From the Black Ark tapes buried in Lee Perry's yard to unreleased Dennis Brown sessions, Billy Polo on the forensic pleasures and urgent stakes of reggae's analog archive.
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Today, we're putting The Tonearm's needle on Billy Polo, in-house audio and mastering engineer, at iconic Jamaican music label VP Records. Billy has spent years restoring and remastering some of the most important recordings in reggae and dancehall history. Works from Peter Tosh, Dennis Brown, King Jammy, Sly and Robbie, and dozens more. Billy works with the original analog tapes, often in rough shape, and brings them back for today’s and tomorrow’s listeners.
We talk about the restoration process, what vintage tape actually sounds like when it's failing, and what Billy's doing to make sure this knowledge doesn't disappear.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are Prince Jammy - "Second Generation"; Augustus Pablo & King Tubby - "The Big Rip Off"; King Tubby with Max Romeo & The Upsetters - "Three Times Three" )
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00:00 Introduction
01:02 What makes a master drive you to drink
02:28 How reggae was mixed and mastered in the eighties
04:52 Billy's origin story — music, engineering, and dub
08:08 Learning without a teacher: trial, error, and Wharton Tiers
10:30 Why signal path matters
11:47 The mixing board as instrument
12:09 Self-conception: musician, engineer, producer
13:18 Art vs. science in archival work
16:42 Opening the boxes: what's actually on the tape
21:14 The cataloging problem at VP Records
23:45 Day-to-day work: A&R requests and independent restoration
26:12 Tape lifespan, composition, and vanishing expertise
30:10 Hardware, MCI machines, and tape repair
30:52 DSD archiving explained
32:23 Streaming, transcoding, and delivery formats
33:29 Fixing gear: Bob Schuster and the New York tape community
34:50 Lineage and being a link in the chain
37:39 Learning from the elders: Jammy, Clive Chin, Graham Goodall
40:28 Lee "Scratch" Perry and the Black Ark tapes
45:23 Atmos and immersive audio in reggae and dub
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Visit VP Records → https://vprecords.com — Billy's label home and the institution whose archive he manages
VP Records on Bandcamp → https://vprecordsofficial.bandcamp.com
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