Why Northbound stays in mono
A two-track safety exists, and we listened to it. The room is wider but the trumpet loses its centre. Okafor's note settled it anyway.
Read →Rook Lane reissues out-of-print pressings in all-analogue editions of 1,500, with the original sleeves reset by hand. RL-014, Lionel Okafor's Northbound, ships 24 September.
Every record in the series follows the same route from the vault to your turntable. It is slower and dearer than the usual way, which is rather the point.
We borrow the original master reels, never a digital copy. Each reel is baked, cleaned and played once, in the room where the cut will be made.
The lacquer is cut straight from the tape. Sides are kept under twenty-two minutes so the grooves stay wide and the inner bands do not pinch.
Lacquers reach the plant within forty-eight hours of the cut. One father, one mother, and a fresh stamper for every five hundred copies.
One hundred and eighty gram virgin vinyl, pressed slowly and cooled flat on the platter. Every hundredth copy is played end to end before it is sleeved.
The original artwork is reset in the same proportions and printed in two blacks on uncoated board with a tip-on finish. Nothing is laminated.
Recorded over two March days in 1966 at Van Doren Studio in Newark, Northbound was Lionel Okafor's only date as a leader. Marlowe Records pressed three thousand copies, the label folded the following spring, and the tapes went into a bank vault with the rest of the estate.
We found them in 2024, boxed and labelled in Okafor's own hand, with a note asking that the record be kept in mono. It has been. Ruhl's cut sits a touch quieter than the 1966 pressing so the bass has somewhere to go, and the fade on The long platform now runs its full twenty seconds instead of being lopped for the side length.
The sleeve is reset from the original mechanicals, with Okafor's name moved up so it no longer clips the rules. The insert carries session photographs by Ruth Alder, the alternate take sheets, and a new note by the trumpeter's daughter, Adaeze Okafor.
A two-track safety exists, and we listened to it. The room is wider but the trumpet loses its centre. Okafor's note settled it anyway.
Read →Five copies from the first stamper, played on three turntables. One hairline tick on side two, band three, traced to the lacquer and recut.
Read →Marlowe's mechanicals were lost with the label. How we rebuilt the rules on Northbound from a clean 1966 copy and a ruler.
Read →Pre-order windows, test pressing reports and vault finds. No discount codes, no countdowns.
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