One in an Archipelago: A Day at the ARSC

by Ale Díaz-Pizarro

Though Phil Schaap was world-renowned as a jazz educator, expert, and all-around master (just ask the NEA!), he could never add "Columbia professor" to that list despite teaching there (and at several other universities). University administrators, citing his lack of graduate doctoral credentials, drew a firm line between the halls of academia and the looser bounds of academically-unaffiliated knowledge— no matter how tangible and expansive the latter might be.

But between May 15th-18th at the DoubleTree Hilton Downtown in St. Paul, Minnesota, that line was nowhere to be found—and neither was the interest in even trying to trace it.

The conference of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections is an odd one: PhDs mingle with record-bin savants, with no distinction drawn between the knowledge or expertise of one group or another. Rather, the ARSC fosters a space of shared passions, where people with a genuine love for all forms of recorded media come together to share their latest projects and learn from fellow enthusiasts who, though they may be working in entirely different media and time, they know for a fact share that same love for physical sound formats.

I was able to attend the conference for one day—Friday, May 17th. The previous night, I had attended one of the conference's open events, where filmmaker and banjo player Craig Evans talked about his project, "Old-Time Conversations," which collects the sounds and voices of Americans involved in traditional music-making, from banjo-making to footstomping to fiddle-playing. As an occasional host of Hobo's Lullaby, I'm not one to shy away from traditional music, and the fiddle tunes sent me off to bed like a promise of how exciting the next day would be.

The promise was realized as early on as 9am the next day— though the subject matter was as far a cry as anything could be from last night's rollicking foot-stomping. For an hour and a half, I was treated to the history of the Möllendorf Collection, a box of wax cylinders that were the first recordings ever made in China (ca. 1890), which were held by a private collector until his death, and which are now housed at UC Santa Barbara's Early Recordings Initiative (a sponsor of the conference). Enthralled, I listened to Dr. Patrick Feaster, of Indiana

University Bloomington, tell the story of the cylinders, which had been commissioned to German linguist and diplomat Paul Georg von Möllendorf while he was stationed in China. Tasked with capturing the different dialects of mainland China, von Möllendorf had native speakers of each dialect recite the same poem. More than a century later, the cylinders yielded a double legacy: an accidental repository of Chinese oral poetry traditions, and a testament to some dialects that have since then gone extinct. This posed a difficulty for David Giovannoni, the specialist in charge of audio preservation of the cylinders: some of these were scratched and damaged, and no speakers remained to make sense of what the audio should say. Giovannoni then described his innovative technique to reconstruct the sound, in a minutia of needle widths and audio mixing that I won't even try to recount here but which left me utterly fascinated. Closed by two representatives from the UCSB Early Recordings Initiative, the panel acquired the sense of a hero's journey: we had started with a dusty, mysterious treasure chest of a cylinder box, moved through its process of restoration, and ended with that collection finding a permanent home where they could continue to be studied. I left the panel giddy.

From the other side of the Pacific, my conference experience then turned hyperlocal, as I attended two talks about the Midwest music scene. I heard Bruce Adams of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's "There is a House in Urbana," which departed from the now-(in) famous house featured on an American Football album cover to take us on a tour of so-called Midwest emo and the record label that made it possible: Polyvinyl Records. If this talk seemed catered to someone my age, it provided no end of fun moments to watch conference attendees three times my age listen to what I can only assume was their first taste of bands like Cap'n Jazz, The Get Up Kids, and Rainer Maria—but best of all was the openness with which they did. The next talk seemed more catered to this demographic, as conference regular Mark Atnip profiled The Vintage Music Company, the last all-78 rpm music store. Located in downtown Minneapolis, catty-corner across from the site of George Floyd's murder, the store's all-glass storefront was spared the looting and destruction that came with the ensuing BLM protests in 2020. Atnip's lithe and humorous talk—"some days, you might find some good records in the bins up front—except you won't, 'cause I bought them all—offered a loving profile of an eccentric little store and its even more eccentric owner, who will not sell a piece until he has dutifully catalogued it into his handwritten discographical record. Incidentally, this session yielded perhaps one of the most interesting moments of the day: another conference regular, Dr. Mike Biel of Morehead, Kentucky, voiced his qualms with the VMC's peculiar store-running style. He recounted an experience of going to the store and selecting materials only to be told that they weren't for sale, which he found offensive, a sure sign that the storeowner thought that he was better at discography than everyone else. Atnip and other audience members pushed back, defending the idiosyncracies that audio lovers must permit their fellows; as Dr. Biel and his daughter Leah retorted, the chatter in the conference room devolved into what sounded more like booing—even audio wonks have drama!

Pleasantly frazzled, I took a lunch break before two sessions grouped together under "Musical Microcosms"—which, as a KCR DJ, I felt were right in my ballpark. Though I came in late for a talk by Nate Gibson, the AudioVisual Preservation Archivist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he soon won me over with a survey of Cuca Records' catalogue, a small Wisconsin-based record label that is perhaps best known for its 1960 chart-topping recording of "Mule Skinner Blues" by the Fendermen. Looking over Cuca's rockabilly, polka (and polkabilly), blues, and country records, I couldn't help but smell a themed Hobo's Lullaby in the making. After Gibson, David Drazin took us through his collection of issues of Flexipop, a short-lived British pop magazine that came with a free flexi record per issue, allowing its subscribers to hear songs by prominent bands like Depeche Mode before they were commercially released. More of a tour than a talk, I had fun "flipping" through the magazines along with Drazin's slideshow, listening to samples from the records while glancing at childhood memories from artists like Siouxsie (of "and the Banshees" fame) and day-in-the-lifes of artists like Debbie Harry. Ending early, the session made for a nice palate cleanser before what I was really there for.

In the afternoon, I filed early into a conference room to be front and center for a talk by fellow WKCRite Sam Seliger—whom you might recognize as the longtime host of Tuesday's Just as Bad, or as WKCR's former Program Director and Librarian & Archivist. Though his work with WKCR's reel-to-reel tapes and heaps of CDs would put him right at home amid these audio preservationists, Sam was there to talk about something entirely different: the commercialization of country music identity starting in the 90s, with artists such as Garth Brooks, Shania Twain, and Alan Jackson leading the charge. I must confess that I can't resist a good Shania Twain song (and, to be fair, they were meticulously engineered by her ex-husband and producer Mutt Lange for that very purpose), and to hear Sam trace the line from the pre-Nashville sound country music we both have delved into when we've hosted Honky Tonkin' all the way to the threshold of 9/11 and the reckoning it entailed for country music opened my eyes about the evolution of a genre that WKCR taught me to love. It didn't hurt, either, that Sam wore a cowboy hat—a form of meta-commentary on the commercialization of country image, sure, but also a delightfully unorthodox accessory to a suit. Sam was followed by the independent scholar Caroline Vézina, who delivered a talk about Creole Songs and the development of early jazz that I couldn't help but think would have felt right at home in Traditions in Swing.

My day concluded with a two-hour film screening of sorts, where the archivist Mark Cantor regaled us with a selection of "talkies" and video recordings of music performances, including vaudeville stilt performers, tap dancers, early televised jazz bands, and none other than Duke Ellington. Film is not a common medium for the preservation of audio, but to see the lively performances that accompanied many such recordings reminded me of the danceable nature of much of the American songbook, and restored the life that is sometimes hard to ascribe to a vinyl record.

Though I was able to attend only for one day, I was left with a taste for more. After all, everything about the ARSC conference felt like home to me: learning about media that the music market has now mostly deemed obsolete and refusing to give up on it, learning about hyperspecific musical spaces or communities with audio to match, and sharing a space with others who are just as excited to be there, who love teaching and learning as much as you like being there. Is that all not what WKCR is? And though I spent only a few hours enveloped in the spell, I left reassured: often, it can feel like WKCR—with our staunch emphasis on history, archiving, preservation, and devoted passion— is an island of its own. After a day at the ARSC conference, I now know that, if we are an island, we are one in a whole archipelago.