Film City, unknown date (likely early-1970s).
vinyl condition: G
From songpoemmusic.com :
Sandy Stanton was a song-poem pioneer. As the owner of Film City Records, Stanton discovered a young musician named Rodd Keith and initiated him to the song-poem game. A gifted composer, multi-instrumentalist, versatile singer, arranger, producer and sometimes engineer, Keith quickly developed into a one-man song-poem killing machine. He went on to have the most artistically successful career in the genre's history.
Stanton also introduced to the song-poem arsenal a pre-digital sampling keyboard called the Chamberlin. Using strips of pre-recorded magnetic tape, the Chamberlin was able to replicate any instrument in the orchestra as well as human voices and sound effects. Following Stanton's lead, other song-poem companies began using the instrument, recognizing it as a less-expensive alternative to live bands or as an efficient enhancement to an underlying band recording. Its eight-second strips of tape limited the Chamberlin -- and its better-known English descendent, the Mellotron -- to rather unnatural distortions of the instruments sampled, although the song-poem entrepreneurs seemed hardly to have noticed.
Hasil Adkins, known for cutting almost all of his recordings in his living room, cut one of his earliest tapes, in 1956, at Stanton's Fable Recording Studio.