Apparently, apprenticing with someone like Souri at his company Souris Automaten is just about the only way to get this kind of training anymore. To call it a lost art is not doing justice to the difficulty of figuring this craft out. “A lot of guys who cut records are really secretive about it,” says Gonecke. “There’s never really been a lot of books on it. I ran into more people that would sell me something than would even tell me how to turn it on.” He advises anyone who’s interested to check out the Audio Engineering Society, which he says is the only source for books on the topic other than “a couple guys on e-bay who sell xeroxes of books from the ‘50s.”

Upon returning to the states, Gonecke dedicated three months to perfecting the technique of transferring music onto lacquers, and while it might not be making him rich, he is cutting one-offs for DJs to spin at their shows, and his clients include Rhymesayers, for whom he’s made everything from simple dub plates to picture discs. And you may be saying to yourself: Dub plates? Lacquers? Like most dark arts, vinyl cutting comes with its own convoluted vocabulary, but basically lacquers are records you can plate and make thousands of copies of, while dub plates are one-off discs for DJs to use
at shows.

Got that? It’s not really all that important; that’s just semantics. What’s really fascinating is seeing him actually cut the stuff. After checking out the track and pushing a whole lot of buttons and looking at some lights and numbers, he sets about carving the groove, with the excess spooling out into a cannister. There’s something abstractly beautiful about holding the material removed from the record to make a track: you’re essentially holding the music. I may be a nerd (check that: I’m definitely a nerd), but I was completely enthralled with his explanation of the evolution of stereo sound.

“When record cutting started out, when Edison had that machine, what it was, if you can imagine, was a speaker diaphragm, you know the speaker cone with a needle on the back, so when he’d scream into it, the cone would go up and down and that needle would hit that tinfoil and make this mark and then when he played it over, it would make the speaker move back just the same way as his voice made it move. So cutting started as up and down: vertical. What they found over time was, if they did it side to side they had less distortion. [Then] they tried to make stereo, so the first thing they [tried was] a turntable with one tone arm with two headshells and two needles and a record with two separate tracks and you’d have to get ‘em lined up perfect and start ‘em and one would be playing the right channel and one would be playing the left channel. And like nobody cared; it was a pain in the ass to use and it lasted like a year. So then they started saying, ‘How can we pack it into one groove?’ Well, we can go vertical and then horizontal. So up and down [for left] and then side to side [for right]. And what happened then was the right channel would sound really good and the left channel would be totally distorted. And what they ended up doing was taking the L shape and turning it into a V. And so what happened is each channel was vertical and horizontal at the same time. [But] the mechanical aspect is that higher treble is vertical and then lower treble becomes horizontal and then bass is totally horizontal. And that’s why you have limitations [like not being] able to have stereo effects in bass because you’ve got this winding little river right there and when it’s going side to side that’s making the bass and it can’t go to two sides at once.”

Seriously, who knew? It’s totally amazing. And vinyl still carries a strong cachet in the hip-hop world because anybody can make a CD, but vinyl means you’re serious. But digital music is eventually going to kill off vinyl, right? Is there any future in cutting vinyl? “I don’t know; I think about that a lot. I go, ‘My god, am I an idiot?’ The weird thing to me is that everyone’s like, ‘Vinyl’s coming back!’ or ‘It’s going away again.’ But no, it’s pretty much stayed [the same] for the last however many years. I mean, 18-something was the first flat record. One of the guys at IBM in like 1962, when they came out with tape, he said, ‘I give vinyl 10 years to be gone.’ And we had reel-to-reels, we had 8-tracks, we had cassettes; they’re all gone now. In 1984, the guy that ran Sony said, ‘I give vinyl five years to be off the market,’ and CDs might die before vinyl dies. It’s been around well over a hundred years; it’s kind of hard to see it just going bye-bye tomorrow.” ||

For more information on Gonecke’s company Dub Plate Cutter, visit DubPlateCutter.com. For more info on record cutting, check out the Audio Engineering Society’s website at AES.org and the forums of The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls at LatheProlls.phpBbWeb.com.