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A Glimpse Inside The Glamourous World Of Audio Lathe Cutting

Phil Macy runs 3.45RPM Lathe Cutting, and is also the main brain behind cosmos rockers I Am Voyager 1. He has been involved in bands, labels, gig promoting and numerous underground musical circles since the late 80's, encountering varying degrees of success in that time.

Zen And The Art Of Monotony Maintenance

What's your favourite track of all time ?

If you've read this far and would like the chance to answer, please leave your reply in the comments section under the relevant post on the Facebook 3.45RPM Lathe Cutting page click here for starters ...but don't let people know what the original question is ! (This is what's known as a "clickbait tactic").
Before you answer though, consider these questions :

Would it still be your favourite track if you had to listen to it 100 times in a row ? Say for instance it was your entire listening for three or four days in a row. Exactly how much do you like this tune ?

And what about if it was a whole album - have you ever listened to your most favourite ever LP 100 times in a row ? How about if it was an album you'd never heard before and were tasked with hearing 50 times, at the very least ?!

As I prepare to start in on an enforced recut of 50 copies of The Woolfs' wonderful new deep folk 7" (the previous 50 having disappeared into UK's version of The Bermuda Triangle, more commonly known as "FedEx") I'm reminded of the "The Laughing Policeman" story which I may have related in public previously, but here goes one more time for anyone who hasn't yet heard it :

In the early days of phonographic disc reproduction there weren't pressing plants - each record was cut by lathe in real time, one by one, to meet public demand. This meant that if one tune became particularly popular then many thousands of copies would have to be replicated over and over again, and lathe cutters would be tied up for months on end with the one tune, trying to keep the supply chain going while endeavouring to make ends meet.

Now, if the track were 3 mins long then maybe at a reasonable rate you could cut 100 discs in an 8 hour shift.

Really push it, and you could get up to 150.

Work at an inhumanely mindbending rate and you may squeeze 250 cuts into a single waking day.

Legend has it that at one point in the late Victorian era, when the tune "The Laughing Policeman" ("Wooah-hohohohohohohohohohoho-ho !") became a popular parlour room hit, lathe cutting suddenly became statistically the employment with the shortest life expectancy in the industrialised world when the suicide rate shot up due to dozens of poor, overworked and sleep deprived lathe operators having to hear the same song ("Wooah-hohohohohohohohohohoho-ho !") thousands of times over the course of months, sending them out of their minds trying to keep up with business.

Everyone now, one more time..."Wooah-hohohohohohohohohohoho-ho !".

From this possibly apocryphal story you'll be able to garner that the main trick with managing constant repetition is to be able to close off from the fundamental structure and melodies while still staying attuned to the underlying technical sound. This is to say, listening for faults in the process while blocking out the music.

In 2015 I was tasked by Keith FdM with creating 50 copies of Craig Padilla's "Short Circuits" LP as a limited bonus edition for his wonderful "Sonar" album. It was the first time I'd been pushed to my stated maximum limit of LP cuts, and I wondered if I could find anything productive to do in that "down" time, while still being umbilically attached to my headphones. Calculating that I'd need a nice and relaxed, sanity protecting two week timespan to complete the order I decided to have a go at reading Nelson Mandela's majestic autobiography "The Long Road To Freedom" (or "The Long Read To Freedom" as it's now referred to as in our household). It was a hot couple of weeks in June and with my Sennheiser 280HD Pro's clamped to my ears, sweating profusely in the 35 degree humidity of the south facing cutting room, I soon became acutely sensitised to the merest wavering in volume and languidly ambient vibrations, which signified such pitfalls as swarf build up, blocked vacuum pipe, pitted discs etc while at the same time being able to familiarising myself with one of the most compelling and inspiring stories of modern times. I lost almost a quarter of a stone in the process, but there was an immense feeling of satisfaction - and relief ! - at the end of it all, and to this day Padilla's "Sonar" LP reminds me of Nelson Mandela. And vice versa .

The very first order 3.45RPM ever received was from the legendary Static Caravan label, and was a lovely acoustic 10" from Peter Philipson called "The Limefield Sessions" of which 25 copies were required. These days I look at an order that size and idly wonder if I could fit it in before breakfast, but in 2014 as a callow, pale-faced freshman in the world of disc manufacturing it felt like a truly daunting task that lay ahead. My total inexperience meant that mistakes abounded left, right and centre, and in what turned into a true battle of attrition I ruined almost as many discs as I completed, which meant by the time I'd finished I'd heard each side 50+ times. There were times I thought I'd be at it for months, and it was a true champagne moment of sheer joy when the final run-out groove was successfully navigated, enhanced ten-fold when word came through a couple of weeks later that the legendary Bill Leader had heard a cut and given it his full seal of approval - higher praise than I couldn't have humanly hoped for during that struggle !

It is inevitable that some tracks do grind you down after a while, and I won't pretend otherwise, but let's stay focussed on the ones that shine through the mind-wilting repetition, and that I just never seemed to get bored of. One of the first times I remember actually wanting to hear a number over and again for the howevermanynth time must have been The InsektLife Cycle's "SunGaze" which was paired on an excellent FdM split 7" with Cats Never Sleep in an edition of around 80 copies. For whatever reason, the tune just grabbed me on the first listen and never let go - a sunny, sparkling five minute instrumental that really ought to have been the soundtrack to some BBC sports highlights programme or similar. I dug it so much I offered to release their album "Temple Of The Soul" on my then fledgling label Gardener's Delight for which I cut 53 copies on clear discs and then when that sold out I did another 53 copies on black disc meaning I heard the whole album well over 100 times.

"Enough !!" you may rightly think, but I was enjoying it all so much that I didn't want to stop, so offered to release another 7" by them ("Zookeeper's Cardinal Healing Forum") for which I started a whole new label, called El Ron Del Mundo.

So yeah - I'm overtly familiar with a number of The InsektLife Cycle's releases. Grand stuff which you really ought to check out.

However, the award for Most Repeatedly Cut Album by 3.45RPM must undoubtedly go to King Gizzard And The Lizard Wizard's incredible epic "Polygonwanaland" LP, which in a moment of commercial genius they issued with no copyright or ownership rights at all, openly encouraging people to "bootleg" it and release it on their own labels. This outwardly insane piece of reverse-corporate marketing was actually an amazingly canny piece of global promotion as it was picked up instantly by dozens and dozens of labels worldwide, all making their own variations which fuelled a fervently rabid collector's market.

You'll have guessed that the orders for this started coming thick and fast the minute the files were upload to the KG&LW website in November 2017. In a surprisingly adept bit of fore planning, 3.45RPM downloaded the files within minutes of them being made public and in under two hours I had successfully completed a test cut, creating the very first phonographic bootleg of "Polygonwanaland" on the entire planet.

This meant I was ready and prepared for the absolute deluge of orders I received over the next few days, and in just over a month I ended up cutting around 200 copies. That equated to OVER TWO HUNDRED LISTENS in FIVE WEEKS !! Seriously, now. You'd think that'd be enough to tip anyone over the edge, wouldn't you ? But you know what ? I ended up completely loving the album. And on hot summers nights, you can still occasionally find me sat zoned out on the sofa in my front room, listening to it just for the sheer enjoyment.

Though, of course, it doesn't sound right unless I hear it seven times in a row.

All together now, one last time..."Wooah-hohohohohohohohohohoho-ho !"

click here to visit Phil's 3.45rpm website

and click here to read Phil's previous piece for FdM