say their live shows rule.

Naturally, I emailed them to get in touch, and a got a half-cryptic response from the cryptically named "Grand Gripplea" simply telling me to check out Art Gnuvo and the Record Exchange. So I did. And tested it on my Weird Shit O-Meter– lo and behold, it checks out for today's post!

• The Amazing Kornyfone Record Label is one example of a bootlegger's label. These guys got a hold of the mother stampers and had a strong enough rapport with the ladies at the pressing plant that they could produce illegal bootlegs of The Beatles, Jimi Hendrix and Frank Zappa to name a few. I haven't been able to find out if the covers were homemade, but the network of people involved in the production seems to be a lot like the network I outlines a few weeks ago, so maybe the covers were done by hand as well.

So here's the story: Ken and Dub created the bootleg label, TMOQ, Trade Mark of Quality in the early 70s. Dub fired Ken a few years later, and in the plagiaristic tradition of bootleggers, Ken named his label, Trade Mark of Quality. Ken had to lay low while the FBI was after him, but then eventually started the Amazing Kornyfone Record Label.

• Speaking of bootlegs, whenever the old-timer guys at record stores show me their collection of homemade covers, they usually pull out some Doors bootleg with sharpie indicating the date and place of recording on it. These are quite possibly the most boring covers ever, but it would be interesting to find out how these guys got vinyl pressed. Darien says that sometimes he'll cut individual records for DJs, so maybe the bootleggers have a connection at a lathe/mastering facility.

• DJs used to use their vinyl as business cards, so to speak for clubs they wanted to spin at. I've seen a few of these, and they usually consist of a black or white commercially produced sleeve with a phone number glued to them. They end up in the used "Dance/Club/Electronic" section of record stores. Darien said DJs produced these with haste during the rave/warehouse party days, but now CDs are easier, faster and cheaper to produce.

• Mix tapes/CDs. Since these are generally not mass-produced, they aren't of much help to me, but they're cool, right? And fun to make for your significant other. If you really want to know more, go get a book on them. Thurston Moore edited "Mix Tape." It's pretty cool.

• I found a homemade cover last fall in Ann Arbor MI that struck me. It's called, "Lipa Kodi Ya City Council" on the Mississippi Records label out of Portland Oregon. The music on it was recorded in the early 70s and features stuff from all over Africa. I bet there's crazy story behind that one–and people on the web seem to really like it.

• Elizabeth in Austin showed me a record in which the band didn't include their own music in it! They just put random 45s in the sleeve. Funny.

• Someone told me about a record made in which the unpainted sleeves were placed on the floor of the venue and it was the audience's responsibility to make sure no cover left unpainted. What a lazy band.

• It is generally agreed upon that the "Most 'Metal' homemade cover ever would be made with human flesh." No one has made one yet, so the throne for the most 'Metal' Metal band still sits unoccupied.

• Limited edition lathe cuts. Lathe cut records, as opposed to pressed vinyl, are fragile and can only be played a few dozen times before they completely wear out. Therefore, editions of lathe cut records are extremely valuable and rare. They must be cut in real time, and the special machine for cutting more than one at a time is quite rare. A guy in Australia does lathe cuts and can only be reached my snail mail. Turn-around time is comparable to getting your Italian bicycle sent back to the factory and replaced–or a long time. A guy in Olympia Washington, Peter King, sets up subscription services in which twenty bands (or however many he wants) to contribute a song or two, and over the course of a few years, you and 19 other people are incrementally sent the full edition. Usually the covers are homemade by the artists, too. They fetch a pretty penny on ebay, so look out for those subscriptions!

• Flickr! Lori told me to browse flickr for homemade covers. DUH! And holy Lennon, I stumbled upon the mother of obsessive album covers: Sgt. Peggy's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a beaded mosaic of the classic album cover. A must see.

• Mingering Mike. Here's what his website has to say: "Between 1968 and 1977 Mingering Mike recorded over fifty albums, managed thirty-five of his own record labels, and produced, directed and starred in nine of his own motion pictures. In 1972 alone he released fifteen LPs and over twenty singles, and his traveling revue played for sold out crowds the world over.

How is it that such a prolific musician has gone under the radar for the more than thirty years? The answer is that all took place in Mike's imagination, and in the vast collection of fake cardboard records and acapella home recordings that he made for himself as a teenager in Washington, D.C. in the late 1960s."

I'm sure there are more things to talk about here, and If you, dear reader, have stories to share, please do!

With Southern love,
James

An Unexpected Visitor

Thank you Tom for the graphic design insight and for the question of "what is authentic?" I encourage readers to take a look at the comments from the last post–it's good. Also, check out this link Anya found on the cassette funeral.

Tuesday was spent record hunting in Austin, Texas. I tried to find a recommended record store on the east side of town, but a Mexican beauty parlor has apparently taken its place. Like an intelligent tourist, I plan my hunting in advance according to a city's geography, so 'twasn't a thang when I saw the beauty parlor–there was another store a half mile away.

Often, my tack is to ask the locals for great record stores, and my back-up for the day was at the recommendation of David, the L.A. Hardcore veteran and Ph. D candidate. There are reasons things are called "punk as fuck" and Trailer Space record store certainly deserves the title. Austin has a smoking ban, just like every other city in the country now (except Wisconsin towns, bless their souls), but J.T. and his fellow clerk chain-smoked their way through my visit and proceeded to down Lone Star after Lone Star pints ("The National Beer of Texas"). There were a few cool records there, but I began to see a lot of stuff that I had previously seen at other Austin stores. In no city as of yet had the selection been that evenly dispersed across record stores.

The night finished with the co-opers and I going down to the local pub and enjoying "pint night," a weekly tradition amongst the Seneca House residents. I had the privilege of hearing about rural Texan rites of passage in which youths learn the valuable lesson of responsible and safe driving by practicing drunk on back country roads. I also heard the correct method of how to save cows idling in the middle of the road from getting hit by traffic–just punch 'em in the face!

I was planning on leaving the anomalous city of Austin Wednesday afternoon to see my dear cousin in San Antonio, but I had to get in touch with this one guy who was referred to me by a co-oper's friend. By the time I had finished in the library reading up on folklore recommendations (thank you Peter and Dan–these books only seem to be found at large universities) it was already 2 and I had to pack my stuff, leave a sweet note for my hosts, catch a bus to the east side of town to interview Chris who had some home-screen-printed CD jackets to show me before he went on tour with his band, Reverse X-Rays, and then boogie on over to the bus station for San An. This was not going to happen, and I'm glad I didn't rush things, because I never would have met the unexpected visitor alluded to in the title of this post. And no, the unexpected visitor was not a family of raccoons in the kitchen, but a lady named Lori, knocking on Chris's door, and who just happened to be the exact person I needed to meet at that moment. Was it fate that made me change my mind about the earlier bus to San An so I could stay a few minutes longer?

Chris described Lori as a filmmaker and his dear neighbor, though Lori would call herself a "maker" and "outsider artist." The newspapers call her a "Salvage Professional," while blogs and discussion forums on the Butthole Surfers call her all sorts of nasty things. I thought she was a nuisance and an intruder at first, then a crazy lady, and then as the three of us were talking, a really crazy lady. Lori finds and sells projector units, and has enough slides to fill twenty projectors playing simultaneously (she was the film performance artist for the Surfers a few years back). She also hosts a yearly Junk-a-Thon where she gets to sell all her treasures from the last year of salvaging, in addition to a small on-going "squirrel epiphany" piece–I shouldn't give it away, but its morbidity and awesomeness is right in line with the vagina and midget's arm, elbow-deep in a bent over man's ass snow sculptures outside my house.

She also makes her own noise-ist tapes and had some things to say about cassette culture, mail-art and experimental/industrial/noise!

Lori offered that some folk break things and use jackhammers and sheet metal to create sounds and cacophonies to calm themselves and their heads. Naturally, record labels can't give un-listenable-by-the-mainstream projects like those any funding (unless you're John Cage, the avant garde noise musician, but even his first recordings were homemade) so out of necessity they are DIY. It would follow that the album jackets would be DIY as well, and since such an endeavor is an individualistic one, the performance is quite different from the punk/indie process involving multiple people in a band, although Darien gave an extensive list of noise/industrial bands as well.

Perhaps we'll hear more about Lori in the future, but I wanted to briefly respond to Tom's question of authenticity, and to do this, I will go back to the conversation I had with Elizabeth and David, as it may shed some light on what is authentic.

Elizabeth has an incredible collection of homemade 45s and has been involved with bands all her life it would seem. Having spent a lot of time in Nashville, she saw many bands come and go and was so intimately involved with them that her comments on the networks of people surrounding the music can be taken with a high degree of validity and seriousness. She described how the southern rock band, Kings of Leon, could never be accepted as a "Nashville" band by Nashvillers because they didn't necessarily contribute anything to the scene there. Their social connections were somewhere other than with the musicians in the city, so they apparently never played with the locals, yet everywhere she turned after the band blew up, Elizabeth read that they were "of Nashville," a statement that reeked of unauthenticity.

Before I sign off, I have some personal things to take care of. Anya has informed me that she never received her record for the Homemade Album Art Historical Preservation Society that I sent off more than two weeks ago in San Francisco. Did everyone else receive theirs? Here's a list of those who I have sent records out to two weeks ago in San Fran:

Anya Dikareva
Truman Danz
Grace Grinager (sent off only last week from Denver)
Sarah Vig
James Linbloom
Matt Sario
Jesse Kegan
Brit Doolittle
Mr. Tzvi

I'll be sending Sean one as soon as I find a post office!

Also, thank you again Dan and Peter for the reading lists. I've been raiding the large university libraries whenever I get a chance, and I really enjoy the Sims book. The part on record store clerks is quite amusing.

From Texas with love,
James

Austin Record Stores

Yesterday was a whirlwind of record stores, donuts, theory discussion, fine Bloody Marys and finding some real gems among the lazily-produced xeroxed record covers. Oh – and being woken up at 5 in morning by a co-oper telling me, "the squatter guy," that she's going to begin work on painting her room that I have been sleeping in. Ugh.

Let's talk about record stores first. I realized yesterday I haven't written much about record shops as of late. I believe that it helps to go into record shops with the intent to write about it later in mind, because it keeps my eyes and ears open to anything out of the ordinary. Photographing record covers for hours takes endurance, (quite like the physical stamina needed to beat the heat here) and as I stated the other day, I feel at this point that I'm photographing the same jackets over and over. Sometimes this literally happens, and that occurrence has its intellectual merit because I can now chart geographically where I see the same record.

But this apathy on my part is cause for concern since record stores are the spaces where locals get to represent themselves in an artistic fashion, and impressions of a record store can give insight into the city flavor and sounds as well as the region. Sound on Sound Records had so many CD cases, 12" records and 7" that my camera died before I could document them all. The 12" records were especially striking, so check them out.

End of an Ear's employees sent me straight to the experimental section where I found a few items of note before finding the gems I mentioned, like a foam collaged cover, a letter-pressed jacket from 1985 (which is quite an early example) and another Caroliner album. I'll talk later about this enigmatic San Francisco psychedelic band. One of the older record clerks told me that homemade covers are usually the artistic products of friends of the band who work with layout equipment and design technology. This is not the first time that I've heard of bands finding people in their social networks with special access to production tools not otherwise available.

I also found an incredible 24 hour donut shop near campus. The need to find air-conditioning coupled with the desire to sit down with my book leaves me with no will power when I walk by. Oh dear.

Later last night, I met for Bloody Marys (which are on par with Palmer's!) with David Uskovich, a Ph.D candidate at UT Austin working on his oral history of 80s college radio stations dissertation, and another of his former classmates, Elizabeth, who was involved in the RTF program (Radio Television Film) at UT Austin. We had some very interesting conversation about some of the formal theories behind DIY music, tools of production, and homemade records, of course. One thing that stands out in my mind was the explanation that Third Wave Feminism has influenced the resurgence of craft in homemade record covers. David, a product of the L.A. hardcore scene, explained that back in the early 80s, simply getting your album out was a feat in and of itself. It really didn't matter what level of craft was involved, but as Third Wave Feminists realized that those traditional crafts such as knitting and sewing that had oppressed women in the past were okay to reclaim with the understanding that they had a choice to partake in them, the effort and attention put into record covers increased substantially.

As I review the tapes of the conversation, I'll throw in more insight, but for now, I have to get on with record hunting!

cheers,
James

Noise Clarifications

I got an email from Darien this morning with some clarification on what exactly industrial is. Here's what he had to say:

"Just to clarify, early industrial music *was* experimental / noise music. The etymology was pretty bizarre as far as the idea that it split off into its own sects of the genre. Industrial music in the 80's became fairly structured and more electronic-instrument oriented, whereas the 'real' industrial artists (the guys kling-klanging about with their jackhammers, drills and sheet metal) peeled off and started calling what they did experimental and noise, although some stuck to using the same instrumentation and the compositions became more structured instead of free-form."

Thank you, Darien! I knew that the blog would eventually come in handy with keeping up with correspondents while on the road.

Check out Darien's record collection on the Picasa page. The link can be found on the right side-bar ("more pictures of incredible covers").

Southern Hospitality/Noise

Whew! I finally found a place to stay in Austin. I was this close to losing all faith in humanity, cursing all of Austin TX, and saying 'to hell' with Southern Hospitality after requesting a couch at two co-ops around town only to be turned down in the name of rules, regulations, and bureaucratic bullshit. Finally, after a sleepless night in Denver, a flight to Austin, an incredible all-ages show across from a Macy's, a night spent sleeping under the stars, and a wrongfully-perceived-as-shoplifting attempt at an Urban Outfitters, some true sweethearts at the Seneca House allowed me to stay for supper and gave me a room to set up shop in.

I was talking with a gentleman at the show last night, and I really like how he chose to describe Austin. He said it "has guts" and "has dirt under its fingernails." Somehow these words rang true after wandering around in the 100° heat and watching all the Texans come alive at night once it began to cool off, as mosquitoes tend to do in Minneapolis.

We'll see if his description holds. I'm also excited to discover if indeed Texas is the country that everyone outside of Texas tells me it is. Did you know that "y'all" is not only the appropriate way to address a sir and a ma'am at the same time, but also the formal means?

I'll write the Texas ethnography on a later date as I get settled in with these co-opers and get them to give me the grand tour of Austin (scheduled for Tuesday).

Although San Francisco is still a good 1750 miles away, I still have a thing or two to say about it. I'm still working this out in my head and on paper, and any generalities I write of should be read with a skeptical eye, but it seems as though there are (generally speaking) two distinct camps of homemade album cover genres–indie/punk/hardcore and industrial/electronica/experimental/noise. For imagery of the latter, please check out the album "Aquarius records" in the Picasa page. (The albums really work now!)

I've intentionally kept my distance from categorizing album covers according to musical genres and just sticking to what can be seen and heard: forms, artwork, dates, and stories. I mentioned a few reasons for this decision a while back when I introduced the Homemade Album Art Historical Preservation Society, stating that I didn't have the time to do any musical content analysis and that simply tracing dates and graphic forms to construct a narrative was enough of a challenge for the time being. Don't get me wrong–I'm certainly not trying to make my job any less challenging–it's just that I feel that fitting sounds and artwork into my own neat categories, ones that may not jive with what their makers would file them under, is arrogant and simply irresponsible. So when I refer to genres, I'm mostly going off of what I see records filed under in record stores. For the sake of hypothesizing and testing out ideas, let's explore this modest duel-camp proposal…

…and back to San Francisco: I spent hours in Aquarius Records in the Mission photographing album art and talking with the clerks who specialize in electronica and experimental/noise. Never had I seen so many homemade albums that weren't in piles, drawers or boxes marked "Indie/Punk/Hardcore"! After photographing literally hundreds of records, I'm at a point where I can look at an album and usually date it in my head within a few years of what's printed on the sleeve. This is to say that I've seen enough imagery to file nearly any record in my head with others that share similar graphic qualities. Most of the records at Aquarius stumped me, because I hadn't seen that type of imagery before. An observation such as this is good sign that something is going on that I am otherwise clueless about!

In the meantime, I've had the opportunity to speak with a few different people about this observation, and two of them have shown me the doors to understanding why these records (mostly CDs, I might add) found at Aquarius under the electronic/experimental/noise section feature such different imagery than the usual suspects. Nat Russell, who designed the first two- dozen covers for Isota Records, didn't mention the usual Pacific Northwest individuals and labels like Calvin Johnson and K Records, that others usually do, as sources of inspiration. Instead, he told me that the experimental/noise folk were handmaking their own covers long before the punks and DIYers were on the west coast–and that they were mostly based out of the east coast. Darien, one of the engineers at Aardvark Mastering confirmed this and included 'industrial' music in the same boat as the experimental/noise pioneers.

Possible answers I and my gracious correspondents have proposed for the big question of "why make these things?" and "what function do they serve?" have usually applied to what record stores label indie/punk/hardcore. I cannot say with any degree of certainty that the same hypotheses apply to the other camp of noise/experimental/electronica/industrial until I speak with the artists and musicians and labels who make these products happen. (Again, these are the predominate labels I find in record stores, not the ones I group the music into.)

Oh dear–I think the heat here has worn me out and I need some rest. I'll write more in the morning.

later,
James

More on the whole "House" metaphor

Just when I think I'm about to lose steam, Sean comes along to hit me over the head and kick me in the ass with some insight and expansion on the "house" metaphor. I can't express my gratitude enough for those folks who are as invested in documenting homemade album covers as I claim to be. Sean wrote so trenchantly that his side of the conversation deserves a spot on the blog. Pay special attention to the last paragraph.

I've been purposefully avoiding describing my own involvement with the production of homemade covers (Sean and I are in Viceburgh together, and I screen-printed 300 double 7" covers for our "Diversity" album) in an effort to challenge myself to think outside my own experiences. I believe Sean's assessment of my own work is helpful to this project because he isn't as close to the work as I am. More discourse is highly encouraged! Thanks, Sean.

Check this out:
"I forgot that I hadn't given you my address and was sorely disappointed when I read your blog and realized I still needed to send it to get sweet records. Shucks.

Here are some more thoughts that came to mind after reading your blog. If we want to call homemade record covers houses than what type of houses are they? Furthermore, ideologically, what lives and resides in these houses?

It seems that you have established a blueprint for the homemade record cover as a house. It is built to contain music, ideas, history, and individuality. Mass-produced records may contain some of these things. However, what you have struck upon is that concept of an open-door that is built into the homemade covers that separates from most commercially produced covers.

As for what resides in these houses, I think it might be good to start by reflecting on our own experience making a homemade record cover. First, we wanted full artistic control over the production of our record. While this meant spending our hard earned bucks, with little hope of recouping our investment, it also gave us an opportunity to learn. And, what did we learn? We learned where to go to get records pressed and about the process of pressing, you were able to practice and refine your printing techniques, we found out which materials worked well, and we began to explore the history of homemade and DIY records.

Furthermore, what we entered into was an open-ended dialog with a community of artists, musicians, recording engineers and producers, and music fans that allows creativity to thrive. To me the reason, at least for the moment, why people make homemade covers, and why people buy them, is three-fold. First, it supports an ideal that allows for greater ingenuity, innovation, and permutations of the form. Second, it gives people a skill-set and network, so they are able to rely on themselves and a community of others instead of being for into the
nameless and faceless regions of commercial production. Finally, it pays homage to a history of record production that focuses first on creativity and social capital and second on homogenization and economic capital.

If we think about the history of record production as a metaphysical space, in which different houses are built, we can more clearly observe the importance of DIY/Homemade production for the development of culture. Mass-produced records, at varying levels, are subject to the ideologies of companies that make their money by making safe, accessible products that, primarily, work to affirm accepted beliefs, rather than challenge them. This means that politics and creativity will be utilized only to the degree that they help sell the image of the product. This makes mass produced records of music, for the most part, passive forces. DIY/Homemade records on the other hand are active in that they are able to not passively signify cultural changes but, albeit on a necessarily smaller scale, actively create cultural changes."

On a side note, I uploaded more photos. I also have more sweet records to send if people are interested!

all my love,
James

Cutting Records

It's been a while, dear readers. San Francisco turned out to be quite an intense experience, filled with driving around the city in a friend's car he left me, bolting in and out of Michelle's apartment in Oakland to fetch her stuff before the gunshots began, and hanging out with a pair of friends, a dynamic of which that hasn't occurred since 5th grade. The last night, I stayed up with my old friend Alex, talking about computers taking over/not taking over the world before catching a bus to the train at 7 in the morning. Needless to say, I've needed a day or two in Denver with my dear Auntie to gather myself and set up the rest of my trip.

Next time you're out in San Francisco, try playing this game: "who's an indigenous San Franciscan and who's not?"

Not to give away all the hints or anything, you may begin by asking people for directions, although as we all know, this isn't always a clear indicator of someone's local status. In San Fran, such a practice is very different from asking the guy in cowboy boots and a farmer tan at the bar in Hanover Minnesota directions to the next bar up the line!

After a few trials of this sort that end in people who you swore were from the city shrugging and saying "I'm not from here…", and after a few people come up to you and ask for directions thinking you're a local, you may be ready to call it quits–but don't give up! You don't have to feel like a cheater by asking your friends who live there to give you a few clues, either.

Maybe you'll at first be discouraged by your host's choice of words, but the fine distinctions will come into focus later. Nowhere do people place such emphasis on the difference between "being from San Francisco," "living in San Francisco" and being a "San Franciscan" while not sounding disparaging in the least. Regardless, your hosts may add, San Francisco is the place where all the freaks come to. So why the hell are you there?

Remember, its important to get a second opinion and continue to ask for directions because map reading sucks. So, you may end up asking someone who moved there because they felt so at home in SF how they tell the locals from the tourists. Surely, it's not all about size as your friend tells you bluntly, you think. How can all the natives be skinny and the tourists fat? But then you do a mental check of your wallet's contents and think about how much you miss that $17 you just spent on a beer and a sandwich and how one could easily put themselves on a diet.

Even a third opinion is a safe route to go, especially since by now you're wondering what the hell someone who has lived here their entire life thinks of all this. By default and by definition, they're a San Franciscan, but you get a strong suspicion that everyone else who lives here or has moved here you've met has come because…well, it's San Fran, right? So you voice your confusion over the matter to another one of your hosts, and maybe they tell you that the people who grew up here are immune to the stereotypes and mainly keep to themselves.

And then you have to catch a bus to leave town.

Here are all the clues I can give you for the game. I really can't divulge any more, otherwise the game won't be fun. But, you can always pick up where you left, I suppose, since there seems to be something inherently San Franciscan about San Francisco, especially when you hear about people moving there to be themselves or be with their loved ones, or people gathering in the park just to hang out by the hundreds, or people just wanting to figure out what this city is all about. Then again, it also seems like some expect San Francisco will give them what they're looking for, but cities are also harsh places that don't grant wishes to everyone.

I have more to say on this city, specifically about the new leads I gathered and the immense number of records I found, but I first have to express my excitement in getting a tour of Aardvark Mastering's facilities here in Denver. Louis, one of the Engineers at Aardvark showed me around the basement of Paul Brekkus' house where they convert tapes, CDs and other media into analog master lacquers that will later get turned into stampers used to press hundreds of vinyl discs that you use on your turntable. It was pretty amazing watching this antiquated 1970s Scully machine lathe-cut a Scott Joplin song onto a spinning lacquer-coated aluminum disc and then play it back!

Louis said that he could count on two hands the number of facilities in the country that do this kind of work; he is one of only a hundred or so people in the world who know how to operate such a machine; and he is one in a million who truly love what they do. It was awe-inspiring to look at this machine with all its tubes and knobs and levers and think that someone knew how to design and manufacture it to cut a master analog disc to reproduce sound. Apparently, Paul, the main guy behind Aardvark, is enough of a genius and an innovator himself to understand it all.

Nat, the artist of all the Isota sleeves from Berkeley, whom I met with in SF, explained the prevalence of 7" records over cassettes and CDs as a demonstration of the commitment musicians make to the distribution of their music. As he pointed out, anyone can burn a CD or duplicate a cassette, but it takes a lot of effort and money (!) to send one's mastered album to a mastering company like Aardvark, have them send the lacquers to a plating facility, arrange to have the plates sent to a pressing plant, okaying the test-presses and having them print the rest of your discs.

Vinyl also keeps guys like Paul and Louis is business and the specialized craft of cutting records alive.

Ride to live,
James