Everyone said vinyl records were dead. Gen Z had other ideas

Vinyl records are doomed when German artist and musician Carsten Nicolai creates interactive art installation bausatz-noto Comprised of a turntable, a sound mixer, and brightly colored 10-inch records, this album is designed as both hymn and elegy. CD sales were still growing rapidly; The file sharing revolution was a few years away. With their pop, crackle, and limited capacity (only 20 minutes of music on a side), vinyl LPs seemed destined to go the way of Betamax and Bakelite phones.

Nicolai, who also owns a record company, is one of the generation that grew up listening to records. His installation invited visitors to put on a pair of headphones, choose some discs, and create their own music. When bausatz-noto coming to Melbourne as part of Vinyl Factory: Reverb Locals will be able to do just that with the opening of the exhibition at ACMI on May 22.

The experience is tactile and cannot be rushed. It requires concentration. Perhaps it’s the antithesis of the current all-you-can-eat mentality of digital music. “For me, vinyl records are the iconic object that best represents music,” says Nicolai.

Vinyl hasn’t expired, of course. It’s the dominant physical medium for music today, and it’s a revival that’s been going on for so long (about 20 years) that it feels wrong to even call it a revival. Streaming is the most dominant form of music consumption in the world (accounting for almost 70 percent of the industry’s revenue), but sales of old-school vinyl are still pretty strong, so to speak.

The Vinyl Factory, a record label and pressing facility in Hayes, part of west London where EMI once produced 20 million records a year, is testament to the medium’s resilience. A box set of Nicolai bausatz-noto It is among the thousands of records EMI has produced since the turn of the millennium, when it bought its automatic pressing machines; These are venerable machines that once churned out era-defining LPs. Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon And Forget the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols.

The ACMI exhibition celebrates the company’s collaborations with artists and musicians. together with bausatz-notoThere will be a 50-seat listening room with a state-of-the-art sound system that will play vinyl LPs from an eclectic group of artists including Sonic Youth, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Miles Davis and Grace Jones.

Sean Bidder, creative director of The Vinyl Factory, says the exhibition, which is part of this year’s RISING festival, is a celebration of “the enduring legacy of the medium”. Some art world heavyweights – Jeremy Deller and William Kentridge – are making works in the show, and there’s a dazzling exhibition of 100 LP covers.

If vinyl’s resurgence was driven solely by older people returning to the format that defined their youth, its days would be numbered. But this is not the case. Bidder says there’s plenty of evidence that digital natives of Generation Z are a major force in today’s marketplace. He points to a report from The Vinyl Alliance that found the largest group who regularly purchases vinyl records are 18- to 24-year-olds, with 76 percent of Gen Z vinyl fans buying vinyl at least once a month.

“Even though digital culture is ubiquitous, we are still humans; we can only move at a certain pace, and we want to take a break from the brutality of digital culture,” he says. “People who are passionate about music want to experience it in a richer, deeper way.”

Other reasons why young music fans buy LPs include wanting to support artists who make more money from records than from streaming services. “It’s like wearing a T-shirt of a band you love; it’s an expression of how passionate you are, how determined you are,” Bidder says. They’re also valued as beautiful objects worth displaying or simply as a way to separate them from your phone and computer.

Not far from where Bidder sits is evidence of this interaction: a wall of discs displaying 250 bespoke colors that artists can choose from when ordering a series of LPs or singles. Fun fact: Bjork called the shade she chose for one of her albums “genital white.”

The pressing plant itself is a busy, cacophonous place filled with electroplating baths and heavy machinery; It’s the kind of store floor you see in movies from the 1940s and ’50s. Here, six EMI presses turn black lentil-like pellets of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) into a 12-inch disc that looks and feels as iconic as Warhol’s soup can. A single LP takes 27 seconds to make. The process involves heat, 2400 psi (pounds per square inch) pressure and steam to help stamp every vibration and drum hit into the grooves. Before the finished record is thrown into a sleeve, a shot of cold water returns the vinyl to its hard state.

Musicians—Suzi Quatro was a recent visitor—often gather at the work end of the presses to watch with wonder as the music they record in studios around the world emerges as an object that is part vessel, part work of art.

Production manager Alex Deninson, 29, who joined The Vinyl Factory from university, says pressing is the final part of the process. The first step is to cut the music onto a blank lacquered disc using a mastering lathe. As a result, an engraved “lacquer” is plated with nickel to create what is known as a “master”. Since “main” is the negative of “lacquer” – it has ridges instead of grooves – a re-electroplating process is used to create a “main” or “positive”. This is used to make the “stamp”, which is the mold that is placed inside the press and shapes the finished product.

“The master allows you to create 20 positives, and each positive can produce 20 stamps. A single stamper can print 1,000 records, so that’s exponential,” Deninson says.

Vinyl Factory’s six EMI presses can each produce up to 1,000 LPs per day, and its seven-inch machine can produce more than 1,000 singles in a 24-hour period. “The busiest year we’ve ever had was COVID, when we hit a record 2 million,” says Deninson. “Everyone was furloughed, stuck at home, and rediscovered music.”

Keeping the printing presses running is a labor of love. The Vinyl Factory has a “graveyard” of decommissioned presses that it has dismantled for parts and a full set of EMI’s technical drawings. Luckily, the machines are built to last. “There’s been so much engineering that they still work perfectly; they’re truly remarkable,” Deninson says proudly. “They are pressing some of the best records in the world.”

Outside the parking lot is another press: a manual machine housed in a shipping container. It was once located at London’s White Cube gallery as part of the Vinyl Factory collaboration with artist and composer Christian Marclay. The music was recorded live at the gallery and printed on site. Manual pressing, which can produce colorful striped LPs, is another option for artists looking to put a unique stamp on their releases. British drum ‘n’ bassist Goldie used it to create LPs that matched the blue and gold of his sneakers. Daft Punk, Sakamoto and “many German death metal bands” also manipulated “wax” here.

This type of personalization is part of vinyl culture; The idea that the LP is a work at least as important as the music it carries. Folded sleeves, screen printing, stickers, engravings on the surface of the LP and heavy discs (180 and 200 gram LPs can be made for a fee) are ways to stand out from the crowd.

“The vision for Vinyl Factory was to take the process back to a time when craftsmanship drove it and focused on the relationship between creator and producer,” says Bidder. “These are the days when you could walk into a studio on London’s Denmark Street, record a track in one day and have it pressed straight after.

“The difference now is the internet, which is a way for artists to market directly to consumers. We want to make the product as good as it can be, both sonically and in terms of what you can do creatively. You’re trying to make a collectible product that people are willing to pay for. These aren’t things to throw away.”

ACMI and RISING available Vinyl Factory: Reverb22 May – 31 August.