The record was cut!

Just sifting through the documentation now, but the record was cut, no major disasters, the weather was awesome, great turnout from friends and just people enjoying the day.... the bands were incredible, Animal Hospital's experimental dense layers of rel to reel and built up samples, Ashcan Orchestra's impressive anything goes percussion setup, bowed xylophones and welded metal gears, Tree Of Tenere's (members of Soccer Mom) instrumental rock and even getting Bobby from the Hussy to acoustic garage rock over the phone, that was a truly surreal moment in the lathe room.

Thanks to everyone that came out, and to Masterdisk, especially Alex DeTurk for working the lathe cutter. It's what I imagine Nasa missions were like. You're in a windowless room listening to audio, talking to people who may as well be a million miles away, placing mic's and adjusting levels, there's only one time to get this. You have one shot.

Really incredible job. Alex and James took the time out of a perfect Saturday to sit in there with us and try something hopefully totally new. We should have the audio rip of the disk us to preview at some point, and tons more pictures.

LIve! From 14th Street! with Art in Odd Places and Masterdisk

Hey there, just wanted to let everyone know about this project happening tomorrow on 14th and 10th ave, NYC. At 2PM in the park between the west side highway and 10th ave, right in the center of the grassy hill there we will be cutting a record, live.

A while back I went to Masterdisk in midtown to check out their mastering facilites and learn a little bit about what goes into cutting the lathe master that gets plated and stamps out the records that we buy in a store. Checking out the lathe cutting room with Alex and watching him cut a record in front of us was pretty amazing. After seeing a tweet from them around the same time about wishing they could throw the lathe cutter into a truck and cut a live record...well that got us thinking...couldn't we live stream a performance to the lathe cutting room a few blocks away instead?

At the same time Art in Odd Places was having their annual public art project across 14th Street and having worked with that great festival before we thought it would be a perfect opportunity to attempt this under the umbrella of AiOP with the help of Masterdisk and 4 great bands.

Since this project is about communication and what happens in the translation between technologies we then wanted to tie in some of those recording landmarks with the bands pieces.

Matt asked Kevin from Animal Hospital to work with the earliest recorded audio from Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville's phonautograph. A demented lo-fi scratchy tune from possibly Édouard-Léon himself.

I talked to Pat from Ashcan Orchestra to listen to the first radio broadcast off the coast of MA in 1906 to see what they'll come up with.

Finally we gave our friends in Soccer Mom (10" out on sweaters and pearls!) an image of the voyager disk for inspiration.

Matt suggested we could go one step further and call in a band to play over the phone and that's when we thought of The Hussy in WI.

The three bands will play live for each side of the record and Matt and our trusty technicians/photographers Jim Manning and Rob Coshow will capture it all, while I'm at Masterdisk with engineer Alex DeTurk making sure it's coming through and watching the record being cut. When it's finished I'll jump in a cab and head down to the park to listen to the record with the bands and anyone who decides to show up.

I'll be posting pieces of the final audio and some video of the performance in the coming weeks. I'm excited, the weather looks like it's going to hold out, and it should be a pretty crazy spectacle on a Saturday afternoon. Go check out these bands, they're all super great guys for working with us, and I hope it's as exciting for them.