By Jon Blistein, Rolling Stone || At the crossroads of an intense creative period and a personal tragedy, Dave Newell found himself stuck with an idea he couldn’t shake: What if he opened a record pressing plant? This was back in 2021. Newell was grieving the death of his father, pondering what the next few decades of his own life might look like, and trying to figure out what to do with the tons of music he’d made over the past year. Since the early 2000s, Newell had traversed the rap underground, releasing music under the moniker Enoch with the Florida group CYNE. Fiercely independent, his desire to self-release a new solo record eventually dovetailed with an even bolder idea to manufacture it himself, too.
“There were a variety of factors that all fell into place,” Newell tells Rolling Stone. “It just dawned on me that this might be the perfect thing for me to pursue.”
Three years later, Newell and his wife Betsy Bemis have realized that vision with Audiodrome Record Pressing, which officially opens today, April 22 (and you can check out Enoch’s album, which came out last month). It’s a boutique shop in Gainesville, Florida that aims to serve smaller artists and labels left in the lurch by the continued growth of vinyl, especially among pop stars whose massive manufacturing needs have created industry-wide backlogs. But it’s also a revolutionary kind of pressing plant: One powered completely by solar energy.
Newell and Bemis didn’t set out to start the first fully solar-powered plant in the U.S., but sustainability was always a key consideration. When Bemis first started looking into what it would take to open a plant, she grew increasingly uncomfortable with the heavy environmental impact of manufacturing vinyl. Vinyl itself is made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a plastic polymer, and often comes wrapped in single-use plastic shrink-wrap. On top of all that, there’s the heavy carbon footprint left by every stage of manufacturing and shipping.
“If we were going to do this, I needed us to do it in a way that we could feel good about, and mitigate as much as we could,” Bemis says.
Admittedly, solar power was not part of the initial plans to make Audiodrome eco-friendly. It was too expensive, maybe something Newell and Bemis could pursue down the line if all went well. But after a few potential plant locations fell through, the couple came across an available space in a new multi-purpose development called San Felasco Tech City that was powered by solar energy and boasted one of the largest arrays of bifacial solar panels in the world.
“They just had everything we needed,” Newell says. “It was kind of serendipitous.”
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Read the full story here:
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/audiodrome-record-pressing-solar-powered-vinyl-1235008286/
https://www.audiodromevinyl.com
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Related Story: The Vinyl Revival: How Records Came Back From The Dead
By Daniel Coughlin, loveMoney
https://www.lovemoney.com/galleries/260993/positive-spin-the-incredible-numbers-behind-the-vinyl-revival
Photo: From Audiodrome’s website
Vinyl in the Sun: Inside the First Solar-Powered Record Pressing Plant // The Vinyl Revival: How Records Came Back From The Dead
