- James Rexroad
- Cascade Record Pressing Owners Adam Gonsalves, Steve Lanning, and Mark Rainey.
Oregon’s first vinyl pressing plant is now open for business.
On May 28, Cascade Record Pressing‘s website went live, with the ability to accept orders from labels and musicians for all types of vinyl projects, with runs of 500 records and up. These orders are fulfilled at Cascade’s brand-new plant in Milwaukie, Oregon, where sacks of PVC pellets the size of lentils are transformed into flat, shiny 12-inch records, packed with grooves of sound.
The record-making process is something of a manufacturing miracle, but the transformation of Cascade from a wild idea among friends to an economic reality is just as miraculous. It’s the project of three partners: Mark Rainey, Adam Gonsalves, and Steve Lanning, all vinyl devotees and music obsessives. They embarked on a lengthy process of education and research, which took them down strange, arduous paths in their attempt to acquire and rehabilitate the six vintage record presses that are the backbone of Cascade’s operation.
But before any of that happened, they each began with an individual and lifelong love of music.
“It definitely started out of a place of nostalgia,” says Lanning, a licensed certified public accountant who handles Cascade’s financial end. “Listening to records with my sister and my parents. Records are just this amazing invention. It’s like the bicycle. The bicycle is effectively antiquated technology, but it’s an amazing invention, and a record’s an amazing invention and concept, too. Ultimately, too, it’s a statement of support for a particular artist—if you buy a record, you’re making a direct statement of support. And it’s just this beautiful, tangible, physical thing that you can hold and look at.”
Rainey, Cascade’s chief operating officer, was similarly raised on vinyl. “It’s how I was introduced to music as a child in the early ’70s,” he says. “I can’t think of the hours I spent just sitting in front of my family’s Dynaco record player setup and listening to folk records that my parents had, listening to Sesame Street records or little 45s that were based on some of my favorite movies or stories, and from that, getting my own radio and getting exposed to popular music and picking out 45s by bands that I liked. And that led me to becoming an obsessive record collector and music enthusiast.”
Rainey started TKO Records in the 1990s, a label that has released landmark punk albums by Dropkick Murphys, Poison Idea, and Giuda. TKO expanded to a brick-and-mortar record store in Orange County in 2007, but in December 2013, Rainey started talking to Gonsalves about moving to Portland, Oregon.
“I think his first question was, ‘Does Portland have space for another record store?'” says Gonsalves. “And I was like, ‘Uhhh… [laughs] I don’t think so! I think we’re pretty good on that.’ Eventually Mark brought up the idea of a record-pressing plant. The plant was his idea. So my first contribution—and I think it was a really valuable contribution—was trying to talk him out of it.”