Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music

Friday 6th September, 2024

“A critical, overarching concept to acknowledge is that the object—the 78 rpm record—dictated performance. Most music that was played live, whether privately or publicly, was not bound by a three to four-minute time limit, as records were. Many types of music around the world, from Indian ragas to Chinese opera, lasted hours. Musicians of all kinds learned to tailor their material to fit the maximum amount of space on a 78 rpm side, until longer formats were widely available for consumers, a process that took decades. That meant truncating performances; condensing the dramatic ebbs and flows of a piece until the engineer gave the signal that the time was up. The three-minute pop song wasn’t decided upon because someone thought three minutes was a perfect amount of time to entertain an audience before starting over with a new tune. It was entirely based around the amount of space that a record (a “single”) could fit. Interiors of stores were rearranged to accommodate these shellac discs; consumer space was dictated by shelving size, shelving size dictated by record size.” (Ward, 2020) p.8

Detailed 100 track compilation with a 184-page PDF with contextual mini-histories about both musical origins and the beginnings of the recording industry from Atlanta’s ever-reliable Dust to Digital

https://dusttodigital.bandcamp.com/album/excavated-shellac-an-alternate-history-of-the-worlds-music

Posted by Malleus

audio blog music recording industry 20th century archives format theory shellac