New SIGHUP release today, Edison Moon:

This is so far my favourite thing I’ve made. It’s a reflection of everything I like music to be and it’s my small contribution to the plunderphonic artform.

The project has been in the works for six months or so, I had come across the Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project curated at the University of California, Santa Barbara and was simply in awe of the contents of the library. Through some technicalities in copyright law, it is assumed that the Edison wax cylinder recordings are in the public domain, so the library has graciously transferred the collection of recordings and placed the raw transfers on their site for download. The collection is very deep, and well worth browsing thoroughly.

While I was looking it over for the first time, I accidentally came across several songs with the word “moon” in the title. Struck me as a sort of quaint ephemera, when popular songs had lots of moonlights, and gardens and sweethearts, so I started searching to see just how many moons I could find, and the idea for a full project was born shortly afterward.

I had played around with several of the recordings and built up a good stock of materials for a set of tracks, but in creating the tracks nothing was particularly cohesive. So I sat on the idea, did several other things in the interim, including my Kenji Siratori track and the Drum Machine EP, and once I came back to it, it all fell into place fairly quickly. I think I finisehd all five tracks in under two weeks.

I have plans to do more projects from the wax cylinders.

Click on the picture above to go to the release page. I wouldn’t recommend the lo-fi files that can be accessed through the player, go straight for the high-quality VBR recordings instead. I’ve listed there the eight recordings that comprise all of the source materials used on this project. I think my approach to the original material is both reverential and perverse, I hope it is perceived as such by listeners.