Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days

Deluxe 144-page clothbound, full-color book of illustrations with two CDs featuring Burmese guitars, Chinese Opera, Persian folk songs, Fado, Hillbilly, Jazz, Blues and much, much more.

Recordings made between 1920s-50s compiled by Rob Millis and Jeffery Taylor of the band Climax Golden Twins. The Climax Golden Twins have designed gallery and museum installations, composed soundtracks (most notably USA Film's Session Nine), worked on documentary films (Phi Ta Khon: Ghosts of Isan released on Sublime Frequencies) and contributed soundscapes to NPR radio programs in addition to releasing numerous recordings on CD and LP.

Audio Interviews about this Title

Rob and Jeffery discuss Victrola Favorites: Artifacts from Bygone Days with Amanda Wilde:

Acknowledgments

"...amazing, like a midway point between Yazoo's Secret Museum of Mankind and Sublime Frequencies..." — Brian Turner, WFMU

"The men behind Victrola Favorites originally used the VF name for a series of cassette compilations of 78s from far and wide, that came with a simple Xerox insert and no tracklisting... Quite the opposite, this expanded version's accompanying book comes with a complete listing of the performers (from Blind Boy Fuller's dirty "Bottle Up and Go" to He Zemin/Huang Peiying's mind-boggling "Blind Idiot Buys a Pig," via Stanley Roper's fascinating London field recordings and the sublime Greek folk music of Stella Haskil) and is packed with gorgeous full-color images of labels, phonographs, exotic postcards, and a vast array of memorabilia... this is perfection." — Andreas Knutsen, Other Music

Excerpts from Selected Reviews

Aquarius Records: "...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."

Village Voice: "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..."