Victrola Favorites [coll] – [Dust-To-Digital]

Dust-to-Digital and Climax Golden Twins are responsible for this book / CD party pack, a celebration of the legacy of 78 RPM recordings released all over the world over a period of time from the 1900s to the 1950s, when 78s began to lose traction in the marketplace. Climax Golden Twins have a history of projects like this, having released a series of 10 cassettes made from their gigantic collection of 78s, played on an actual Victrola that was recorded with a high quality microphone. Those cassettes were packaged without any annotation whatsoever, but this collection adds artists, titles, and years of release as well as some background info in the book, as well as many pages of graphics from packaging, needle tins, advertising, and the labels of the records themselves… this helps us imagine how exciting the idea of recorded sound once was to early purchasers of recorded discs, and the machines to play them on. Rob Miillis of the Twins has selected a few favorites here, which I’ve highlighted in yellow in the track list; that’s a good place to start, but it’s all fascinating stuff, and even the tracks by American artists are quite exotic at times. (crimes)