Dust-to-Digital Parlortone

Excavated Shellac: Strings
Various
Parlortone / Dust-to-Digital LP
The phenomenon of record collectors skimming their personal archives to assemble compilations isn’t exactly a new one. Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music paved the way in 1952 at the dawn of the long-playing era, and also set a precedent for compilers encoding records to achieve ends that go beyond sharing their favorite tunes. Smith sought to bring America back to parts of itself that it wanted to disavow. More recently the Sublime Frequencies label has tried to change academic and touristic attitudes to global musics, and the recent Pomegranates compilation enjoined residents of NATO states from dismissing Iranians as exotic others fit for nuking.
 
Strings is the first LP release by Parlortone, the vinyl wing of Dust-to-Digital. It begins a projected series of collections by Jonathan Ward. the author of the Excavated Shellac blog and one of a younger generation of 78 rpm collectors, this time focusing solely on performances on stringed instruments. Ward’s agenda counters decades of format fetishisation: the 14 tracks on Strings aren’t good because they’re old and encrusted with crackle, but because they’re killer cuts. This LP isn’t meant to take listeners back to a better place and time, but to bring nonpareil performances into ours.
 
Tho unidentified Vietnamese duo that plays “Nam Binh” on moon guitar and upright fiddle sound utterly assured, and Ugandans Galabuzi and Party blow through a rhythm workout as intense as anything played by Miles Davis in 1974 or Konono No 1 this year. The solos, which comprise nearly half the record, are even better. Indian yina player Sundaram Balachander, Armenian tar player Soghoman Seyranyan, Norwegian Hardanger fiddler Kjetil Flatin, and a pair of violinists from Iran and Turkey are all technically adept, emotionally devastating, and not at all veiled by surface noise.
- Bill Meyer