VinylesMania

Portraits of diggers

They search everywhere, looking for nuggets. These passionate discoverers of lost discs show visitors their pieces: Christian Biral ("in high school, I would always carry a bag of records in my hands"); Fabien Vandamme with a recording from 1860 (17 years before the invention of the phonograph), made audible in 2008. Lyon Municipal Library holds a major collection of records of noise. An emotional touch in the archives of photographer Zoë Timmers who put together in 2013 a filmed portrait of her father, seriously ill, surrounded by his discs. The « vinyl mania » will perhaps be heightened by the shortage resulting from the recent fire at the Californian factory which had a monopoly on 80% of the primary material needed to produce black discs.

33 revolutions… of the earth

Africa is being honoured this year with the Africa 2020 project at the Institut Français. VinylesMania is paying tribute to the musical energy of the African continent, thanks to Sofa Records, a Lyon record-shop specializing in world music, and to the journalist Rachel Clara Reed who has taken photographs of the world of Jimmy, the owner of an unclassifiable record-stall right in the middle of the Kenyatta market in Nairobi. VinylesMania also takes us to a country where vinyl does not exist, South Korea, where it is almost totally absent from the shops and from the music scene. We travel on to Jerusalem where Emahoy Teague-Maryam, a 96-year-old Ethiopian pianist and composer, lives as a nun; we see her in a short appreciation beautifully filmed by Omar Gefen in 2015.

Surprising sleeves, with Lyon BD Festival

The French Ministry of Culture has declared 2020 "the year of the strip cartoon". A further incentive to explore the links between vinyl records and strip cartoons, often good bedfellows. In a third partnership between Lyon BD Festival and VinylesMania fifteen cartoon artists have been invited to design the record covers of their dreams, which will be displayed at the Fnac Lyon/Bellecour.