Surface Noise

DJ John Peel was notorious for dropping “Talk amongst yourselves” instruction whenever a vinyl-related mishap took place during his BBC Radio 1 shows. For Michael Cumella, on-air casualties are par for the course.

For over 10 years now, the 44-year-old New York resident has served as host of WFMU’s “Antique Phonograph Music,” which features songs from the first 25 years of the 20th century. However, in an advanced age where music from bygone eras is readily available for digital consumption (stream the University of California at Santa Barbara’s online archive of 8,000 recordings), Cumella strives to maintain authenticity. His bi-weekly radio show features the original source formats (cylinders and 78s) being played on actual period devices (graphophones and phonographs).

Because of the formats and players involved, mishaps are a frequent occurrence. During a recent March show, “Angel’s Serenade” by Valentine Abt slowed to a sludgy, raspy crawl, Cumella delivering a “whoopsy-daisy” before later explaining that older records are typically worn and therefore produce drag on the needle. “The show is about giving listeners the opportunity to hear the original music on the original players,” Cumella said. “About recreating the same experience from that time period. What you hear is scratchy, but you come to embrace the surface noise.”

And there’s plenty of it. The cylinders and 78s Cumella plays are artifacts from the days when recording and playback technology was far more archaic. Reedy voices and orchestral sonance is layered underneath a tide of soft white noise, lending the music even more of a venerable quality.

Cylinders, made of wax and then later celluloid, were the earliest method for reproducing sound and widely mass-marketed in the 1880s. Disc records (or in the case of Cumella’s show, 78s) began to supplant cylinders as the most popular format after World War I. When played on Cumella’s show, each format comes with its share of in-studio legwork: winding cranks on graphophones and phonographs, cueing up metal styluses, placing microphones into the metal horns on players.

But Cumella handles it all with unfettered enthusiasm. He introduces foxtrots by urging listeners to “roll back the rugs,” giving each of the timeworn ditties he plays plenty of context, humorously parroting the more unusual vocals. In a time when rapidly evolving technology has had a massive effect upon pop music—in how it’s crafted, consumed and collected—it’s wonderful to find those who revel in returning to its pre-electricity, ghostly past. Peel once surmised that life has surface noise; what’s wrong with a little bit in your pop music?

“I basically hit a wall,” Cumella explains when asked about the origins of his passion. “Being the youngest of four, I was around records all the time—33s and 45s mostly—but you really couldn’t go any further back than the mid-’50s. Much of it was out of print. It wasn’t like today at all. Back then, there was real difficulty in finding any of the stuff I play on my show.”

Today’s accessibility—fuelled in part by archivists who preserve the audio found on ever-brittle cylinders through digitalization—has spurred many to join Cumella in exploring pop music’s nonage. Check the recent buzz surrounding the March discovery of Frenchman Edouard Leon-Scott’s phonautograph recordings. (Cumella, playing the role of curator as much as DJ, played the historic, nearly 150-year-old snippets of the sound of a tuning fork and a woman singing on his show.)

But as impressive as “Antique Phonograph Music” can be for its brand of pop music erudition, there’s a light-hearted element as well. Along with playing records that reveal an era’s overt racial and ethnic intolerances or detail historical events such as women’s suffrage and Prohibition, Cumella brings a bit of levity to his shows: musical beer adverts, novelty “laughing records” (literally, folks’ guffawing set to song) and artistic whistling. His rather eclectic playlists attract everyone from the curious to the hard-core collectors.

“There’s a pretty wide range of listeners who tune in,” says Cumella, who’s currently working on a children’s book that ties into his passion for this music. “I’ve had teenagers tell me they were covering the 1920s in school, so they listened to a show while they studied.”

Cumella’s predilection for antique sound doesn’t necessarily mean he recoils from today’s product. But it does mean he reserves any child-like zeal for his shows. One of his most memorable was with his son, Christopher, as Cumella sounded as charmingly animated as the youngster.

“I consider my players to be my toys,” Cumella says. “Having a show like this, where I can play this type of music, is just great.”

Hear more at [www.michaelcumella.com](http://www.michaelcumella.com)