Daniel Lofredo Rota wrote to tell us about a project he is undertaking to revive his grandfather’s Ecuadorian music record label from the 1950s…
Hello Kitchen Sisters,
I am very pleased to have heard of your podcast. as a keeper myself, i feel that maintaining archives is extremely important work, and I am quite happy to have found a place where i can find others.
4 years ago when my grandfather passed away, i found 200 reel to reel tapes hidden under a hoarder’s stash of 3600 Kg of newspaper. The reel to reel tapes turned out to be the pristinely kept catalog of a record label my grandfather had started in the 1950s. The label had specialized in an extremely special point of Ecuadorian Music history; a sort of golden era, where brilliant players had been recorded in the most high fidelity media.
This find threw me on a course of deep exploration of the Ecuadorian musical landscape, the nature of memory in the times of the internet, and brought me into a deeply rich underground scene of keepers, who passionately keep and reconstruct the stories of our past using only the available clues.
I am now working part time as an archivist and will be launching my very own record label dedicated to the repressing (on vinyl) of some of the most influential and powerful records that i have come across.
all the best,
Daniel Lofredo Rota
Listen to some of the musical gems that Daniel uncovered below. And learn more on his blog.
