Making our own styli

To make records with our lathes we use a number of tools and pieces of equipment. One of the most essential is the stylus (colloquially called a “needle”) usually made of a sapphire or metal. The material the stylus is made of must be hard enough to make impressions of the right depth and sensitivity in our polycarbonate or PETG discs.

We have tended to order record lathe styli from one of the few creators who make them, but when they weren’t available a few months ago Joe decided to try it the DIY way, which has always been our favorite approach anyway.

We acquired a gem faceting machine, which uses a grinding wheel to polish and shape hard minerals. With the help of an experienced lathe buddy, Joe figured out how to operate the machine and, more specifically, which angles he needed to achieve to make a tiny piece of mineral into the right shape for embossing grooves into records. So far he has made styli out of ruby, tungsten, and high speed steel, and they’re all making great sounding records.

Here are pictures of the ruby one in Joe’s hand and under the microscope.

Joe calls this stylus “The Dark Wizard” because it reminds him of a wizard’s staff. This is ruby mounted on black powder high speed steel.

We use a microscope to get the relative angle of the tip and check for abnormalities.

For fun Joe also wanted to try an idea he’d been nursing ever since we got into “rock hounding” a year or two ago: He loved the idea of cutting records with a piece of almandine garnet we found in the Wissahickon Creek, where they are abundant but still exciting to find. This garnet has a hardness of ~7.5 on the Mohs scale, making it softer than sapphire (which ranks a 9) but, we figured, hard enough for our purposes.

Some pieces of raw garnet we harvested from the Wissahickon Creek

And we were right! Here’s a video of Joe cutting and then playing a record he made with the garnet stylus.

We’re having fun trying out new materials, thinking of ways to further hone our DIY process, and control more of the supply chain ourselves. Next Joe wants to try quartz, which is also abundant in our area and quite easy to shape into the styli we need.

Cutting up a storm!

Happy new year, folks! Just popping in to let you know that Consonant has been really busy lately putting on live record cutting events, and we’ve got more lined up in the coming weeks and months. These events have all filled up very quickly, so we’re going to keep scheduling more like this. Keep your eye on @consonantcollective on Instagram to see the announcements as we roll ‘em out!

This evening we’ll be at Parkway Central Library, doing the fourth installment of our yearlong, monthly event, DIY Discs, for which participants get a 7” vinyl record made then and there on our Rek-o-Kut Imperial record lathe, using whatever audio recording they provide. The workshops are almost entirely filled through the rest of the year (!) but there will likely be some opening up for the final two sessions in July and August. Registration for these will be made available in June. To be alerted when registration is open again follow the Music Department on Eventbrite.

Then on Saturday we’ll be bringing the DIY Discs program to the Roxborough Library. We’re longtime lovers of the neighborhood and are excited to be doing our thing there :)

On February 7 we’ll collaborate with the wonderful Fabric Workshop & Museum to put on “Love Notes,” for which participants can put a song, poem, or spoken message onto a record, then create custom record labels and sleeves in the screenprinting studio. Pretty cool, right? Maybe you saw us on Wooder Ice!

And just a few days after that we’ll be back downtown at Parkway Central for the February installment of DIY Discs. We love the library and always look forward to sharing our work and connecting with people this way. Thanks to librarian extraordinairian Jane Lippman for making this whole thing happen!

Finally, here is a lovely article in a Swarthmore College publication about the student open mic event we did there in the fall. We got a lot out of doing this and hearing the students’ poetry and music performances, and are grateful to McCabe Library and the wonderful Abbie Weil for inviting us to be a part of it.

Cutting the Dwarves

Yup, you heard that right. We almost didn’t believe it, either. Punk News is putting on its Summer Soiree next week, and the headliner is thee one and only Dwarves, purveyors of blood, guts, & you know what. Consonant Collective was hired to cut a few limited edition runs of Dwarves records for them to sell at the show (and only at the show!!), which means Joe was sweating away in the studio for a couple weeks making:

  • 25 copies of Blood, Guts, & Pussy 35th Anniversary Special on 8" square discs,

  • 50 copies of The Dwarves Live on Speed! on 8", and

  • 50 copies of The Dwarves Do the Ramones on 7"

Philly legend Schoolly D is the other headliner, which also feels like an awesome surprise. Lips of Kohl, Pink Soap (featuring members of the disbanded Vixen 77), and the Noid will open. Should be a helluva show.

You can watch a video we put together about cutting these records HERE.

Thee lovely John Gentile from Punk News (and organizer of the soiree) stopped by the CC studio to pick up the records

Consonant Collective at ALA

This past weekend the Consonant Collective had an absolute blast in the Zine Pavilion at the American Library Association’s 2025 conference. The exhibition hall of the Pennsylvania Convention Center (right here at home in Philly) was full of publishers and other exhibitors talking about books with folks from around the country.

Librarians are some of our favorite kinds of people, so we had the pleasure of not only sharing our work but connecting with many lovely, like-minded folks—some of whom are old friends. Thank you to Violet and the other organizers of the Zine Pavilion for making all this happen!

These donated zines were raffled off in bundles to librarians to help them start or add to their institution’s zine collections.

A view of the Zine Pavilion in full swing. Joe is on the right in a blue shirt, chatting with folks about Consonant Collective’s many projects.

Here’s our good buddy Nicole aka Taped off TV, co-owner of the South Street Art Mart, slinging zines and being her charming self.

This lovely human invited us to reach into the monster’s mouth to get a free zine. Yikes!


MovieJawn collaboration: Songs about cats!

Back in March we announced a new partnership with rad local movie magazine, MovieJawn. Throughout 2025 we will be releasing a record to accompany all four quarterly issues, each one on a different theme. The first issue of the year was called Silence Please!, and our accompanying record featured fun, spooky songs by Corey J. Brewer and starmouth.

The summer issue is about to come out and we’re excited! It’s called This is For the Dogs, and it contains essays and reviews of movies that feature cats and dogs. Consonant Collective commissioned two incredible musicians to make music for the record. Joe Jack Talcum of Dead Milkmen fame wrote one of his perfect pop songs, a lovely, satirical ditty called “All Cats are Beautiful.” Philly-based artist little stray made a pretty hyperpop banger called “Cats on My Mind.” This song slaps. They both do, in very different ways.

Katie and Joe then cut the songs onto 6-inch clear vinyl records using the three record lathes in the CC studio: a 1937 Presto 6D and two 1947 Rek-o-Kut Challengers. The album’s beautiful cover art, like all MJ releases, is by house artist Hugo Marmugi. We couldn’t be more pleased with the result. The records and magazine are available for preorder from MovieJawn now. We only made 50 records and preorders close on June 18, so get yours now. You may also purchase the album digitally on Bandcamp.

If you’re local, you can pick up your record at the zine’s launch party at Film Society East on Thursday, June 19. They’re screening the Japanese weirdo classic HOUSE (1977). Get your ticket to the event, and we’ll see you there!

Joe interviewed on "Other Record Labels" podcast

Listen in on this excellent episode of Other Record Labels, in which podcaster Scott interviews people about their labels to learn how they think about their work, from both a creative and a business standpoint.

Scott also conducts Other Record Labels Academy, a course on running this type of small business that Joe took several years ago. It really helped him clarify and realize his vision for This & That Tapes, which has since folded into Consonant Collective. In this interview, he tells Scott about his journey from making zines to running a label to cutting records on his own lathes—and how it all came full-circle.

MovieJawn Collaboration

This month we’re super excited to work with Philly friends MovieJawn, a gorgeous quarterly movie magazine in print and online. Joe has been reviewing films for the magazine for a few years now, and before we knew it a collaboration of another kind was in the works.

This year, we’ll partner with MovieJawn by producing a record to accompany each of its four issues. The first issue of 2025 is called Silence Please! and is dedicated to silent films, so we solicited music that plays with that theme.

On one side of the 6-inch record is a song by Corey J. Bewer, a Seattle-based musician who makes these amazing original scores for silent films. (We know Corey through Spencer Moody; he contributed one of his scores to Midnight Service, the fundraiser compilation Joe organized for the Mütter Museum back in 2020.) For Silence Please!, Corey contributed the song “The Cat and the Canary,” which was inspired by the 1939 film of the same name. On the flip side is “nosferatuUuUu,” a super fun, spooky dark synth track by iggy and izzy of starmouth. After having seen and loved Robert Eggers’ lush new Nosferatu, we couldn’t resist.

You can pre-order the issue and the record on MovieJawn’s website now. Orders ship in mid-March.

a-knife made an album!

We’re very excited over here today. Our rudely-named noise band, assholeknife, is having a proper album release!

The good people at Naan cül Press have created a gorgeous cassette of Wakes Up, an album that features 10 new songs. Katie Haegele, Chris Baldys, and Joseph Carlough made the music spontaneously using several methods and instruments, including a Yamaha CS Reface Virtual Analog Synthesizer, audio samples from old videos and films, the MM-XX T-APE stereophonic bytebeat generator, Ethereal Dialpad for Android, and Joe’s human voice. As they always are, it was a cathartic, invigorating, messy, and surprisingly harmonious session. Noise music is good for the soul.

The cassette will debut this weekend at the Jersey City Art Book Fair. Thank you to Matt and Kaitie at Naan cül for all that you do! We’re so proud of this beautiful object and the music that’s on it—please consider buying a copy from them, either in person or through the press’s website. We will have our own copies for sale soon, too. Here’s a sneak peek at the cassette (photos courtesy of Naan cül):

And here’s a video Joe made for the song “wake up (earth rise) + breakbeat remix”:

Found Footage Festival

We debuted a new dead-media project at the Found Footage Festival on Saturday: VHS to Vinyl. To make these bootleg records, Joe rips old movies from VHS tapes, creates “soundtracks” comprised of music and audio snippets from the films, then cuts them to vinyl. The Festival was an ideal place to launch the project. We felt at home with the other vendors, who had also made art inspired by their favorite movies. (And lots of them were selling VHS tapes, too—Joe made sure to pick up a few for future soundtracks, including The Dark Crystal.) We’d like to thank Tim at Tapes from the Crypt for hosting the vendors!

Enjoy this short film Joe made visiting the other vendors at the Found Footage Festival with his PXL-2000 pixelvision Video Camera.

Consonant Collection explores the other vendors at the Found Footage Festival’s 20th Anniversary celebration. Shot in glorious Pixelvision using a modified PXL-2000.

Artist Residency at Cloud Croft Studios

A few weeks ago, just days after the election, Joe and I (Katie) packed up our mobile record lathe and drove up to Cloud Croft Studios in New York state’s beautiful Southern Tier. Months earlier we were invited by the good people at the Tioga Arts Council to put on a record cutting event for the community and spend the rest of the week in residence at Cloud Croft. What a gift this was. We were already looking forward to spending time and creating art in this gorgeous rural place, but after getting sideswiped by the reality of the condition our country is in, the experience felt less like something we wanted and more like something we needed.

As planned, Joe and I spent the week tromping around the woods and fields of Cloud Croft’s 90-acre property, recording natural sounds and making music out of and in response to them. It was very peaceful and restorative to do this. During our time there we also connected with the people from the local community who came out to our record event and to the artist talk we gave on our last evening there. They made us feel welcome and supported; that human connection was as healing as the connection we made with the natural world.

Some kind of Yeti we saw in the woods

Casting a shadow

The view from the converted barn we stayed in

Getting cozy in the barn

The old schoolhouse at Cloud Croft where we did our events

Good advice

Our lathe set-up in the schoolhouse

Meeting people and making records

We created a few songs during our stay and plan to create a set of songs here at home that act as a kind of response to that music. Look for that record in January! Thank you to Suzy and Mike of Cloud Croft Studios and Christina from the Tioga Arts Council for inviting and hosting us, and thanks to our dear buddy Eric, who does one of our all-time favorite zines, Real Tioga, for recommending us for the residency.

The "Hour of Blue Sky" recordings

Last week we had the total pleasure of hosting two friends from Australia, Vanessa and Simon. Vanessa Berry is a writer and artist from Sydney who Katie met through zine-making, years ago now. All this time they’ve been pen-pals, trading letters and zines through the mail and collaborating on a few projects, too. This was the first time they met in person, and they got along famously, as you can see.

Katie and Vanessa looking witchy on the morning of EastFalls Fest

We all did a creative project together as well, making this visit something of a writing residency. Vanessa and Katie took a long walk one afternoon, letting their conversation wander. Afterward they chose four topics they’d covered—blue sky, aunts, nests, and falling leaves—and wrote short meditations on them. Then we made a recording of K & V reading their pieces and right away began cutting the recordings onto vinyl. It was so gratifying to conceive of and completely execute this project over the course of Vanessa and Simon’s visit; the resulting records (and accompanying zines) stand on their own as objects of literary interest, and they also serve a kind of artifact of this brief moment in time. We feel lucky to have had the chance to do this.

The record and zine, which is called “Hour of Blue Sky,” will debut at the Philly Zine Fest next week on Saturday, November 9th. Please consider stopping by to check out this popular event, which has grown even larger in recent years. There will be lots of interesting work to check out.

Vanessa, Katie, and Joe cutting the records and making sleeves for them

Happy Lathe-versary to us!

It’s been exactly one year since Joe acquired his first record lathe and learned to cut records on it. In that time he’s gotten a few more lathes and has also taught me (Katie) how to cut records, and together we’ve made a lot of them. It’s been quite the journey so far. To honor the occasion I asked Joe some questions about all this, for your edification and our amusement. Enjoy!

Katie: When did you first find out about and get involved with lathe-cut records?

Joe: Well, I had my first record made in 2012. It was a 5” square record of my own music called Worry About Your Future. I was a fan of People in a Position to Know Records, and label owner Mike Dixon mentioned in an email that he was now making short run, lathe cut records. I had him first explain what they were, then hired him to make me 50 copies of Worry About Your Future that I funded through a Kickstarter campaign.

Skip ahead a few years and I’m running my own cassette label, This & That Tapes, and making zines for Joyful Noise Records’ bands Tall Tall Trees, Deerhoof, No Joy, and Sound of Ceres, and hear word that they’ve just hired Mike to make a monthly lathe record series for them. He and I reconnected, and it turns out that he’s spent the past decade purchasing old record lathes and mastering how to restore them.

After I had a few disastrous pandemic pressed record releases—one of which, a split I put out with Murder City Devils’ Spencer Moody and Dead Milkmen’s Joe Jack Talcum, took 13 months from the time I submitted it to the time I received the records—I thought it was time to take control of making my own records.

Katie: Mike is the one who taught you how to use a lathe, right? Tell us about what it was like to attend his Lathe Cut Camp!

Joe: He sure was! Mike runs this great weekend-long lathe cutting camp from his studio in Tucson, Arizona. I learned about the history of lathes, what type of machines are in use today, how to use the most popular Presto 6N lathes, and a lot about lathe maintenance and best practices. I flew home from that weekend with my own Presto 6DSP, “The Original Presto Record Lathe.”

Joe with his Presto 6D on its first night at home with us

Mine’s likely from ~1937-1939, and was used in a radio station to record and replay news broadcasts on 16” records. It’s a real beast, you should have seen me wrestling it through the airport on my way back home to Philly! When I got home, I rebuilt the lathe with your help, and the help of Antiquated Future’s Joshua James Amberson, who happened to be staying with us for a few days. Little did we know that in just a year’s time there’d be THREE lathes in this studio!

Katie: I remember that weekend well. It was the start of our lathe adventure! Tell us a little about the other lathes you use.

Joe: Oh boy, you shouldn’t have gotten me started, I can talk about them all day. In March of this year we got our second lathe, a Rek-O-Kut Challenger from ~1947. As you know, we colloquially call that the “Katie Lathe” since that’s the one you use when making records. The ROK is more modern and more compact, probably used to cut test records in studios and for home use. That was was also restored by Mike Dixon, and has a great backstory: it was bought from Sam Phillips Jr., son of Sun Records founder. We don’t know exactly how it was used, but we know it was in his Sun Studios in Memphis in the 60’s, so who knows whose records have been cut on this machine! The third lathe we have is what’s referred to as a “franken-lathe” and it’s my first restoration project: the overhead system is from a 1939 Rek-O-Kut we bought from a nice guy in Pittsburgh, and the original amp and body are from a different ROK Challenger we bought from the RCA Victor headquarters in Camden, NJ. When we went to pick it up, we could hardly believe where we were, but there was a huge stained glass image of Nipper, the dog listening to the gramophone! This one I’m building to be ultra portable to we can cut records on the road, directly from people’s cell phones.

Katie: Once you trained me up on how to cut records we were off and running. We’ve put out a bunch of interesting stuff in the last year. Which projects were the most exciting for you to work on?

Joe: Gosh, it’s hard to pick just one. Here are some of the highlights: in January, we put out a book of my poetry accompanied by a record shaped like a leaf called Dark Nature. I recently put out the self-titled debut album from a jazz supergroup called The Blind Seekers which is phenomenal. But my absolute favorites are the really strange projects, the thing you just couldn’t do with traditional record pressing, like a clear 6” record titled Three Minutes of Philadelphia Gas Works Working Outside My Home Studio, And The Guys Are Doing TV Impersonations which is exactly what it sounds like. And Cats on My Mind, a song I wrote with my friend Chris Baldys to accompany the launch party for your book Cat Party, which we cut onto cat-head-shaped records, complete with whiskers and ears and everything. We're just about to hit our 1,000th record cut, and we’ve had 22 different record release projects in this year alone. It’s so magical to have an idea and then be holding a record of that idea soon afterwards.

Spencer Moody cutting live records with us this summer

Cool old records

Last week Katie braved the heat and visited librarian Dr. Abbie Weil at Swarthmore College’s McCabe Library. What fun: Together Katie and Abbie pulled and listened to poetry records from the library’s amazing spoken word collection. This fall the Consonant Collective will cut records of student poetry for a literature class, and beforehand we will play records from the collection for the students to enjoy. Dorothy Parker, Nikki Giovanni, the Dial-a-Poem project, Allen Ginsberg, Sidney Poitier reading "Poetry of the Black man" in his beautiful voice, Vachel Lindsay (what a character!), Sylvia Plath at Harvard—there is a lot of cool stuff here to inspire the students (and us). Thanks for the experience, Swarthmore!

Reykjavik Art Book Fair

In the latest installment of our ongoing love affair with Iceland, we went back to that incredible country to attend the Reykjavik Art Book Fair, and we had the most beautiful time. Great conversations, tons of interesting work on display, a few pieces of Hjónabandssæla (happy marriage cake) … what more could you want? Here are a few shots of our table and of the other exhibitors in Hafnarhús, the hall at the Reykjavik Museum of Art where the fair took place. Many thanks to Edda, Joe, Agnar, and Einar for organizing the event!