An image of an old tin of German-made gramophone needles is blown up to a size where only a portion of the image is seen on the page, while an old British postcard that included a record (Tuck's Post Cards by appointment of the house of Windsor) has its front and back displayed in full on another page. The first image in the book, which you might overlook as its hidden beneath the first CD, is of neither a record nor the paraphernalia that accompanies them.
Lifting the CD out of its slot, you could be forgiven for squirming a bit as it reveals the image of a multitude of insects crawling around. Even though they are by no means realistic in appearance, I still managed to feel like you would when lifting a rock and finding the earth under it alive and moving. The revealed little creatures are a type of beetle that secretes a resinous substance called Lac. When the substance was purified, it was used to make the old shellac records.
This explains the brittle nature of old 78 records because they weren't vinyl at all. While it sounds sort of organic and natural to make records from the secretions of an insect, I'm betting the process was not only time consuming and labour intensive, but in the long run also environmentally damaging. Consider that the resin secreted was left behind on the leaves of trees by the insects. Who knows what chemical reactions occurred when the stuff was processed into shellac. Still it's fun to think of the old records being made from what sounds like the trail of an insect as it crawled through a tree.
The music contained in the two discs is an example of every type of recording you can imagine. You're taken on a journey around the world with stops in India, China, Japan, Africa, Thailand, Persia (now Iran), Greece, Portugal, Hawaii, Mexico, and the United States. Everything from sound effects ("Sounds Of London" is a recording of church bells ringing in that city) to the sound of the Chinese Buddhist Nuns ("Chanting The Ten Vows" in a recording made in Hong Kong) can be heard.
It really is a case of traveling from the ridiculous to the sublime in some cases, when one second you can be listening to an excerpt from classical Chinese Opera and the next something called "The Insect Powder Agent," which I'm not sure was a commercial or a piece of strange radio drama. Needless to say there are some pieces that will appeal to some people more than others, and in my case I was particularly interested in the recordings of early Blues musicians like Blind Boy Fuller or Noble Sissie and his Orchestra.
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