WANTED: Noisemakers, musicians, poets, amateur historians, storytellers, actors, tap dancers, spoon players, comedians, artists wanted for Never Records.

For Never Records Derry, Ted Riederer will be cutting recordings of live performances inside of a record store / performance space located in the Context Gallery on Artillery Street.

One free vinyl record of your performance and the chance to participate in your performing community.

Contact the Context Gallery on Facebook or by e-mail to get a slot and be a part of Never Records… Live recordings from 6 May to 19 May and record shop is open through till 1 July 2011.

www.secretshape.com/neverrecords

Never Records is a multi‐media multi‐artist project by New York artist/musician Ted Riederer. Exploring the potential of a record store and record label to unite, educate, and uplift a community through recorded sound, Riederer’s project began in an abandoned Tower Records near Union Square in New York City. In January 2010, Riederer, in collaboration with curators No Longer Empty, created what the Wall Street Journal described as a “mock shop” that served as a “love letter to the dying concept of the record store.”

In September 2010, Riederer brought Never Records to the Liverpool Biennial, and expanded upon his original idea by purchasing a vinyl record lathe, and by cutting recordings of live performances inside of record store/performance space. The BBC wrote, “Never Records is a mock record shop that only stocks vinyl that has been cut in the store itself. Using microphones and a specialist vinyl‐cutting turntable at one end of the “store”, New York artist Ted Riederer has been recording musicians on the spot before giving them freshly‐pressed 12‐inch records of their songs.”

Part Sun Studio, part Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, the project continues to explore the idea of a record shop and record label as a social library and a communal locus of performance and cultural exchange.

Sun Studios is the recording studio located in Memphis, Tennessee, widely credited as the birthplace of Rock and Roll. During the 1950’s, before it expanded to a larger location, the studio released records by Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, and Howlin Wolf. Now the original Sun Studio is a museum and still a functioning recording studio.

According to the mission statement on their website, “Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, the national museum of the United States. We are dedicated to supporting cultural diversity and increased understanding among peoples through the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound.” Begun in 1948 by Moses Asch and originally called Folkways Records, the label was an attempt to, “to document ‘people’s music,’ spoken word, instruction, and sounds from around the world.”

A combination of Sun Studio and Smithsonian Folkways and the missions of archivists Alan Lomax, and Robert Johnson engineer Don Law, Never Records takes the shape of a performance space, a recording studio, a record store with racks filled with the albums recorded on site, and an on‐line record label where visitors can watch video of concerts and recording sessions, read information about the artists, and listen to diverse music and sounds from the growing Never Records archives.