On April 14, 2026, John Cabot University welcomed sound artist Robert Millis to present a lecture on his book and double LP Indian Talking Machine. The event was sponsored by the JCU Communication and Media Studies Department, in collaboration with CRiTT (Interuniversity Research Center on Transnational Technocultures) and Nero Editions.
Robert Millis is a sound artist, Fulbright scholar, Guggenheim Fellow, and musician based in Seattle, Washington. He is a member of American experimental music band Climax Golden Twins, co-author of the album Victrola Favorites (Dust-to-Digital, 2008) and has produced many related projects for the Sublime Frequencies record label, including documentaries from South East Asia and LPs of 78rpm era music from Myanmar, Korea, and Japan.
Millis discussed the history of recorded music in Asia focusing on India and Japan. Millis spent a year in India as a Senior Fulbright Research Scholar, as well as a further 5 months in Japan as a Japan-US Friendship Commission Fellow. Millis spent most of this time looking at early music recordings, photographing and researching private collections, shops and archives and listening to 78rpm shellac discs from over 100 years ago. His travels granted him unique insight and expertise on the industry, and he shared stories and videos from his journeys with the JCU community.
Millis guided the audience through the history of the shellac disk records during the British Empire. These early disks were sold worldwide, and Millis is one of the most active collectors to date.
What Millis emphasized throughout his lecture is the importance of sound. Millis explained how he is, relating sounds to their historical context, and examining the relationships between sound, place, and memory. His curation of rare sounds, videos, and audio recordings helped to cement him as a sound artist whose work has quietly but profoundly reshaped how many of us hear the world.
