From the outside looking in, the row homes of Somerville, Massachusetts all look the same. However, upon opening the door to Victoria Shen’s apartment, you’ll quickly realize a powerful metaphor: she lives in her creative process. Her apartment is a living industrial workshop complete with a scattered organization of tools, equipment and paraphernalia. 

In today’s world, it’s no secret that music has become increasingly disposable. Every week, single releases compete for playlist selections only to garner fleeting attention and be replaced by next week’s batch. With these often short lived-snackable digital releases dominating the music industry, many listeners are left wanting more. This lingering insufficiency according to Victoria is, "the reason why they buy an LP, right? Nowadays it is because of its tactility, the materiality of the thing, the thickness, the objectness of it. Right?”

Victoria noticed a void and ran with an idea to fill it. She bagan conceptualizing and working on an LP speaker, a vinyl cover that doubles as a means to play her album: "The idea of when it dawned on me was like, whoa, this is just kind of too perfect, too integrated, too seamless of an idea... it's just kind of magical." Victoria’s ingenious, yet playful idea continues her exploration of the space where art, engineering and sound intersect. 

The LP cover, doubling as a speaker, not only serves the functional purpose of playing the album; it’s just as much of the artwork as the album itself. It is the full interpretation of the album to be listened through the LP speaker which, of course, Victoria makes herself by hand,  "It takes so much hand work and focus, but also it's like, I spent that much time and put that much love into the recording and the ranging of like the piece too. So it's hard for me to feel like, okay, I invested all of myself into this piece. And then I'm just gonna let this industrial process take care of the rest of it? So I just can't help myself." With this release, Victoria made one hundred record sleeves, taking about an hour each. Although she describes the process as one which evokes, “cavewoman technology,” Victoria is never one to place her creative process anywhere but firmly in her own hands. The result of tuning each speaker by hand means that no two copies of Victoria’s Album sound the same. Hair Birth serves as the beautiful antithesis to modern day streaming: it’s distinct, tangible and entirely your own.   

Watch our doc with Victoria below where she takes you through the process of making her LP speakers.

Victoria Shen’s debut album Hair Birth is out now via American Dream Records and was recently repressed on red vinyl. Follow Victora on instagram