Malta's lost voices of the inter-war years are to be heard again soon thanks to a project initiated by Andrew Alamango, and supported by the National Archives and the Ministry of Education as part of the National Memory Project.
The project aims to gather and catalogue early Maltese gramophone records, documenting and preserving them for research and posterity.
The records include folk and popular music recorded in Milan and Tunis with major records labels, including HMV, Polyphon, Odeon and Pathe records.
The first phase of the project dealt with research and preservation of the earliest documented sound of the country, which has been input into a database. The database, which will be accessible to the public for research purposes, contains the original sound file of these 78rpm records as well as restored versions of the music.
The second phase includes the publication of a 50-page CD publication with 30 tracks from the original records, photographs and adverts from the newspapers of the day.
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