(Photo: Thomas Adank, courtesy Touch)

Move over, cassette-tape and 8-track reanimators. There’s a far older—and arguably more beautiful—retro-tech sonic fetish object in town: the wax cylinder.

The original tech dates from the late 1870s, when serial tinkerer Thomas Edison was at the prime of his powers, having installed himself in his famed Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory.

The device has been revived by Carl Michael von Hausswolff and Michael Esposito, who have released a brand new cylinder, titled The Ghosts of Effingham, as noted on the website of the publisher Touch this past weekend. Effingham has been released by Ash International, a hub of experimental sound whose splendid motto is “R&D; not A&R.;” Oh, and just to one-up Edison, the Effingham cylinder glows in the dark.

The Hausswolff/Esposito
cylinder—along with the occult origins of recording
technology, such as Edison’s own spiritualist
adventuring—is the subject of an extended piece by
Ken Hollings in the January 2011 issue of the
Wire magazine. (The image at the top of
this post, by Thomas Adank, is from that article, and is
borrowed from the Touch website, on which it appeared.)

When Apple’s Steve Jobs and ILM’s George Lucas employ
the word “magic” as a touchstone for what their companies do,
it can come across as cloying. But what they’re aspiring to
isn’t a Disney-esque fantasy, even if Jobs sits on Disney’s
board of directors. They almost certainly have in mind Arthur
C. Clarke’s oft-cited axiom about how sufficiently advanced
technology is indistinguishable from magic. Magic, of course,
is polite-speak for the occult.

Which brings us to
the sounds on this Effingham wax cylinder. The recording it
contains purports to be of EVP, or the Electronic Voice
Phenomenon, in which speech-like signals are discerned from
within electronic noise. The EVP was captured on the longtime
Esposito family farm in Effingham, Illinois. The audio
resembles harshly recorded voices that emerge tantalizingly
from a deep static. Not eerie enough, you say? As Hollings
writes, Edison stopped producing phonographs in 1927 (cylinder
production ceased in 1929), the same year Esposito’s family
purchased the farm.

The Effingham object, which goes
for £85 (about $133), comes accompanied by two MP3s: one of the
original sound file, and one of a reproduction of the cylinder
being played on a 1909 machine (the Edison Fireside Model A,
“with a Diamond B reproducer and a Cygnet horn”). More
information here.

And for budding wax
enthusiasts, Hackaday has
stories from early this year on a band’s newly
produced cylinder (and related BBC coverage), and another from
late last year on how to make your own homebrew wax cylinder
recorder.