As with so many vinyl enthusiasts, New York artist Ted Riederer found his groove at a young age. “When I was 16, my mother was hospitalized for a year and instead of being a troubled adolescent I joined a rock band,” he says, laughing, “and started going to record stores like an acolyte to a church.”
Never Records will be "open" in New Orleans throughout the month of October.
Cue up Never Records, Riederer’s evolving multi-media experiment in the community of sound. Since its “opening” in 2010, the not-quite-store/traveling installation has welcomed fellow parishioners in New York City, London, Liverpool and Ireland, stocked with site- and time-specific melodies, monologues, commentaries and all manner of recorded noise.
The premise is straight-forward enough: musicians, actors, poets, cantankerous folks with something to say or an axe to grind enter the Never Records space and mic up while curator/”store manager” Riederer records them. He presses the vinyl on the spot, giving one copy to the participant and keeping one for the shelves of the Never Records library, a growing archive that will soon include contributions from the New Orleans community.
For Riederer, who pays the bills working in a “big fancy commercial gallery” in New York City, the project represents “the opposite in the sense where most people can come in and out of Never Records and not know that it’s an art installation. They just think it’s some record store and I love that because there’s no sort of barrier.”
Except that it’s a record store without the “store.” There’s no commerce here. Thanks to a grant from the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Foundation and other area donors, participants don’t pay for their recordings, nor are any for sale. Instead, people browse entries from previous cities while contributing their own. It’s a living, breathing, sometimes screaming document of an individual time and place.
“It harkens back to those old shops in the ‘50s where you could actually cut a record and play it in the booth,” Riederer explains. “What happens, which is really great, is you basically just get a bunch of people hanging out and listening to music together.”
“A lot of people aren’t comfortable walking into galleries,” he continues. “On the other side of it, I’m really happy that Jonathan [Ferrara] gave me his old space, which by the time I’m finished with it, it’s just gonna look like a record store on Carondelet.”
Riederer, who cites the DIY aesthetic of field recordings and Folkway Records’ founder Moses Asch, plans to take the project beyond Carondelet, perhaps to a Sunday sermon or a Saints game. “I just read Mr. Jelly Roll, that Alan Lomax book,” he says, “where it sort of really becomes clear that so much of our vernacular comes out of New Orleans, and I think that everybody in the country dreams of it whether they’ve been there or not.”
What vernacular will come to Never Records in October, Riederer isn’t sure, but he’s quick to encourage “nontraditional” participants, and beyond the musical realm. “I know that this isn’t necessarily the cool stance these days, but good art is a gift to the people that witness it or are a part of it,” he says.
“And going into New Orleans, I will have cut over 150 different performances and about 400 records, and I’m bringing 300 blanks, so I’m hoping to do at least 100 performances. We’ll see.”
Never Records’ tenure in New Orleans runs October 6-November 4 at 841 Carondelet St. Check back here for updates, podcasts and more on the installation.
