300 CD Carousel Console (2021)

A console built around a 300 CD carousel, with 300 CD racks to hold the corresponding cases.

I found a Sony Megastorage 300 CD Carousel for $10 and bought it. I had a similar one when I was younger and always really liked them, as some sort of obsolete relic. I took it home and was disappointed to find that it didn’t work. After some googling, I found that a common problem with these machines is that, after 20 years or so, these little rubber belts that drive the carousel disintegrate into goo. The goo can be easily replaced for a few bucks. I replaced mine and the machine worked good as new.

But then once I began using it, I found it was cumbersome, because you select a disc not by the name of the album (like an iPod), but by the number of the disc in the carousel. Some people who use these machines have a printout beside the machine with an index of the artist and album names corresponding to each disc, to refer to when selecting a disc. A more elegant solution, I thought, would be to use the CD cases themselves as an index. By labeling each case with the number of the disc, and integrating them into a rack with the carousel, the cases would serve as an index. One could browse the collection by perusing the CD cases and then select the number of the disc with the dial on the machine.

The console lives here in my workshop as a juke box. When I was building the workshop, I made it to serve as an offline music source, so I wouldn’t have to have my phone or computer to play music. My favorite function of the machine is its mechanical “shuffle”, in which it spins around to a random disc, pulls it out, and plays a random track on the disc. After the track ends, there is a few seconds of mechanical noises before the next song plays- the carousel putting the disc back and spinning around to a new one.

Here it is in the workshop 8 months later. Many more CDs, as you can see from the rack.

One thing I didn’t realize when I conceived of the console, was that the machine allows you to manually type in a name for each disc by plugging in a computer keyboard. This allows each disc to have a name in the system, so instead of locating an album by “disc 154” you can indeed locate it by, say, “Royal Trux”. This effectively makes my original concept for the console as a physical index for locating discs pretty useless. Still, I like having the cd cases accessible and integrated with the machine.

I removed the shell from the machine and covered it with this plexiglass panel, so you can see the mechanism. Another useful function of the machine is the ability to group discs. Instead of shuffling all 300 discs, you can group discs into (up to 8) different groups, and shuffle within the groups. So far, I have three disc groups to shuffle within- 1. my CDs up to early high school (which I basically never play) 2. my CDs from early high school til now (what I mostly play) 3. Seth Price Soundcloud mixes I divided into individual tracks in Audacity and burned onto CDs (these discs don’t have CD cases and so aren’t represented in the CD rack). Another function is the “Hit List”- a playlist you can program into the machine (only up to 32 songs).

I originally made the console as a sculpture for a group show at Punto Lairs Inc. It was plugged into a speaker and playing on “All Discs Shuffle” for the duration of the show, shuffling my CD Collection from middle school until 2021.

I would have probably never made the console if it weren’t for the prompt to make a work for this group show. It was an object I wanted to see in the world, but not necessarily an object I wanted. It was more like a joke, a relic of some obsessive personality, but not my own. When conceived as a sculpture, its existence was suddenly justified to me, and so I made it.