Norton Records, Still Rocking, Is Releasing a Lost Dion Album: Six months after the death of Billy Miller, his wife, Miriam Linna, still keeps his ashes in their only appropriate place: next to the couple’s gigantic collection of 45 r.p.m. records. For nearly 40 years, Mr. Miller and Ms. Linna reigned as the king and queen of New York record collectors. They hunted for rare rockabilly singles, chronicled lost scenes in their magazine Kicks, and founded Norton Records to reissue some of their greatest and most bizarre finds, with liner notes that had scholarly depth but also showed the excitement of true fans.
In full, on vinyl, no talking: have we lost the art of listening to music? A group of audiophiles gathered recently to rediscover Lauryn Hill, on hi-fi gear, no chatter. Kate Hennessy muses on our most starved sense: hearing. “I’m going to turn some lights off now – enjoy your session.” Jean-Philippe Ducharne, an organiser of Classic Album Sundays, is speaking to a room of strangers in a Sydney bar, poised to hear Lauryn Hill’s 1998 album The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. In full, on vinyl, no chatter. People recline on pillows and slouch on couches, but still, you can feel it. The collective uncertainty. An edge of entrapment. The album is 70 minutes long. What are the rules again, exactly? “Think of it like a movie,” says co-organiser Jim Poe.
Councilman’s business brings back the sound of vinyl: When Dan Marter is not helping to make laws as a member of the Englishtown Borough Council, he is making vinyl records. Vinyl record label intheclouds is owned by Marter, 32, who joined the borough’s governing body in January. Since founding the record label in 2011, Marter has helped musicians and bands put their music on vinyl. “I cut each record one at a time by hand and if I can pat myself on the back a little, they sound great,” he said.
Clearaudio: the £3.5k cleaning device for those with the ultimate vinyl LP collection: They are susceptible to three destructive forces: 1) dirt, the oil from fingerprints or anything else on the surface or in the grooves that the stylus (a.k.a. “the needle”) will play as if it was part of the record, 2) scratches that can make the stylus skip and 3) wear-and-tear. The latter, even if one’s turntable is set up perfectly and the stylus is kept clean to OCD levels, is simply a fact of life: a diamond tracking cross squiggles in a vinyl groove will wear it away a molecule at a time.
On the record: Once-dusty vinyl making a musical comeback: “I get a lot of younger people who have turntables. I’m surprised because they like the kind of stuff that I like,” said Robinson, who has owned Revolution Records for almost two decades. “They ask about the Beatles, Doors, Rolling Stones — the things I grew up with. It’s not their generation of music. We’re talking my time — and my time was a complete and total rebellion again our parents. They listened to big band and smooth country, Frank Sinatra and Patsy Cline. We had the Beatles, the Stones and Led Zeppelin that weren’t a thing like our parents’ music.”
