The Magic Shop at ARSC

Magic shop mastering engineer Jessica Thompson and producer Jocelyn Arem traveled to Chapel Hill, NC to present about the Caffe Lena archive at the ARSC (Association for Recorded Sound Collections) Conference. They shared with their experiences tracking down recordings, obtaining funding, restoring audio from live performances recorded over a 50 year span, and delivering a CD box set, a book, an online searchable database and a fully cataloged and digitized audio archive. The highlight was the spontaneous poolside banjo jam that broke out when they were having tin type pictures taken for the Southern Folklife Collection.

Here they are with Matthew Barton, Curator of Recorded Sound at the Library of Congress’s, music analyst Meagan Sylvester from Trinidad and Jenny Doctor from Syracuse University. (Photo by Kate Kyle).