The weirdest materials people have used to make records
If it wasn’t already difficult to wrap your head around how on earth music gets pressed onto vinyl, wait until you hear it’s not the only material you can do it with.
Vinyl pressings are one of the most magical things we’ve ever come up with. What do you mean, we can listen to music that’s been engraved into the grooves of a physical, tangible piece of plastic? It’s literal witchcraft.
Well, not really. But the real explanation makes it all sound so boring. It’s something to do with carvings, vibrations, needles, waveforms, and all those wonderful mechanical words that make music sound like the most dull thing in the world. But it’s anything but. The fact that it’s vinyl actually seems far more interesting, especially as something that’s been used since the 1950s.
Before then, the alternative was shellac, which, for anyone who’s ever had their nails done, seems anything but flimsy. But when vinyl came along, something that was far more lasting and much less brittle, it was the ultimate game-changer. It’s everywhere now, and hard to imagine our records any other way. But as with everything, people like to test the waters. And that means finding out other ways of playing music, with materials you wouldn’t expect to see outside of places like the kitchen.
Most people say vinyl is the smoothest listening experience, which was probably proven most strongly when an engineer who goes by the name of Amanda Ghassaei tried laser-cutting Radiohead’s ‘Idioteque’ onto wood. If you see the video, the song is practically inaudible, which says a lot about how far along we are with incorporating such materials into the music world. Unless you’re a really big fan of the scratch and crackle of the needle, so much that you’d prefer to hear that over the melodies themselves, this one probably isn’t going to go very far.
But if that’s not entirely for you, maybe ice is your thing? Weirdly, it can actually be done. But obviously, when the ice starts melting, it all gets a bit…soggy. It actually has a similar effect to glass, which was used in 1885 with a rather terrifying audio of ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’. If you’re brave enough to look up the cursed sound, you’ll immediately note how rubbish it sounds, which is hard to decipher whether it’s because of the material itself or the fact that people just didn’t know what they were doing at the time.
All things considered, one of the weirdest has to be chocolate. Sounds like something straight out of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but this dream was actually materialised in 2012 when ‘By Your Side’ by Breakbot was released on chocolate in a limited edition of 12” singles. Croatian singer Gibonni did the same thing not too long after, both with the idea that you’d play them once and then eat them after. Talk about consuming music.
Weirdly, Gibonni’s idea came from a place of mixing the happy hormones evoked by both music and chocolate. At the time, he explained it seemed like a no-brainer, even realising people would be more likely to buy it upon realising they could gobble it up straightaway after. But does something like that actually have legs? Well, considering we never really hear about these things, probably not. But it is a pretty enticing idea.
Say, if your favourite artist released a limited edition run of edible records tomorrow, would you not rush to press the pre-order button?
