March, 2014
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We Buy White Albums
Rutherford Chang is a New York-based artist who collects the Beatles’ White Album, and only the White Album. At present he has over 900 copies of the first pressing of the record. Mr. Chang’s interest in the album centers on the way that the all white album covers display theRead More…
Vinyl Still Circulates
One of my responsibilities as Multimedia & Web Services Librarian at City Tech is overseeing the numerous media collections we have. I recently weeded numerous broken VHS cassettes, 3.5″ floppy discs, incompatible CD-ROMs from the 90s, audio cassettes, and currently 8mm and 16mm reel to reel films. What is most interesting is that we still… Read more »
The Work of Vinyl in the Age of Digital Reproduction
n.b. from the Editors: The original presentation of this piece contained pop-up annotations by the authors throughout the text. Those annotations have been converted to footnotes for the purpose of this reproduction. n.b. from Ted: I posed my responses in the form of interleaved paraphrasings of what Njoroge and Rich wrote. ConsiderRead More…
A Thousand Years of Audio Recording: Patrick Feaster’s Pictures of Sound
On March 27, 2008, a story ran on the front page of The New York Times that a group of researchers were playing sound recordings older than those of Thomas Edison. This seemed impossible—nonsensical—for Edison, everyone knows, was the father of the phonograph, having invented the machine in 1877. YetRead More…
Let the Music Play
My first experience with vinyl records was entirely mediated. I didn’t touch or even see the record. I chose it with a keypad, punching in the two numbers that would direct the jukebox to the correct 45rpm disc. Unlike some older jukeboxes, this 1978 Seeburg Celestia doesn’t show its innerRead More…