Excavated Shellac documents the global origins of recorded music

Archivist Jonathan Ward offers a guided tour of the early world of music you've never heard with his new Excavated Shellac collection.  

Here's the scoop...

Dust-to-Digital is making available Jonathan Ward's mammoth 100-track survey of rare early regional music from 89 countries in six continents drawn from his vast personal stash of 78s. The new collection Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World's Music – following Ward's two prior Excavated Shellac sets "Strings" and "Reeds" – highlights music that is often invisible in today’s world — the incredible world of global recordings that aren’t jazz, blues, country, rock ‘n roll, R&B, or “classical.”

Excavated Shellac: An Alternate History of the World’s Music includes 100 recordings and 100 stories in an extensive, well-illustrated PDF with detailed, contextual mini-histories about both musical origins and the beginnings of the recording industry, touching on the complexities of colonialism, economic agendas, and cultural tourism.

With almost all of the tracks never before reissued, this collection expands upon and acts as a companion to Jonathan Ward’s Excavated Shellac website (https://excavatedshellac.com), a unique repository of music, history, and data on 78 rpm recordings from around the world, rarely heard and seldom seen.

You can order Excavated Shellac as 100 MP3 files + a 186-page PDF with essays and annotations by Jonathan Ward via Dust-to-Digital right here or from Bandcamp over there. 

Check out the preview clip and Du Feu Prix en Tête Man Nordé by Martinique's Orchestre Créole Delvi below followed by the complete track listing. You can also read Dust-to-Digital fan Joe Boyd's recent think piece about the Excavated Shellac set right here.