Many people have recorded on vintage equipment, but you have everyone topped. The formats used on your 2003 release, The Museum of Me, are very old indeed. What inspired you to investigate and then to actually use these recording devices?
A couple of things. When people reach for vintage gear they usually reach because it sounds good in the moment, better than things that are "new". I wound up using old stuff because it sounded worse. It gave you an interesting color to whatever you put into it. If you were performing something in 2003, 2004, 2005, as soon as you played it back, it sounded like instant old. It sounded like time travel. I got into this whole thing because of this wire machine I am pointing to. It's a Model 7 Webster-Chicago, the pre-date wire machine of a company that became Webcor. I was at a flea market off of Canal Street in New York City. There was a really cool art deco looking machine. A hammer finished metal and burgundy, real Bakelite knobs and all this stuff. And I thought to myself, 'This is fantastic!' It turned out to be a wire recorder. I didn't have any kind of power cord for it so I kind of stuck it in the corner. One day I had an idea for a song, however all the stuff that I had that I would normally plunk a song down on, kind of grunt a song into a cassette machine or something, was all in the shop. Everything was broken. I looked and I remembered, 'Oh, I've got the wire machine, I wonder if it works?' They always come with at least one spool of wire and it's usually a family trying to get the baby to say, "Mama" or "Dada", you know, invariably, all the used spools.
So it would seem that somebody would get their hands on the technology because it was on a consumer level?
This particular model absolutely was a consumer level. I found a power cable, kind of rigged up a power cable, found a microphone that would fit these interesting old inputs. Turned the thing on, and, lo and behold, it worked. A lot of hum, lots of interesting metallic crackle, but it worked. Suddenly a song that was done in the 20th century sounded like the turn of the 19th century, all crackly. It kind of became my own Alan Lomax field recording. I thought, 'This is way cool, I'm interested in old technology.' When you're in a recording studio you're surrounded by cool old stuff anyway. But let's go further back — obviously you can't go any further back than Edison. I live in Hoboken. Edison's lab was in West Orange. Hop, skip and a jump. I'd never been to the national Edison historic site. So I got the grand tour. I met their audio curator, Jerry Fabris. He said there's like 30,000 to 40,000 discs and cylinders that they haven't even gotten to yet. I said, "I'm knocked out by this stuff, do you ever record?" He said, "We don't, but there's an engineer out on Long Island named Peter Dilge." He is the East Coast's leading Jesus on "Edisonia". I went out there and did some recording and it was just fantastic. I did recording on wax cylinders. So now I had a wire technology and wax technology. What else can you do? There's home disc cutters from the '30s. A lot of radios came with disc cutters included so you could archive a radio show or there was a mic in so you could send an audio letter to Aunt Martha in Schenectady or to your son overseas. Then there's the whole more professional type formats like the Studer J37, which is the 4-track, one-inch "Beatle" machine. This whole project took seven years.
And that was what became The Museum of Me?
Yeah, because you kept finding formats and then, of course, as you learn about recording you don't just find the machine, you have to find someone who can repair the machine, because invariably it would blow up on your first take. Everything takes twice or three times as long because half the time it's in the shop.
How hard is it to find stock for these old machines and somebody to repair them?
A lot of this stuff, especially up to the Studer era, and of course any studio quality multitrack, is built like a proverbial tank. High-quality stuff. The so-called consumer level things, like this wire recorder, are unbelievably well engineered. By the way, there's one motor on this. One motor makes the two reels go and makes the head go up and down. The robustness and its being analog means that if you can find the schematics and a technician with the time and the interest, you can maintain it. It is easier to find recording media because, again, it's incredibly robust. There always seems to be wire at either flea markets or at ham radio fests. So wire media is no problem.
What about wax?
Wax is tricky. I'm gonna tell you that this all comes from Peter Dilge. Peter collects all kinds of "Edisonia". He has probably thousands of different types of cylinders. There were various types of materials used for the manufacture of cylinders through time. I think the oldest ones were a beige- colored metallic soap. They are the ones that you could purchase with pre-recorded sound. It's put on a lathe that shaves off the top layer of the recording. You could then reuse your cylinder. So what Peter does, since he has so many cylinders, is he takes his duplicates. The ones that have the best audio are either transferred or archived in some safe way. But he'll take the duplicate and use it for a recording. So step one was to find cylinders of a certain era that aren't cracked, molded, melted, distorted, or in any way bubbled or screwed up. He narrows that down. Thankfully, the Edison cylinder was a very successful medium. There's plenty of stuff out there. So the first thing is recycling old stuff. Second thing, there are some lunatics out there. Casting. Peter will sometimes cast his own. There is a special kind of large format Edison wax cylinder called orchestral or concert model, which was a very large, about as big as a coffee can. There was a guy in England who cast them, if you have that kind of machine out there. The wonderful thing about anything antique is that there is always a lunatic collecting it somewhere.
And there's always a lunatic looking for it somewhere else.
And the idea is to hook 'em up.
Do you think there's a community that's either growing or exists to preserve this stuff, and one that is using it like you are in making modern recordings with old technologies?
I have no doubt. Because in the process of doing this as a kind of a sampler medium, where one song is wire and one song is wax, you go down these curious paths where you find a club that has two shows a year of just Edison machines in Wayne, NJ. People talk parts and they exchange lore. Out of the blue, I was watching something on television and there was a wire machine collector in Indiana who was very proud and sheepish. He had a basement full of stuff. I was able to track him down and talk and learn about the lore. He's the kind of guy who asks, "You have a Model 7, huh? Has it got the green light? I haven't seen one of those in a long time. What's the serial number?" Obviously he's into preserving it, he's into using it. And then on a more macro level the historical committee for AES [Audio Engineering Society] is always interested in maintaining old gear and/or keeping the stuff and the people in contact. Also NARAS [National Association of Recording Arts and Sciences] has grants for archivists. I was just talking with the chief tech at WBGO in Newark, NJ, the jazz station. They have a huge collection of when they used to do remotes of 1/4" tape live jazz performances from the 1950s up until the present. NARAS gave them a grant to hire an archivist to specifically work on this. Probably, depending on the tape, it's an old mono machine. So there's an awareness of old technology because there is a lot of archival work because the stuff is deteriorating. There are professional archivists in audio and video.
With transferring abilities you have stimulation because there is the decaying old medium and people are saying, "I need to have this transferred."
Have it transferred to something more lasting. Also, through all this playing with old machinery you begin to meet the actual archivists. I got to know Andy Lanset a little bit from WYNC and Adrian Cosentini, who worked for the NY Public Library. Andy Lanset is WNYC's archivist. The station has broadcast for 80-plus years, which goes back to acetate type stock.
On the Museum of Me was there anything that you had to modify to get things to work or were you able to use the old devices purely as they were intended?
Well, you know, no. You have to re-learn how to record in an acoustic non-electrical environment. Which means no spikes and no loud fast transients, and nothing bass 'cause it ain't gonna go down. So if you're used to singing like a rock 'n' roll singer you're gonna blow it out. Which is interesting because then you start to learn how a person's performance was modified by the technology. The BK-401 Sound Mirror was the first commercially available tape recorder in America, which was made at Brush Electronics where my uncle used to work. When I was little my uncle gave me a box full of these ball microphones and I really didn't know what they were for. I used to stick them on everything. They were these big crystal mics. The first BK-401 that I found came from my brother's girlfriend's garage in Florida. In order to get it working we had to vacuum all the mouse poop out, get the black widows out, and replace the wires that the other vermin chewed through. Miraculously, I found another one in better shape and use this one for parts. By the way, the rule on this stuff is you always have to get two. You have to have a parts back up. Three is even better. So I wound up with two BK-401 Sound Mirrors. Got one that worked well enough to record. It kind of wheezed and gasped and the input was too sensitive, very distorted. But I liked the take. It sounded like an old roadhouse thing. So we kept it and that's the song called "Swamp Boy". That machine kind of made it through its recording life and I don't think I've turned it on since because I'm kind of afraid to. The Studer stuff, the J37 came from Jolly Roger Recording in Hoboken, NJ. We got the machine to work well enough and it's a beautiful piece of work. The Rolling Stones Mobile Truck, which was a real find, obviously was unbelievably top shelf because it was English and well made. The Helios silver console, two MCI 16-tracks, was just fabulous!
Do you find the type of technology dictates the recording approach?
Absolutely. That was one of the one of the more fascinating things. You had to modify what you did to suit the medium. And that was for every one of these things. Even with the most modern Pro Tools system there are things you can and cannot do. It has a limit. The limitations are completely different but each one has its own set of limitations, its own little narrow notch of peak performance. In other words, certain frequencies work best on a wire machine. Sometimes I had to do a little pre-emphasis to try and find that. Analog can be way off spec and still work. A lot times I would have to make do with just functioning. So I would have to tweak my input some way off to suit the medium and the particular machine that we were working at. You really learn how the technology affects what goes into it. For example, we all know '50s rock 'n' roll had no bass drums on it. Somebody was playing it but obviously that was notched out because the technology couldn't handle that kind of power. The limitations of the gear dictate your performance. So everything is evenly modulated. From what I understand, that's how the idea of how a crooner in the 1920s and '30s came about, because there was no such thing as a compressor or limiter. There was a VU meter on the music stand and the singer had to watch and make sure they didn't go in the red. Then they would modify how they sang and everything would come out even. You tend to level out your dynamics. If it's too low you are in the noise floor, if it's too high you are over modulating. Now there are little magic boxes for that stuff. There's great pictures of musicians recording acoustically in Edison's attic in their recording studio where there's a huge collector horn and you have all the people lined up. A piano is up on stilts so that the back is facing the horn, you've got people playing Stroh violins, which are violins with a projector horn so they are more or less unidirectional, all aimed. The drummer is way in the back across the room. The singer is fairly up front. The trumpets are way back because they're very "spikey". All the musicians are on roll-around platforms so that whole sections of instruments could be moved. The interesting thing about all these recorded media is that what gets recorded is very different than the playback. More and more as the technology has gotten more sophisticated, the archivists are pulling stuff off of an old acetate that if you played it back on the normal reproducer you wouldn't hear. For example, you can take an old acetate and use all the modern methods to restore it, and suddenly you hear room ambiance. You do hear a fuller frequency spectrum that was recorded on there; it's just that the technology couldn't reproduce that.
So then do you see the old technology as limited, given today's technological advancements?
Well no, that's what the archivists are finding. They are pulling things off of old cylinders and old 78s with a more sophisticated playback system and you hear unbelievable detail. You hear a wider spectrum than one would think and there is more recorded information on this old stuff waiting to be discovered. And as the tools are becoming more and more advanced the archivists are pulling up room ambience or the sound of a horse going by. There's a depth to the recording stuff that you didn't notice until more recently.
Do you think that advancements from one device to another were mostly to provide a lower noise to source ratio and also for ease of usage for the consumer?
Good question. Obviously, whenever somebody invents something there's a pro market and a commercial market. A lot of it is that there is an assumption that things can be dumbed down to where the public can accept it. Edison's whole thing was that he was heavy on the PR to make it seem easy. It's not easy to use even the oldest of the technologies in an adequate way. The technology parallels the growth of the commercial music industry and the idea of reproducing something. Edison thought he had a nice little office machine. The idea that it became a home entertainment device came afterwards. The musical distribution medium of choice in the late 1880s and '90s was sheet music or a piano roll. Every parlor had a piano. It was the instrument that all middle class families aspired to have. You didn't have pre-recorded music. That was a novelty. And this all predates radio as well. As each technology progressed, it's kind of chicken and the egg. Somebody would invent something; there would be a commercial angle to it as well. Berliner comes up with the flat disc, which is easier to reproduce than those cylinders. That becomes the de facto choice after format wars (that still go on today). Everything old is new again. Everything that goes on now in terms of format battles and who's gonna triumph in the marketplace. That stuff goes back to day one of recording. Most of the companies had research and development departments that tried to continue to improve the machinery, and to continue to simplify it. There always the goal in capitalistic marketing to find a "hit toy" that everybody will want to have, whether it's an iPod, a Walkman, or a hi-fi stereo system. There's always that contrast between how great a technology is and how easy it's going to be.
When listening to the stuff you recorded, the wax recordings, the wire, and the old tape, it seems to me that as each technology was in succession of the other, the noise ratio went down, and the ability to use the machine was made easier.
Yes. It got down to where in the 1930s the Recordio Company made a radio with a cutting turntable on it. It got pretty easy and pretty foolproof. You were not necessarily concerned with super hi-fi reproduction if you were just recording an "Amos & Andy" radio show or a letter to mom and dad.
We were at the birth of consumer- based playback and that was exciting in itself.
