It’s called La Victrola, after what the forerunners of the Victor Talking Machine Company wrought some 135 years ago, the cylinder phonograph, gramophone, the Edison-Bell cylinder, “His Master’s Voice,” and everything that followed since, all the way to CDs (remember them?) and well beyond.
Now in its “final build sprint” at American Steel Studios in Oakland, with most of its $100,000 budget raised, this combination wood-and-steel sculpture/sound system will be 35-feet tall and weigh 8,000 pounds when installed in mid-August at Burning Man in Nevada. La Victrola has a 3,500-pound steel horn; the nine-foot tall base features art nouveau detailing and wheat-pasted custom illustrations.
La Victrola’s sound system will play music from the 1890s to the 1930s, with a cabaret stage for live performances of blues, bluegrass, jazz, country & western, and more.
“Live performances in an authentic setting can transport an audience in a way that digital technology cannot. As we move more quickly through life, slowing down to appreciate intimate, human experience is essential,” says the project’s creative director, Tim Bremner.
“This piece celebrates a period of great creative innovation — a time that helped to birth blues, bluegrass, jazz, country & western music, and eventually recorded music itself.”
Bremner is a partner in Hand Crank Creative, the creative drivers of La Victrola. Industrial-arts fabricators Sheet Metal Alchemist are managing the day-to-day build while San Francisco-based Holmes-Culley are the project engineers.
Originally, the term Victrola applied only to internal-horn phonographs made by the Victor Talking Machine Company, founded in 1901, and was not a generic term for all old phonographs. The first internal-horn phonograph, initially designated as the Victor-Victrola, was marketed in 1906.
