Wax Works Berlin celebrated the physicality and craft of analogue recording

At Wax Works Berlin, the Vinyl Alliance teamed up with Audio-Technica and optimal media to shine a light on the human craft of analogue recording and the superior sound quality it captures. Spending two days at Analogue Foundation Berlin with some of the city’s most skilled musicians, producers and mixers, we witnessed this process fast-tracked from studio session to playback.

The excitement was palpable. For the last 12 hours, a team of 20 plus people had been engaged in the labour-intensive multi-stage process of creating a vinyl record – from recording, to mastering and cutting the acetate. Now, the final product was ready to be played. 

The lacquer, which had been cut across the hallway, was paraded into Bar Neiro, the high-spec audiophile bar attached to Analogue Foundation’s Brewery Studios, where the aforementioned recording session had taken place. What ensued was a moment of collective reflection and, for many, release at what had been achieved in the one-day timeframe. A celebratory moment, but also an affirmation of the values that underpin the analogue recording process that sat at the core of the Berlin Wax Works project. The work in question being a multi-instrumental series of jazz-indebted vocal explorations.

The Wax Works project was the brainchild of the Vinyl Alliance, an organisation whose mission statement reads: “As daily life becomes ever more digital, we’re working together to keep vinyl records and analogue culture thriving in the streaming era, and to promote the enjoyment of vinyl to new and long-time enthusiasts alike.” General Manager Ryan Mitrovich expanded on their MO: “We’re not just interested in telling this age-old story about the vinyl format being around for nearly a century and that it’s still finding relevance in the 2020s. We‘re also really interested in where the format goes from here and how it sits in modern culture and society. We’ve just finished a big project researching Gen Z and why, as a generation of digital natives, vinyl is so essential to them. We concluded that, for them, it’s a brand-new technology. They previously had no experience with it, and now it’s positioned as something new they are interacting with.”

He continued: “An event like Wax Works is one of the best opportunities to showcase what goes into making a vinyl record. As we’ve seen, it’s a vast multi-step process with a ton of craft, expertise, knowledge, and care. As a central voice for the format, we want to spotlight that and the details and efforts that go into it.” 

In alignment with this ethos, the Wax Works project gathered a collection of vinyl enthusiasts, collectors and journalists to Berlin’s Brewery Studios – whose facility is one of the few in the world capable of end-to-end analogue recording – to watch an ensemble of musicians record the final song of a four-track EP. The project was then mastered by internationally renowned analogue lifer Russell Elevado (D’Angelo, Kamasi Washington, Michael Kiwanuka), in a fraction of the time it would typically take to do such work, before being cut to a lacquer that day using a unique piece of lathe machinery imported by Audio-Technica from Japan. The acquisition of this specialist piece of equipment marked a watershed moment for the studio, as it enabled them to complete the entire first part of the process, including cutting, in one day. The next day, the process was completed by travelling to optimal media – one of Europe’s largest vinyl pressing plants, two hours north of Berlin, to complete the process of pressing 200 bespoke records in under 24 hours. 

Safe to say this was one of the busier days in the calendar of Elevado and co-producer Erik Breuer. Both agreed that the time restriction added a layer of focus to all those involved; the significant difference in recording to analogue tape being the inability to do multiple, multiple takes in quick succession. This, in turn, made every take from the band ever more crucial. As Breuer explains: “What is so special about this session is that there are musicians there who had never worked recording to tape,” he said. “Franka [Fairy], who wrote the song we recorded, had never even had her music pressed on a record before. I think a significant factor on the musicians’ side was the urgency that the analogue recording process creates. Normally, you have the computer running, and you can do takes 20 more times… The urgency to get it right doesn’t exist, and adding this in was a mind-blowing experience for them.”

But why give yourself this time pressure? In the room, it pushed everyone involved to perform, stimulating the kind of kinetic energy and shared creativity that used to be the norm recording music. “Some of those early blues albums were recorded and cut in the studio, and they cut the lacquer on the same day it went to the radio stations and got played,” Elevado tells us. “A lot of the early jazz records were like that.” 

His deep affiliation with analogue recording methods – and the motivation for preserving space for serendipity and spontaneity was clear. But so was his belief in the innate qualities of analogue over digital. “On a sonic level, working this way cannot compare to digital. The human ear is used to hearing analogue sounds, not digital ones. On a technical level, a digital track will always be a copy; it will never be an original. The sound goes into a computer to be converted to a digital format and is converted again to the way it thinks a human ear wants to hear it. The signal is already being translated by something that isn’t human. When you play back an analogue recording, you can hear the warmth of the tape. Everything is already glued together and sounding more organic than if you were listening to a Pro Tools version or a digital multi-track.”

Using original analogue recording equipment and decade-old mastering methods (engineers were also limited to using 22 tracks when committing sound to physical tape), the skills and focus of those involved were pushed and pulled in new ways. Throughout it all, what became clear was the physicality of the process at every single stage. From the musicians to the use of the console, to the cutting of the recording tape, to the first use of the lathe to produce the lacquer, there was constant movement and kinetics involved. Pianist and band leader Franka Fairy, who led the compositional process for the record, was visibly exhausted at the end of the recording phase, but glowing at the subsequent playback. Her band, running on fumes, were still utterly present, listening for the details in the recording, and full of the slightly manic energy that can only come at the end of a long creative process.

This theme continued throughout the following day at optimal media, where the scale of vinyl production and its myriad intricacies were demonstrated. Breuer was blown away by the attention to detail inside the plant. “It’s hands-on in ways you wouldn’t think. Everything is so fragile, and there is such a level of detail, but then there are steps when things happen by hand. You almost can’t believe there is such a human touch to a process like this occurring in 2025. There are all these steps that no one can do other than a human.”

Taking the group on a tour of the plant to witness the completion of the record-making process, Thorsten Megow, optimal media’s Quality Manager, and Peter Runge, Head of Production and Logistics, explained how this vast and complex operation works. The human element, or analogue aspect, of producing vinyl at optimal media was arguably its most striking characteristic; the plant employs over a thousand people and was responsible for pressing two million Taylor Swift albums. By contrast, it also handles regular runs of 200 records for smaller labels, which go through the same, multiple-stage process: stamper creation to replicate the lacquer grooves, pressing using the stamper, test pressing creation, quality checks, labelling and packaging and finally distribution are all handled on an industrial scale at Optimal, but with a close attention to detail. This is an immense production line, but one in which humans play a key part.

Watching the records pressed and the creative circle become complete in physical format provided another pivotal moment in the cycle. From abstract concept to physicality, many of those whose creative energies had fuelled the process had never seen a record pressed, let alone one they had contributed to.

The Wax Works project was completed by those who had handcrafted the music, and packaging their records with sleeves and covers was a final act in creating a product defined by movement and human interaction, one that stayed true to the values of analogue recording so dear to those at the heart of vinyl culture.

Credits:

Video:
Produced and directed by Nick Dwyer

Musicians:
Franka Fairy (piano, synths), Petter Eldh (bass), Silvan Strauss (drums), Szabolcs Bognár (synths, wurlitzer), Lucy Liebe (guitar), Lisa Buchholz (trumpet, flugelhorn), Niko Zeidler (tenor saxophone, flute), Moses Yofee (piano)

Experts:
Russell Elevado (Analogue Foundation)
Erik Breuer (Brewery Studios)
Thorsten Megow, Peter Runge, Philipp Hahn (optimal media)