New York (AFP)

Inside an unnamed street warehouse in Tribeca, south of Manhattan, New York, lives one of the world's largest collections of vinyl records, archives that survived the advent of digital with the support of some celebrities.

Classified, listed, the 3.25 million records, mostly vinyls complemented by CDs and cassettes, are stored on the large shelves of the ARChive of Contemporary Music, the name of this organization founded in 1985.

"You discover things all the time," says co-founder B. George about these objects that contain more than 90 million songs and whose number is growing steadily thanks to regular donations.

The collection also contains many books, magazines, videos, films, posters and souvenirs.

In the digital age, physical recordings are scarce, even though vinyl has been resurgent for a few years.

These discs, as objects, belong to history, besides that all the pieces on them do not exist in digital form.

The revelation in June that master tapes (masters) of 500,000 pieces, including many classics, had been destroyed in 2008 in the burning of a warehouse located on the site of Universal Studios, recalled the perishable nature of the recorded music.

The master tapes are the initial recordings that are used for re-releases, posthumous albums or compilations.

Even if nothing matches the quality of masters, several record companies have contacted the ARChive to have access to versions close to the original recordings.

Two reissues of albums by Nigerian artist Fela Kuti, creator of the Afrobeat, were made on the basis of vinyls found in the warehouse of Tribeca.

- And in 5,000 years? -

Beyond the professionals of the music industry, filmmakers and researchers come regularly to draw on their projects.

The Grammy Museum of Los Angeles, dedicated to the Grammy Awards, the awards of the American music industry, and the recording of music, has submitted to the ARChive a list of 3,000 labels and artwork for illustration.

After two weeks of research, the fund had almost all found them, recalls B. George.

The collection he created with David Wheeler, who died in 1997, accepts all the popular music gifts that B. George defines as anything that is "not classical".

He remembers recovering 125,000 rock records, including some 1,500 autographed ones, from a Boston house that had been condemned because it threatened to collapse under the weight of vinyl records.

Always tenant of his warehouse, ARChive relies on the generosity of patrons to continue to pay the rent. A district where commercial premises were gradually emptying in the early 1980s, Tribeca has become one of the most expensive in the United States today.

Among his supporters, B. George includes avant-garde artist Laurie Anderson, to whom he introduced his future husband, the singer Lou Reed, or the musician and producer Nile Rodgers. The director Martin Scorsese, the singer Youssou N'Dour or Paul Simon are part of the councilors of the structure.

More convinced than ever of the interest of conservation of this heritage, B. George is nonetheless aware that "everything is fleeing". "If we are realistic, all this will only be dust in 5,000 years."

He therefore seeks to multiply the media and works with the Internet Archive website, a sort of memory of the web, to digitize this fund with the idea of ​​keeping "as many things as possible to the maximum of places".

Some 130,000 78 laps, an old version of vinyls, have already been digitized and can now be listened to for free online.

"You do your best," says George, "hoping the migration will be to the next stage, to the future means of conservation, but it's unpredictable."

© 2019 AFP