| Story | Vinyl is the most tangible tactile form of music. If you look at the grooves of a record through a microscope you will see these valleys of sound, pressed hard into the vinyl landscape. This is where music is a physical structure. Each and every song has a different valley that stretches on and on, like a musical fingerprint. To bring to life our endline “DISCOVER THE WORLD OF VINYL”, for our client DublinVinyl.com, we wanted to capture in camera the exact location of specific lyrics. Lyrics that happened to also be placenames. We picked a number of classic songs from classic albums available on DublinVinyl.com, and set about capturing the geography of the world of vinyl. Dublin Vinyl was set up as a vinyl pressing plant in Glasnevin in January 2018. They are passionate about music – they started the business together because of this passion. And their relentless attention to detail and quality is one of their more admirable traits. We met them in January 2019, took a tour of their plant and talked about music for a couple of hours. Then we went off and had a little think. Vinyl sales globally have been on a steady rise for the last number of years, with more music enthusiasts opting into vinyl records. Hugh Scully and the team at Dublin Vinyl had just launched The RecordHub.com, a site where they were now selling vinyl direct to consumers. We wanted to help them get some attention. So we had an idea. If you look at the grooves of a vinyl record through an microscope you will see these valleys of sound, where the music is actually a physical landscape. Each and every song has a completely different valley, like a musical fingerprint. You could almost map a song – there’s a geography to this format of music. So we set ourselves the almost impossible task of capturing these Valleys of Vinyl, thinner than a human hair. We hooked up with renowned advertising photographer, Jonathan Knowles, and he immediately fell in love with the idea of capturing this weird landscape of music. And we wanted to capture in camera the exact location of specific lyrics. Lyrics that happened to also be placenames. “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die” Let’s photograph Reno. “Holly came from Miami F.L.A” Let’s shoot Miami. The results, as you can see, are stunning. Each one is composed of 400 separate exposures, each exposure covering an area of 100th of a millimetre. Music made physical. We discovered the world of vinyl. |
