56 http://www.popularmechanics.co.za _ AUGUST 2017
recently started making presses, and some are robotic. Third Man
wanted manual machines. They wanted to create jobs – Third Man
Pressing has created 20 jobs – and they value creativity. (Over the
past decade they’ve released a liquid-filled record, a twelve-inch
single with a seven-inch single hidden inside it, and launched a
record player into space while it played a vinyl of music from Carl
Sagan’s Cosmos. In 2014, White released his last solo album,
Lazaretto. Third Man called the release an Ultra LP, which means
that they’d crammed every possible version of vinyl sound repro-
duction onto one record: songs played at three different speeds,
songs were hidden underneath the labels. One song had an acous-
tic or electric opening depending where you dropped the needle.)
In a little room off the factory floor and off the tour, there’s a
massive mixing board and a giant lathe that cuts acetates, the
original documents from which records are made. This lathe and
this mixing board are tied to the concert stage in the record store,
right now playing host to a band called The Mummies. The little
room lets live shows be cut directly to acetate, only a hundred
metres away.
The tour groups don’t see all of this, but what they do see, what
Third Man makes sure they see, are the possibilities. A display in
front of the presses shows different colours of vinyl pellets, sitting
like Nerds candy in ramekins, and the records they could become.
One, pieced together with quadrants of four different pucks, has
come out looking like the game Simon. Another, yellow, with red
pellets thrown in at the last minute, has an ethereal haze of red
over its cheery face, something like a solar flare, or the finish on a
sunburst Telecaster.Clockwise from top
left: Trimming the
centreholes; cutting a
master; calibrating the
press; keeping things
clean. Opposite:
Maintaining the all-
important trimming
machine.dle-aged rockers who are still more stylish than the average
non-cool person; and the younger musicians, who will always
be the coolest people in the room. Well, except maybe for the
people actually running the presses because, hot damn,
they’re making records, the ones you can buy right now if
you want – something White pointed out earlier has never
been done before: records coming off the presses and being
made available straightaway to music fans.
The party is all drinking and revelry until rumour spreads
around midnight that someone has been struck by lightning.
Paramedics appear. The crowd coils up tight like a main-
spring. Even White is caught up. “I think someone was struck
by lightning!” he says. Then, ever the host, “Hey, meet my
brother Eddie!” It’s all a blur. No one can tell if someone was
actually struck by lightning, or if it’s the affair itself, the fact
that, yup, there are sudden fissures opening up the sky and
letting out the rain and everyone has had a few too many
drinks and the band is hot and the floor in the plant is yellow
like the fissures. But this much is certain: what midnight
means is that the folks outside are now less than 12 hours
from their own celebration and they are wet and tired, but
no less electrified than anybody else.
OW THE PEOPLE ARE LINED UP AROUND THE SIDE
of the building. Not out front, but beside the pizza
place next door, past the painted Willys-Overland
badge – the ur-Jeeps were once made in this building- outside the loading dock. Inside, Third Man employ-
ees – black button-downs and yellow ties for the men,
yellow and black dresses for the women – let them in in groups.
Tour groups.
The factory workers are on display again, running their vinyl
presses and extruders, the latter of which look something like hot-
glue guns sized up for a Pink Floyd concert stage. There’s one
extruder and two presses for every worker. The worker scoops
vinyl pellets from a 200-litre drum and dumps them into a hopper
on the extruder. The extruder melts them down and pushes a
snake of hot vinyl out the nozzle and into a receptacle that coils it
into a puck. The open jaws of the press hold a stamper plate for
each side of the record, musical negatives that bear, instead of
grooves, a spiralling mountain range of music. A worker deposits
A-side and B-side labels into its maw, throws in the puck, at 150
degrees– and the jaws clamp down and retract into the body of the
machine, where a cycle of hot and cold makes the vinyl alternately
pliable and rigid, until it is a record. Eddie Gillis, one of White’s six
brothers; and Brandon Chrzanowski, the plastics expert Third
Man brought in to help run the plant, call the production of a
perfect plastic disc a war against heat and time.
Third Man’s artillery is made by a small German company of
music industry veterans who used to make records but, like every-
one else, gave it up as CDs and MP3s took over. Their company is
called Newbilt because the machines are a modern take on a classic
press called Finebilt that was manufactured in Los Angeles in the
1950s and ’60s. They’ve got electronic controls and sophisticated
hydraulics, but in one notable way, the machines are old-fash-
ioned: they’re manual. There is a worker at every one pulling pucks
into presses and turning out records. A few other companies have
SATURDAYMADE in the USA