Clinging to the relics of recording

By Lee Landenberger


The moment for music fans is clear - there are those who like to download their music, keep it on a hard drive and never touch it, only listen to it.

Then there are those for whom just listening is not enough. They need to have something to go with the sound. A disc. Its jewel box. Some liner notes on a sleeve. Then it's filed on a shelf with other discs.

Venerable Music and Dust-to-Digital are two Georgia businesses with feet simultaneously in the past and present. It's a tough crossroads to be standing at, deciding which of these markets to cater to - downloaders or collectors.

For Malcolm Vidrine, owner of Venerable Music in Monroe, a huge part of the music experience is not just aural, it's tactile. He wants a package with his music that gives context to the listener, and that's what he's selling.

On the side, he collects rare 78-rpm records. It makes for a great listening experience, he says.

"There's a physical sensation that goes along with it," he says. "If you've got a collection and another person who owns a collection, and they're pulling records as you're listening to records, there's this flowing thing. But it's very physical. It's so different, and I don't know why, than listening to a compilation CD."

Venerable dedicates itself to preserving and promoting music from the 78-rpm era. It's an online service where collectors and the curious go when they, for instance, are looking for the complete early recordings of Kid Ory or the Mississippi Sheiks. The music comes on a compact disc with sleeve notes, not just an MP3 download.

Dust-to-Digital is a label that's garnered plenty of attention the past few years.

It's been nominated for five Grammy Awards and won the best historical album category this year for "The Art of Field Recording, Vol. 1." The label is run from Lance and April Ledbetter's Atlanta home.

The experience of music is more than just sound for Lance. The world of the single download is a world away from him.

"The whole interaction you have with the music is important, like when you put on a CD for 75 minutes, this thing can just wash over you," he says.

"Goodbye, Babylon," Dust-to-Digital's first release, is a case in point. You can't just download it and store the music on a hard drive.

Lance and April won't have it that way.

You have to buy the entire package - cedar box, the book of artists' bios and song lyrics, six discs and some cotton to complete the experience of old-time Southern religion.

"It's not like we're just churning stuff out," April says. "Lance meditates on it, what it's going to be like, how it's going to come together. He gets inspiration from different things."

The newest release from Dust-to-Digital takes a similar tack. "Take Me to the Water: Immersion Baptism in Vintage Music and Photography 1890-1950" is one disc of hard-to-find historic, sacred recordings that comes inside a 96-page book of photos of baptisms taken from 1890 to 1940.

It's a far cry from the iTunes top download list.

"When you put the music on and look at the pictures, what you're witnessing in some cases is the happiest moment of an individual's life, the moment they got saved, the moment they got their sins washed away," Lance says. "You're getting to peer into these people's most important life experiences, and to me, that's powerful. There's no way you can replicate that on a computer screen. Printing on paper is still the best way to experience that."

Lance says he has thought about making his collections of historic roots recordings available as downloads, but he thinks that would hurt the overall ideology upon which he founded his label. It could be a revenue stream, but he's turned his back on the idea. In the label's future is another look at the past - issuing vinyl.

"There is demand for it. A lot of people ask us about it," he says. "To me, we're not big enough to move backwards. I love to move forwards, and then maybe when April and I are in old age, we'll say it's time to put the Dust-to-Digital catalogue into vinyl."

Venerable and Dust-to-Digital are making music available to a world that sees fewer and fewer compact discs sold as each day goes by. Major music retailers like Tower Records are gone. Space on the floor at Borders for music sales is shrinking.

Even the markets for what they specialize in are getting smaller, while the rest of the music-listening market often expects to get music in a decidedly nontraditional way: online and free, which makes what these two Georgia businesses do even harder.

"People who do this do it because they love it, and it's not about money," Vidrine says. "And regular music is about money."

• This commentary was provided to the Banner-Herald through Georgia Online News Service. For more information on Venerable Music, see the Web at www.venerablemusic.com; visit Dust-to-Digital at dust-digital.com, and learn about "Take Me to the Water" at dust-digital.com/water.htm.


Source: http://www.onlineathens.com/