DAILYSESSION

From Disco to Disco: New York’s Global Clubbing Influence
By Tim Lawrence – RedbullMusicAcademy

Paradise Garage. Studio 54. The Loft. The heady influence NYC’s clubs have exerted on global dance culture.

The case is harder to make today, but once upon a time New York hosted the most numerous and adventurous DJ-led party spaces in the world. Visitors testify they had never experienced anything like it prior to their trip to the city. Some even returned home with the dream of re-creating something of their own.

New York’s influence can be traced back to the moment at the beginning of 1970 when David Mancuso hosted the first in a series of shimmering house parties that came to be known as the Loft. Around the same time, two entrepreneurs known as Seymour and Shelley took over a struggling discotheque called the Sanctuary and became the first nightclub proprietors to welcome gay dancers into a public venue.

Selecting records in relation to the energy of their multicultural and polysexual crowds, Mancuso and Sanctuary DJ Francis Grasso established the sonic and social potential of a contagious culture. Better Days, the Tenth Floor, the Gallery, Le Jardin, Flamingo, 12 West, SoHo Place, Galaxy 21 and Reade Street bolstered the word-of-mouth network. With the media barely aware of its existence, the city’s dance scene remained resolutely subterranean – to most locals as well as tourists.
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Photo by www.ivobol.nl

Mastering for Vinyl
By Recording Magazine

“LPs are staging a big comeback, which means there’s a lot to know before you send your music off for pressing.”
By Scott Dorsey

There’s something of a small renaissance in LP production these days, and we’re starting to see a lot of people in small studios producing material for issue on LP for the first time.

It’s not just in one sector of the industry, either. The guys producing dance music for DJ use have never really given up on vinyl because their customers like the ability to mix and scratch the stuff, but the techno music explosion has also brought in a lot of people intending to cut vinyl. There is an increasing amount of jazz being released on vinyl, and a number of small audiophile labels cropping up that release primarily on vinyl.

This is a bit of a problem, though, for people who want to get into this growth. LPs aren’t like CDs at all, in that a lot of manipulation has to be done to fit your material onto the disc. So there are a lot of things to watch out for that most folks who haven’t mixed for LP release might find a bit odd.

How LPs are made

Now, this stuff is actually more important than you think. When you release on CD, you don’t need to know a thing about the pressing process, because you know that the bits that get sent out to the plant will be the same bits on the disc you release.

This is not at all the case with LPs, and you need to involve yourself in the process a lot more. You also need to know how things work, because the probabilities of something going wrong are great, and you will need to talk with the manufacturing people and understand what they are saying. So a lot of this stuff may sound completely irrelevant, but it’s important in understanding some of the limitations of the medium.

In the beginning, we start out with an acetate blank (also called a lacquer), a disc made of aluminum with a thin layer of acetate plastic on it. It’s placed on a mastering lathe, which is a sort of turntable with a cutting head (basically a huge oversized phono cartridge in reverse) on a bar that is suspended over the disc like a linear tracking tonearm.

The head may be cooled with water or compressed helium because of the huge amount of heat generated by the high torque coils in it that are required to cut smoothly through the acetate surface without distortion. This is despite the fact that the cutting stylus is heated to help it glide through the plastic without tearing. [Read More]