Watch a Record Being Made at Cascade Record Pressing

Mark Rainey, Chief Operations Officer at Cascade Record Pressing, was serious about bringing a vinyl pressing plant to Portland. "Portland was really an obvious choice," he says. "Proximity is everything," adds Jeff Truhn, Chief of Maintenance. "There's so many great labels [in the Northwest], from Sub Pop on down."

There was a time when records were the standard for music listening, but as tapes and then CDs became the accepted musical currency, records fell out of favor, and the time- and energy-consuming process of making them became less profitable. The required machines dispersed from large plants, ending up in places like Jamaica, where records maintained some popularity, and also in storage facilities—too big to move, too big to really do anything with. 

But then things changed again. Digital culture created a reverence for the physical object, leading to a boom in demand for vinyl. So Rainey, who'd been running a record label for almost 20 years, decided to leave California and start pressing records in Oregon. 

Securing the heavy machinery required for the kind of operation he and his partners wanted to run wasn't easy. It took a couple years and some false starts. As Rainey says, it was "a long and painful journey" that finally brought the equipment to this warehouse space in Milwaukie. But that journey is paying off. A renewed interest in pressing records, as well as the ubiquitous Pacific Northwest music scene means that Cascade Record Pressing—the first and only vinyl manufacturing plant in the state—is already fully booked with projects. "We're really catering to the indie labels," Truhn says. "The people that kept the record industry as the record industry alive." 

That doesn't mean the plant is a small operation, necessarily. According to Truhn, its optimal per-day production is "about 2,000 records."

So, bands, if you're sick of paying hundreds of dollars to get your records shipped from out of state, Cascade Record Pressing could be your dream come true. And even if you aren't in a band, the whole record pressing process is just pretty cool—as you can see in the video below. 

Making Records with Cascade Record Pressing from wweek.vimeo on Vimeo.

WWeek 2015