The Wax Cylinder Project
I’m nearing the end of a project I’ve been working on sporadically for the past year or so. In a previous release (the second volume of my Top Floor Sessions), I’d been recording music for use with some Dictaphone recordings which I’d made over the course of the past decade or two. They featured sounds from beach holidays, conversations, rainfall, family games, etc. I really enjoyed working with these recordings, using them for both inspiration and accompaniment. Accordingly, I was looking for some more records or samples to work with which would be in some way similarly obscure, not to say also ‘royalty free’. For this, I needed to find some very old recordings, copyright generally extending to up to 70+ years in the UK. For old recordings, you can’t get any older than the earliest recorded media format, which was the Edison phonograph cylinder. A Columbia wax cylinder I purchased to photograph for this project. Note the mould patches on the cylinder which I rather like as a visible s...
