WALL of SOUND - Black Vinyl

WALL of SOUND - Black Vinyl | by Marika Järv

I love music. I especially love music festivals.
Easy-listening classic rock of the 70's. Grunge from the 90's.

I will even admit I have a soft spot for bad 80's music, and know all the words to all those tragic tunes. 

(but hey what 30-40-something-year-old gal doesn't?—it was what we grew up listening to!)

Several years ago I was searching online for some cool new mashups, and I came across an ingeniously titled track: "BoyGeorgeMichaelJacksonBrowne". I thought that was pretty clever—and for some amusement started to conjure up more and more interlinking names (coincidently about 6 months later my favourite radio station Triple J started playing a similar game "Band Sausage" on their breakfast show). Then one day I came to the realisation that put down in words, my silly little distraction could make a pretty interesting print for all us music fanatics—and so was born
 WALL of SOUND. 

For those of you who don't know, the "Wall of Sound" is a music production technique developed by record producer Phil Spector in the early 1960's (those big, dense, layered sounds you hear pumping through your stereo at times, are probably owed to him). 

WALL of SOUND, as in by me however, is a series of limited edition prints (only 100 available!) dreamt up in homage to musical artists from around the world. Over the course of 5 years, I spent weeks upon weeks, if not months upon months, interlinking more than 500 names together, which were then eventually put down on paper and formed into a spiral to mimic the continuous groove of an old vinyl record. Printed on a gorgeous, heavy-weight (550gsm), fine-art paper imported from Italy, and using the traditional techniques of debossing and foil stamping, the first piece in the series is the aptly named 'Black Vinyl' (in obvious reference to the classic old vinyl record). 

Ahhhh vinyl records—before the digital age of iTunes; before MP3's; before mini-discs;
before CD's; heck even before my childhood staple, the good old audio cassette tape!
(oh long-lost cassettes.... don't they bring back mixtape memories?)

MJx

photos by Matt Russell & Marika Järv