Music - On the "Letter From Home" tracks from "The Private Press" by DJ Shadow and the impermanence of things

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The most obvious - and most extreme - examples of privately pressed pieces that ended up on the record are the Recordio Discs that wound up in the opening and closing ‘Letter From Home' tracks. One-off recordings pressed onto cardboard and designed to be sent by their maker to their single recipient by post, these were anomalies even among the obscurity- obsessed crate-digger community Shadow was almost an adjunct professor of at the turn of the century. Not really records, they didn't turn up in second hand record shops, and when people did unearth them, they'd often be hiding alongside personal letters or private mementoes in the kind of places that ended up with the unwanted portions of house-clearance sales. Today we would perhaps interpret them as aural selfies, albeit ones created by a generation that still retained a rote form of formality when sending messages that email and SMS has all but obliterated: Novella Johnson signs her audio postcard, and puts her address at the top, like a letter. (Go online you discover even the street she was "writing" from no longer exists; past is forever being rewritten, and not just by DJs making sonic collages.) and the

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Uploaded Jul 14, 2024 at 10:33AM EDT

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The Recordio discs were a product of the Wilcox-Gay Corp., which began in 1910 as a small company creating radios and transcription recorders in Charlotte, Michigan. As their business grew so did the product line they carried and in 1939 they launched the Recordio. The Recordio device not only played records but also allowed the user to use a microphone that accompanied the player to record themselves onto a blank record -- a "Recordio Disc." The Recordio machine recorded at 78 rpm with decent fidelity. These machines also included an AM radio receiver. With this function you could record your favorite radio broadcasts to listen to time and time again. These machines were marketed to the middle class through such media outlets as Ebony and Life magazine. The player/recorder found its way into the hands of musicians, and Johnny Cash and Les Paul were known to use these devices. In its debut year the Recordio device sold 25,000 units, but with the Great Depression underway and the adoption of magnetic tape the Wilcox-Gay Corp. sales declined. In 1961 the company moved to Chicago and lasted two more years before finally declaring bankruptcy a second time and closing its doors for good in 1963. --Source

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