The building on the east side of Detroit still smells faintly of bread. For fifty years it was a bakery, famous in the neighbourhood for its rye, and when the Halloway sisters bought it in 2017 the ovens were still in place. Today those ovens are gone, replaced by two hulking record presses built in 1966, a boiler that hisses like an irritated cat and a steady stream of black, blue and amber discs cooling on wooden racks.
Halloway Pressing is run by Denise, Carla and Maxine Halloway, who between them bring a background in mechanical engineering, a career in music publishing and, in the case of the youngest, a decade as a touring drummer. They started the business almost by accident, after Maxine's band waited nine months for a pressing slot at one of the large plants and the sisters decided, over a family dinner, that they could probably do it faster themselves. They were wrong about the speed. They were right about almost everything else.
Pressing a record is a surprisingly brutal process. A puck of heated vinyl compound is squeezed between two stampers under roughly one hundred tons of pressure, then cooled, trimmed and inspected. The large modern plants automate most of it. At Halloway, each disc is handled by a person at every stage. Denise, who restored both presses from salvage, can diagnose a problem by the sound of the hydraulics. Carla inspects finished records under a lamp and rejects anything with a blemish she can feel with her thumb.
Slow by design
Their capacity is small by industry standards, around two thousand records a day on a good shift, and they have no intention of growing much. Instead, the sisters have built their business around the jobs larger plants treat as nuisances: short runs for independent labels, reissues of forgotten local soul and gospel records, and custom colours mixed by hand from pigment in a repurposed dough mixer. The amber vinyl that has become something of a signature began as an accident with a batch of recycled offcuts.
Everybody told us vinyl was a fad. We figured if it was a fad, it was one that had already lasted seventy years, and we could live with that.
The sisters are candid about the environmental cost of vinyl, a petroleum product, and have spent two years experimenting with compounds made partly from recycled material. The results are promising but inconsistent, and they refuse to market them as green until they are sure. Maxine handles the musicians, many of whom visit the plant to watch their first records come off the press. Some cry. One gospel singer in her eighties, reissuing an album from 1971, sang a verse to the press for luck.
The waiting list now stretches well into next year, and offers of investment arrive regularly, usually from people who have never visited. The sisters turn them down politely. They have hired six people from the neighbourhood, including two former bakery employees who knew the building better than they did, and they close every Sunday without exception. Carla says the business is exactly the size where everyone still knows each other's lunch order, and she sees no reason to change that.
Before I leave, Denise pulls a test pressing from the rack, a reissue of a 1970s Detroit jazz record long out of print, and puts it on a battered turntable in the office. For three minutes nobody speaks. The sound is warm, close and slightly imperfect, a crackle audible at the start of the second track. She lifts the needle, frowns, and says she will press it again tomorrow. Then she smiles and admits that she will probably keep this one for herself.
