There is a sobering moment that every yet-to-be-diagnosed OCD record collector faces at some pont, and that is the moment at which the undeniable evidence presents itself that there are collectors out there who are even more OCD than you. These are collectors whose own personal stories reduce yours to mere precious anecdotal eccentricities, and whose collections deeply pierce genres you’ve only dreamed about. Not to mention their *size*. Size does matter, at least to a degree. Every collector wants to have the biggest stock in the bar.
When you begin to listen to the discs included in “Victrola Favorites”, that moment becomes apparent. And you relive the joy all over again that you lived with each new genre you discovered, each new band, each new label – each time you lost another aural virginity.
“The obsessive record collectors Rob Millis and Jefferey Taylor have done all the hard work for fans of oddball early recordings, rare world music, ’20s jazz, blues and old time. Millis and Taylor, of the experimental Seattle band Climax Golden Twins, have collected thousands of unusual old 78 r.p.m. records from around the world, and a sampling from their troves is now available in a lovely and beguiling two-disc set called Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days. The set mixes popular recordings of recognizable American artists like Roy Smeck, Don Redman, the Tennessee Ramblers and Blind Boy Fuller with more esoteric and arcane audio postcard-like tracks from around the world, like the startling recordings of Burmese popular songs with electric guitar accompaniment from the 1950s, or the other-worldly croaking reed music from Thailand, or a lovely track of solo Korean bamboo flute. The set is something like a cross between the ever-relevant Anthology of American Folk Music, compiled by Harry Smith, and the equally astounding series of collections called The Secret Museum of Mankind, issued on the Yazoo label in the 1990s and based, in part, on a radio show on the pioneering freeform radio station WFMU out of the New York City area.
The music is amazing, but so too is the packaging, which dispenses with lengthy book-like liner notes in favor of a more artistic, fetishized-artifact quality, with pictures of old record labels and sleeves from 78s from around the world. You can almost feel the brittle, crumbling paper and the hefty weight of the shiny shellac discs. Like Smith’s Anthology, this set does away with the idea of organizing the music by style, race or region. As a result, it’s only the most terminally eclectic listeners who will be able to stay with the swing of things as the tracks flow from the nasally playing of Bismallah Khan on the Indian shenai to the bumping big-band blues of Noble Sissle and his Orchestra, or on the journey elsewhere from Japan to South Africa to India.” — John Adamian, Hartford Advocate
Here are some of the lovingly reproduced images from the book.
The book was the next logicl follow-on from the series of cassette-magazines that these guys produced – all of which are impossible to track down now. Let’s hope this becomes a continuing series, just as the cassettes once were. Some audio tracks”
Carlos Ramos – Torre De Belem (Portugal 1910)
[audio:http://www.jukeboxheart.com/screamers/victrola/vf1.mp3]
He Zemin/Huang Peiying – Big Idiot Buys a Pig (Hong Kong 1930s)
[audio:http://www.jukeboxheart.com/screamers/victrola/vf2.mp3]
Kane’s Hawaiian – Mokihana (Hawaiian Islands 1928)
[audio:http://www.jukeboxheart.com/screamers/victrola/vf3.mp3]
Zeki Duygulu – Karciar Taksim (Oud solo recorded in Turey c. 1920)
[audio:http://www.jukeboxheart.com/screamers/victrola/vf4.mp3]
While researching this entry, I caThere is also a blog for Victrola Favorites. Check it out.