The 78 Project at Rough Trade NYC for Record Store Day

Record Store Day is less than a week away. If you’re like us, you’ve had it circled on your calendar for months. It’s a great opportunity to score exclusive vinyl and support your local record store. If you’ll be in the NYC area on Record Store Day, come celebrate with us! On April 18th we’ll be cutting a record live with Sondre Lerche at the Rough Trade store in Brooklyn. It’s a thrill to be a part of Rough Trade’s fantastic Record Store Day event, and we hope you can be there.

More info and the full concert lineup are on Rough Trade’s website.

If you’re closer to Minneapolis, Pepito’s Parkway Theater is hosting a special Record Store Day screening of The 78 Project Movie. It’s part of a great double feature starting Saturday, April 18 at 6:00 pm. Tickets are available on The Parkway Theater website.

Record Store Day is the perfect time to crate dig at your local record store for your copy of The Original Soundtrack to The 78 Project Movie on vinyl if you haven’t already!

Family Story: Hear Christopher King tell the birth of Riley at 78rpm

So often they seem beyond belief, the yarns that are spun around town and around dinner tables, late in the night or in passing on the street.  They are mostly told secondhand. Or third.  Stories from the family lore too wild to think they could have actually happened, and so exciting and colorful we would hardly want to live in a world where they couldn’t.

Often a delightful dubiousness is added to these tales by the distance they traveled to reach our ears, the wine, and the festive manner of telling. This was not the case on the summery night when our friend, acclaimed 78 collector and producer Christopher King, shared with us his family fables. His were told firsthand, and with demonstrations to help us picture the action.

“Did we tell you how our daughter, Riley, was born?” He asked us later, nonchalant as he cleared our plates.  After the stories his family had already shared, of ceiling snakes and hatchets and the town where they live in Virginia, we knew this legend, saved for last, must be the best one.

Test Your Turntable with Our Hand-Screened Stroboscopic Disc

Official 78 Project Stroboscopic Disc now available in our store.

Stroboscopic Disc "The 78 Project"

We knocked together our love of sound, technology and the moving image to create The 78 Project. We are just so excited about exploring the places where music, film and science meet.  Call it nerdy, we won’t argue.  But we know you’re with us!

It’s why, when we were looking to make something, a piece of The 78 Project that you can hold in your hands, a Stroboscopic Disc seemed like the perfect thing. It’s a vintage science experiment you can perform on your turntable at home, with a useful function, and a cool  visual effect to boot.

For almost 200 years stroboscopes have been employed as useful tools for determining cyclic speed. On a stroboscopic disc, concentric bands of radial squares each correspond to a speed on your turntable – 33.3, 45 and 78 rpm.

Place the disc on your turntable, apply direct light and set the platter spinning. The corresponding radial appears to be perfectly still if the record player is working just right.

If you’re testing a vinyl or acetate recorder, the extra hole on the disc fits right onto your stabilizer pin. We use this to test our PRESTO before each recording!

Our friend, and super-talented Brooklyn silkscreen artist, Kayrock, cooked these Strobes up for us. He even had them die-cut for precision. We love them. Can’t help it. They’re the perfect piece of functional beauty.