The World: "Victrola Favorites: Artifacts From Bygone Days"

Dust-to-Digital's mission is to produce high-quality, cultural artifacts, which combine rare, essential recordings with historic images and detailed texts describing the artists and their works.

The material coming from Dust-to-Digital is very special. For music and history lovers, it's a fantasy; for anyone, it's a treat to experience such peculiar treasures in so glorious a packaging.

Today we are introducing to you:



This beautiful cloth-bound book is a catalog of vintage music - two CDs - and artwork.



Care is given to every detail. The visuals are beautiful. As are the colors, vibrantly mixed throughout the thick pages.

...the bulk of this handsome book is made up of gorgeous archival images, 78 labels, old record tins, posters, pamphlets, old greyed photographs, mailing labels, instruction booklets, all sort of Victrola ephemera. It would be well worth it just as an art book. Makes you dread the oncoming MP3 takeover, what will future generations discover of our music, old busted hard drives? None of these cool old sleeves, decaying from years of moisture and insects, gorgeous little visual artifacts offering clues as to the music contained inside... So absolutely recommended.

— Aquarius Records

The recordings were compiled by Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor, and span the 1920s-50s. To our border hopping taste, they also span the globe. Chinese opera, Burmese guitars, Persian folk songs and Blues are just a small smattering of the eclectic and worldly playlist.

Victrola Favorites features a bewildering array of exotica, religious chanting and barroom bawls from an equally bewildering array of countries — India, USA, bamboo flutes in Korea, Chinese Buddhist monks chanting in Hong Kong circa 1915, Thailand, bamboo xylophones from Japan circa 1910, Zulus, Persia... We’re talking about field recordings and beyond from the dawn of recorded music, pretty much. And yes, it totally is the s**t... you get a sensation of what the original recordings sounded like...

— Village Voice

Some of the material is just strange, "like a midway point between Yazoo's Secret Museum of Mankind and Sublime Frequencies," as Brian Turner puts it.



Brew a cup of coffee; settle into your favorite chair. Turn on the stereo and get lost in this collection's sights and sounds.




As it turns out, we are not the only folks to fall for this curious collection and share our joy with the world wide web. To titillate the senses of audio and motion, here is a film introduction:

For more information on this collection, visit Dust-to-Digital's website >>

You can purchase Vitrola Favorites on amazon.com >>

[images of Vitrola Favorites material © Dust-to-Digital]