On the fringes of Los Angeles, San Gabriel Valley’s vinyl company Onyx Record Press establishes a voice for the community as they deconstruct record industry hierarchies by implementing grassroots DIY ethos with high quality products. Built by the passionate hands of co-founders Moe Espinosa, Gil Tamazyan, Cyrus Makarechian, and Surachai Sutthisasanakul, who understand the struggles of independent artists, the team has banded together to streamline a fast and efficient service for creating vinyl. 

Onyx has built a reputation for making premium grade vinyls; however, what really makes them special is their impact on the music community. The company prides themselves on dismantling the “gatekeeper” mentality by educating. From inviting artists to sell their music at their record fairs to guiding them to procreate well-crafted vinyl, no other pressing company champions the independent artists the way Onyx does. 

Throughout my music career, I have gone through every notable pressing company, and last year, I went through Onyx. Not only was this the best experience, but it was the first time that I was given the opportunity to understand this archaic process from the inside. Working alongside Moe Espinosa, he shared a lot of historical and technical background that opened my eyes to the difficulties of putting out vinyl. The insight gave me an irrevocable sense of respect for this tradition and reinforced my passion for making a physical medium. By the end of the project, Onyx gave me a quick turnaround, great advice, and growth. 

Recently, I had the privilege of sitting with Moe (Drumcell, Belief Defect, Black Noise, Droid Behavior, and Observe) - a pioneer of Los Angeles Techno and a critical figure in our music community.  As a self-trained DIY artist, Espinosa is a hands-on individual who understands the contemptuous nature of a working musician. By running labels and touring, his background has given him the tools and knowledge to control his artistic narrative that would eventually lead him to the manufacturing side: being one of the owners and operators of Onyx.

Over some coffee, Moe took some time to tell me about his experience. This is what he said:

Start with your name and a basic intro.

My name is Moe Espinosa. I'm one of the one of four co-owners here at Onyx Record Press. Basically, the four of us started this place because we were all for independent musicians who had been pressing records for a long time and had dealt with a lot of frustration in the industry. We started this company with the hopes of streamlining it and making it easier for independent artists to get their records pressed.

Do you want to expand a little bit on the history? What did the early days look like?

Well, it's actually a romantic story. I met Gil, one of the main partners, who is the main press operator and vinyl mastering engineer, back in 1999. At the time, he was an electronic engineer and worked as a mechanic. He had worked in several studios repairing and replacing SSL channels on SSL mixing consoles. He’s also the only person I knew who could break down an entire Bronco car and rebuild it. At some point, he got a hold of an old SMT pressing machine that's almost 67 years old. It was all broken down, but he actually rebuilt the entire machine and taught himself how to press records. 

I was an electronic music producer, who had just started a record label in LA called Droid Recordings, and we wanted to put out our very first release. We were a group of grassroot producers who wanted to push techno in LA. We were some of the first people in Los Angeles that started the techno scene out here, and I didn't know where I could go to press a record. 

Eventually, I went over there to meet him, and sure enough, there's this house music producer, who’s running this set up with a boiler and pressing records out of his garage. Completely DIY. This was unheard of. Nobody does that, especially in the 90s, you know? It was a super punk rock thing. Gil didn’t have any clients, so when I went over to him, I became his first client. I said, “I want to press some records for my label, Droid,” and we became friends.

Gil pressed our records, and this started a relationship. I just loved that experience of being able to press our own records DIY punk style. While every other techno record label in the world is funneling their records through some major grease pit pressing factory, they don't give a shit, we were literally in a garage in downtown LA pressing records, sleeving and jacketing them ourselves. 

What are some names that you were first pressing for Droid? 

The first release was mine. It was a Drumcell record with another artist named Steve Eagle, who used to go by Fabriknoz. Another artist named John Massey, who was another local L.A. artist that I worked with. 

From there, I was literally putting records in my trunk, driving around to record stores all over the city, selling records on consignment. 100 records here. 100 records there. When I turned 18, I booked a ticket to go to the very first Detroit Electronic Music Festival, and I went out there with 500 records that we had pressed, and I just passed out records to every DJ and every artist that I saw at the festival. It kind of took off and hit like a wildfire.

Next thing I know, this label was one of the main staples in North American techno labels. Eventually, we started throwing events. We were throwing some of the biggest parties in the West Coast, and all of that was really centered around making records. I would attribute the majority of the success to the brand and the label to the access we had to making records through Gil.

Who are the other partners?

The two other partners are Cyrus and Surachai. Both of them are very good friends of mine that I met through music. Cyrus was a touring member of a band called Blackline with Douglas McCarthy of Nitzer Ebb, and they had toured as the opening act for Depeche Mode. 

Surachai comes from the black metal world. Him and I bonded on a common musical taste, since we both really liked dark industrial, experimental electronic music that meets black metal, IDM, and noise. We started a label together called Black Noise, which was heavily focused on avant garde, experimental, dark electronic music. 

As a matter of fact, our first label night at Black Noise, we had Alessandro Cortini from Nine Inch Nails, Richard Devine, and Kevin Key from Skinny Puppy to name a few. We threw our very first Black Noise label night at Gil's loft, where he had the pressing machine to commemorate how we all kind of came together.

Did you ever think you would fall into this line of work?

I had never really ever thought I would get into the vinyl pressing industry. I've always been a musician first. There was no plan B for me. I eat, sleep, shit, and breathe producing, touring, putting out records, and being an artist. Everything that was attributed to the DIY culture of building your own brand. But when the pandemic hit, all of us were out of work. We had nothing. There were no gigs to play. There were no shows to throw. But the record pressing industry exploded. Now, we were talking to pressing plants that were saying the turnaround time was seven months to two year turnaround time. 

Back then, Gil called me up and told me that he had sold his old SMT machine. He saw how the industry was changing. He asked if I knew any investors because right now is a good time to start a pressing plant. He said he could get these brand new machines from overseas that have really fast cycle times that can turn around records at a rapid pace.

At the time, I had just had a child and I was rethinking what I wanted to do with my future -  Do I still want a tour? Do I want to be around my son more? I told Gil that I'm not a man of money, but I'm happy to work with him, so we put a pitch deck together, built a team, and tried to see if we could get the finances to fund it. That started a conversation between all of our partners. We would meet once a week. We planned. We set up diagrams. We worked on the plumbing, the piping, the electricity, electric, electrical work by yourself. 

We decided to move forward, but instead of it being some Mickey Mouse pressing machine in some garage, we thought about how we could turn this into an actual company and set ourselves apart from the rest of the industry. We had a pretty good idea of how things worked and realized that most major pressing plants are more about quantity than quality. It's about cutting corners, finding a way to maximize profits. Also, major record labels get the first seats, and independent artists kind of get the back. Then you get into the age of reissues, which was clogging up the machines in the world. It's all about fulfilling the demand for this new trend. But for us and for our community and the world we grew up in, this was never about trends. Vinyl is something we never abandoned. It was something we had always done, even when nobody wanted it. 

What have been some of the challenges for ONYX? 

From the startup funds to the technical side, there's a lot of things that have been challenging. For example, you have to buy a boiler that can produce enough steam to the machine, but then you realize that the city doesn’t approve of boilers of this size to work inside this place. Then you downgrade by 210 horsepower boilers instead of getting a giant Parker boiler just so you can meet codes. 

There's the recycling process and what we do with the extra material and how you do that in a green way. Then as a business and how we compete with other pressing plants. We are so small and boutique, so our main competitive drive is to offer a higher quality product. If somebody wants to come to us and they want a pristinely pressed, high quality 160, 180 gram record, trimmed perfectly, perfectly flat, no dishing, no concaving, no excess vinyl buildup, and no dimples, they can come to us. We can do that. We use 100% virgin vinyl when pressing because using recycled regrind introduces noise to the record. 

The ambient temperatures change constantly here, especially in California. We have mild winters, but it's still in the 30s and 40s degrees on a really cold night. Our summers can get hot sometimes. You have 112, 115 degree days, right? When that happens, the temperatures change because the water that comes into the building from the city changes. That's because your boiler only produces a certain amount of hot water. The water that comes in from the city is also hotter. 

There's a lot of really fine temperature adjustments that need to be made when you're pressing a record. You have steam that goes in, that melts the vinyl, makes it malleable to press it, and then you blast it with cold water to solidify and harden the record. But if the water temperatures are changing constantly, then you're getting different results throughout the season. You have to run a pressing plant long enough that you actually know how to adjust your machine to work in the weather you're dealing with over a long period of time. It's a lot of benchmarking and figuring out the technicalities. Sometimes you need to go through 2 or 3 seasons until you actually dial it in perfectly. When we hit peak summer times, different types of vinyl react differently. black vinyl presses pretty easily, but when we start working into color vinyls with crazy splatters and marbled records, then you're dealing with different types of vinyls that melt at different temperatures. 

Pressing records is really difficult. There are about ten steps that need to go perfectly well to get a proper record. Each one of those ten steps is usually handled by different people and has a very high probability of something going wrong. That technology hasn't changed since the first day I ever started. We are still incorporating and implementing archaic manufacturing processes that's hundreds of years old, and each one of those steps has a very high probability of something going wrong.

What does the production process look like?

The first step is to have a lacquer, which is basically a piece of metal in a circle that's covered with a thin veneer of a nail polish material. Inside that process of making those lacquer discs, sometimes there's imperfections when they're putting that thin veneer paint on top of it. Sometimes there's air bubbles that pop up that can cause problems. That's just from a manufacturer, who provides us with material. Then we put that onto a lathe and cut the music using a diamond or sapphire stylus needle that cuts into that thin veneer at a very shallow place. Think about what you're doing. You're playing audio through this thing, and this thing is just cutting waveform into a record.

Well, this raises a lot of problems when it comes to the mix. If your mix has too much low end bass frequencies in the stereo field that will cause those grooves to do very funny things. If you have high frequencies with high sibilance and sizzle range, that can cause things to distort on vinyl. If you have phasing in your mix, like you have multiple microphones on drum recordings, then that can cause grooves to wobble. They move. If they wobble, you get a record that skips a needle: jumps off a record, you know?

Now, we're in the process of musicians who give us mixed music, and we have to scientifically figure out in the process of how to get that music to translate into this archaic format without any problems.

Once you cut the disc, you actually don't know what the results are going to be until it gets plated. Then it goes to plating. In plating, they put it into a spray booth, a similar machine that would paint a car, and spray it with liquid nickel until it's covered into a shiny nickel vibe. They take it and they put it into a galvanic bath that electrocutes it. What the electrocution does is it makes the nickel stick to the record and get into all those grooves that are cut on the lacquer. Then we peel those off, and those are the stampers, which are the negatives. 

When spraying the liquid nickel, the spray cans can get jammed, it’s like doing graffiti, it sputters out blobs of paint. Then you get pops and cracks. You can't control it. You don't know what's going to happen. Then they go in the galvanic bath, and that whole process is super expensive. Every lacquer disc is $85 a disc. The galvanic process is $300. The building process puts us a few thousand dollars in the hole. Then you get the plates and you put it on the machine and do a test press. If any one of those steps go wrong, and they all have a high probability, then you got a shitty sounding record.

I feel like I might be going out on a limb here, but the majority of my job is crisis management more than it is just making people's dreams come true.

I was going to say, “what surprises you about this job? But now, I feel like rephrasing it: what has not surprised you?

Well, there are things that still surprise me. I am constantly surprised by how different our consumer market for vinyl is these days. As much as we'd love to sit here and talk about how romantic records are; how we want to buy these records; and how they matter, to be honest with you, sometimes it feels like this industry is more about selling candy than it is selling records. 

Sometimes we press a record and we as people who listen to records every day, might be critical in saying, this record doesn't sound great, but we give it to the client and they don’t fucking care. The thing that they say to us every time is no one's going to listen to it anyways. And there's truth in that.

So, would you say what surprises you is that there’s still hope? I'm a true believer that analog will never die. It could be gear: it could be whatever. I just think that people want to experience something. I was talking to a friend about renting movies and it makes me want to get back into buying a VHS.

Let me give you my input on that. I realized I thought everybody did this, and then I had a harsh reality, especially with younger generations, that it made me feel alone. For me and amongst my closest friends, when we're hanging out and everyone brings over beer, we chill out at the after party, whatever it is, we would have a tendency to be like, “yo, did you hear this new fucking record?” And they'd say, “no,” and someone would pull it off the shelf and play it.

I tend to think about the reasons we do all of this. For example, having this space and doing what you do, especially what you've done in music and your love for making records. This reminds me of my studio and why I do what I do. A lot of people have bedroom studios now, where they can do everything, so what’s the point? I think about the responsibility we have as artists. There are conversations inside these spaces that I believe can spread in a good way. The experience of recording at a studio or pressing vinyl is to do something unique, as opposed to releasing on Spotify or being isolated to a bedroom. I feel like it’s the same thing, and it’s our responsibility to continue that tradition and path for other people that don’t see it that way. Maybe some do, but for those that don't, maybe that conversation inspires them. There’s a sense of responsibility that I feel. 

I have a phrase for that. I call it, “your tribe has failed you.” What I mean by that is if you look back at the history of tribal gatherings, the elders have always passed down information to the younger people about how cultural significance works. We hold on to our ancestry that way and that's how it's always worked for millions of years. 

I think up until the 2000 that tribal “passing down the torch to younger generations” always existed in rave culture, punk, or anything. When you have the young cats that came in, the older generation would be like, “here, yo, like, this is the real shit.” You stand tall in the backs of their hard work. These are the bands that started this. You might be into these guys, but these guys were influenced by these people, right? You know what I mean?. Check out this record. Listen to this record. Do this. All those cultural nuances tend to be passed down. 

I believe at some point, especially with the birth of the internet, our ability to gather information no longer came from our elders. It started with quick access to information from the internet. This meant that a lot of cultural significance and a lot of fringe music cultures had been lost - a lot of history had been lost. Also, a lot of people, who should be passing down information to younger people, maybe started gatekeeping. Maybe they started not giving information. Maybe they started hating on all these young kids, who don't know what the fuck they're talking about. They stopped caring, and that's where their tribe failed them. They failed to pass that information on to the next generation.

Sometimes I think that nobody took the time to discover, look back, and learn things. 

I can definitely see that. On that note, do you have any last words?

I think it would be very inspirational for any artists out there who are thinking about pressing records to kind of understand how this industry works. I think a large majority of people come to us, of course, smaller bands, and the first thing they say is they want to print 100 records. You give them a price and they go, “wow, that's expensive,” I don't think they quite understand that pressing 100 records is not cost effective. You’re not actually paying for the records. The records are the cheap part. You know, you're paying $2.80 a record. The vast majority of your cost is in the startup. That's the cutting, the mastering, the plating, the stampers, and the test pressing setups. All that stuff eats up almost 75% of the money.

Depending on the record and whether or not you press 100 records, you end up spending anywhere from $18 to $20 a unit when you divide all your startup costs. But once you print 200 records, just 100 more, the cost is $400 than your initial quote - you cut your cost per unit in half.

Right now, you're paying $12 a record, then you print 300 records and now you're paying $8 a record. Every time you print more records, the cost per unit comes down. Now, of course, not all of us can sit around on 500 records. I get it. But I always tell people you might as well just print 200. It's $400 more. You cut your cost per unit down by half. If you sell half those records, you break even. You might be stuck with 100 records extra, but the next time you release your second album, people are going to want to go back and buy your back catalogue.

It's always good to have inventory.

You always want to have inventory. Hopefully, if you're sticking with this and you're going to be playing gigs for the next five, ten years, you're going to have records on-hand that you can sell at every fucking show you go to.

Also, if you print 100 records and you do get rid of them, you are going to have to go through the whole process all over again.

I think bands need to figure it out and realize that you're providing something special to your fans. Also, do something special: number your records, sign them, package them yourself, make a video, etc. Make people have an emotional connection to what you do. Actually care enough to support you. Sell records to your aunts, your uncles, your cousins, your tribe of friends, and get everybody you love to support you. Also, don't be afraid to walk into record stores and sell your records on consignment. This is the work.