[78-L] 78 "Vegans"?

[Michael Biel]

On 5/12/2013 1:22 PM, Michael Shoshani wrote:
> I only touch them if the shellac is humanely collected from organic
> forest-raised lac beetles, and the carbon black is hand-produced over an
> open flame on glass that had never been used for any other purpose.
>
> I'm not so picky as to insist that the label be made from paper pulped
> from old-growth trees, but it's always a plus.     MS


Michael -- The subject of humanely collected shellac IS apparently going
to be discussed at ARSC on Thursday morning.  During the 10:45 session,
while some of us are listening to Cary Ginell on Billy Eckstine, the
rest of us will hear this:
++++++++++
All Natural Discs   Jacob Smith,   Northwestern University

“It doesn't sound very much like an insect, does it,” asked a writer
in 1928, “this great, soaring tone of Caruso’s matchless tenor?”
The writer went on to assert that despite the seeming incongruity,
Caruso’s recordings relied upon an unassuming, short-lived, tiny
insect. That is, Caruso’s phonograph discs were once “gum-like lumps
on the twigs of a far-off forest,” the “life-work of a little mite
hardly half a pin-head in size.” That “little mite” was the Indian
lac insect, which produced a resin called shellac that was the key
ingredient in most of the phonograph discs manufactured before the
mid-1940s.

The lac insect’s role in the technological assemblage of recorded
sound is one of the topics that I explore as part
of an eco-critical analysis of the early phonograph industry’s
infrastructure. This presentation is concerned with the period during
which the acoustic and shellac eras of phonograph history overlapped:
what I call the “Green Disc” era. The discs of this era were
“green” because they were produced through the labor of both human
and
nonhuman actors; required little or no electricity for recording and
playback; and were made from a biodegradable bioplastic taken from a
sustainable source. Through a discussion of shellac manufacturing,
recording technique, and the consumer ecology of phonograph needles, I
argue that early phonography should be appreciated not simply as a form
of antiquated material culture, but as a valuable model for the
development of eco-ethical modes of media production and consumption.

++++++++++
Should be fascinating!

Mike Biel  mbiel at mbiel.com  

 On 05/12/2013 11:58 AM, David Lennick wrote:
>> How about kosher or halal records?
>>
>> dl
>>
>> (What happens in Vegans, stays in Vegans.)
>>
>> On 5/12/2013 12:57 PM, Julian Vein wrote:
>>> Are there any 78 collectors who won't touch a record unless it's a
>>> master pressing, i.e. not a dub of an existing 78, a dub from a 16"
>>> lacquer or recorded on tape?
>>>
>>> Julian Vein