All She Wrote...

Okay, submissions for the AI compilation album are now closed. It may surprise you to hear that I received 91 tracks. Taking one of the ten slots for myself, that means you have a roughly 10% chance of getting on the comp, which is not bad at all for this sort of thing. I didn't listen to every track as it came in; it kind of depended on the delivery mechanism. If someone just put a track in dropbox or embedded it on their site, I generally gave it a listen; if it came as a YouSendit payload or something I generally didn't. But my general feeling is that there is a good theme to be had here; most of the submissions are free of any genre restrictions (which was the ultimate goal) and several that I heard are pure electro-acoustic enterprises, which is interesting. In any event, on Sunday I am travelling (by Airstream RV, of all things) up to Portland to visit the family for a few days. During the course of this trip, I'm going to listen to this over 6 hours of music and try out themes and groupings, and see if I can't come up with a cohesive album. I should have a final grouping by the time I get to Phoenix. (Hey, you guys catch that?) So the next order of business is mastering, getting lacquers, and the pressing. While I've had hundreds of thousands of CDs manufactured, and am intimately acquainted with that process, it may surprise you to learn (or not, rather) that I have never had any vinyl pressed. I know that quite a few of you have, and some advice on the process, along with recommendations of people to talk to, would be appreciated.