LONDON• Tucked in a trendy co-working complex in West London, just past the food court and the payment processing start-up, is perhaps the most technologically backward-looking record company in the world.
The Electric Recording Co, which has been releasing music since 2012, specialises in meticulous re-creations of classical and jazz albums from the 1950s and 1960s.
Its catalogue includes reissues of landmark recordings by Wilhelm Furtwangler, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, as well as lesser-known artists favoured by collectors, like violinist Johanna Martzy.
But what really sets Electric Recording apart is its method – a philosophy of production more akin to the making of small-batch gourmet chocolate than most shrink-wrapped vinyl.
Its albums, assembled by hand and released in editions of 300 or fewer – at a cost of US$400 (S$566) to US$600 for each LP – are made with restored vintage equipment down to glowing vacuum-tube amplifiers and mono tape systems that have not been used in more than half a century.
The goal is to ensure a faithful restoration of what the label's founder, Mr Pete Hutchison, 53, sees as a lost golden age of record-making.
Even its record jackets, printed one by one on letterpress machines, show a fanatical devotion to age-old craft.
"It started as wanting to re-create the original but not make it a sort of pastiche," Mr Hutchison said in a recent interview. "And in order not to create a pastiche, we had to do everything as they had done it."
Electric Recording's attention to detail and Mr Hutchison's delicate engineering style in mastering old records have given the label a revered status among collectors – yet also drawn subtle ridicule among rivals who view its approach as needlessly expensive and too precious by half.
To a large degree, the vinyl resurgence of the last decade has been fuelled by reissues. But no reissue label has gone to the same extremes as Electric Recording.
In 2009, Mr Hutchison bought the two hulking, gun-metal grey machines he uses to master records – a Lyrec tape deck and lathe, with Ortofon amplifiers, both from 1965 – and spent more than US$150,000 restoring them over three years.
He has invested thousands more on improvements like replacing their copper wiring with mined silver, which he said gives the audio signal a greater level of purity.
The machines allow Mr Hutchison to exclude any trace of technology that has crept into the recording process since a time when the Beatles were in moptops.
That means not only anything digital or computerised but also transistors, a mainstay of audio circuitry for decades; instead, the machines' amplifiers are powered by vacuum tubes (or valves, as British engineers call them).
"We're all about valves here," Mr Hutchison said on a tour of the label's studio.
Mastering a vinyl record involves "cutting" grooves into a lacquer disc, a dark art in which tiny adjustments can have a big effect.
Unusually among engineers, he tends to master records at low volumes – sometimes even quieter than the originals – to bring out more of the natural feel of the instruments.
He is a surprising candidate to carry the torch for sepia-toned classical fidelity.
In the 1990s, he was a player in the British techno scene with his label Peacefrog. The label's success in the early 2000s with the minimalist folk of Jose Read More – Source
LONDON• Tucked in a trendy co-working complex in West London, just past the food court and the payment processing start-up, is perhaps the most technologically backward-looking record company in the world.
The Electric Recording Co, which has been releasing music since 2012, specialises in meticulous re-creations of classical and jazz albums from the 1950s and 1960s.
Its catalogue includes reissues of landmark recordings by Wilhelm Furtwangler, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, as well as lesser-known artists favoured by collectors, like violinist Johanna Martzy.
But what really sets Electric Recording apart is its method – a philosophy of production more akin to the making of small-batch gourmet chocolate than most shrink-wrapped vinyl.
Its albums, assembled by hand and released in editions of 300 or fewer – at a cost of US$400 (S$566) to US$600 for each LP – are made with restored vintage equipment down to glowing vacuum-tube amplifiers and mono tape systems that have not been used in more than half a century.
The goal is to ensure a faithful restoration of what the label's founder, Mr Pete Hutchison, 53, sees as a lost golden age of record-making.
Even its record jackets, printed one by one on letterpress machines, show a fanatical devotion to age-old craft.
"It started as wanting to re-create the original but not make it a sort of pastiche," Mr Hutchison said in a recent interview. "And in order not to create a pastiche, we had to do everything as they had done it."
Electric Recording's attention to detail and Mr Hutchison's delicate engineering style in mastering old records have given the label a revered status among collectors – yet also drawn subtle ridicule among rivals who view its approach as needlessly expensive and too precious by half.
To a large degree, the vinyl resurgence of the last decade has been fuelled by reissues. But no reissue label has gone to the same extremes as Electric Recording.
In 2009, Mr Hutchison bought the two hulking, gun-metal grey machines he uses to master records – a Lyrec tape deck and lathe, with Ortofon amplifiers, both from 1965 – and spent more than US$150,000 restoring them over three years.
He has invested thousands more on improvements like replacing their copper wiring with mined silver, which he said gives the audio signal a greater level of purity.
The machines allow Mr Hutchison to exclude any trace of technology that has crept into the recording process since a time when the Beatles were in moptops.
That means not only anything digital or computerised but also transistors, a mainstay of audio circuitry for decades; instead, the machines' amplifiers are powered by vacuum tubes (or valves, as British engineers call them).
"We're all about valves here," Mr Hutchison said on a tour of the label's studio.
Mastering a vinyl record involves "cutting" grooves into a lacquer disc, a dark art in which tiny adjustments can have a big effect.
Unusually among engineers, he tends to master records at low volumes – sometimes even quieter than the originals – to bring out more of the natural feel of the instruments.
He is a surprising candidate to carry the torch for sepia-toned classical fidelity.
In the 1990s, he was a player in the British techno scene with his label Peacefrog. The label's success in the early 2000s with the minimalist folk of Jose Read More – Source
