Meet The Artist Who Makes Sonic Art From Vinyl Records

Michael Dixon’s vinyl cuts give a whole new meaning to “limited edition”. 

With vinyl obsession stronger than it’s been in 25 years, finding ways to make records stand out from the rest has become a new artistic challenge. Boutique manufacturers are experimenting with weird new vinyl production techniques to make the physical record as interesting as the music cut into its grooves.

Michael Dixon is one of the leading practitioners of this new movement of DIY record making. He experiments with 1940s radio station record cutting lathes to cut into found objects like plexiglass, laserdiscs, picnic plates, mirrors, placemats, X-rays and even 90% cacao chocolate.

Dixon also doesn’t just mess around with a record’s material, but the actual functionality and shape of the disc itself. In his Eulerian Circles series, he cuts oddly shaped records with multiple center holes that relate to entirely different grooves. Like a Venn diagram, the record will play different sounds or songs entirely depending on where you drop the needle. In Dixon’s words, it creates a “psychedelic effect of overlapping grooves.” Check out some of his crazy works below. You can find more on his website here.

Read more: This record label presses dinosaur bones into vinyl records