Citizen Vinyl Record Pressing Plant To Open In Asheville

Citizen Vinyl, a new boutique vinyl pressing plant and record store that also features a bar/cafe, will open in the former Citizen-Times building in Asheville, North Carolina in September.

Once home to the daily paper’s printing facility and offices, the site will soon become North Carolina’s first on-site pressing plant. Founded by veteran music producer Gar Ragland, Citizen Vinyl is keeping all shipping and manufacturing in-house, and will be able to fulfill low-volume orders at a budget friendly price and still maintain the bandwidth to execute large scale label projects.

Sharing the ground floor with the presses will be a fully-stocked record store, an intimate performance and lounge space and Session, a bar/cafe co-created by local culinary mainstays Susannah Gebhart of OWL Bakery and Graham House, formerly of Sovereign Remedies.

The building’s third floor once played host to Asheville’s historic WWNC, which was once considered the most popular radio station in the United States. In 1927, the station hosted live performances by Jimmie Rodgers shortly before he went to Bristol, Tennessee and made his first recordings. In 1939, the station featured on its Mountain Music Time segment the first live performances ever by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, the aggregation that marks the beginning of Monroe’s creation of a new sound called “bluegrass.”

CEO Gar Ragland has set up shop in the former station’s Studio A where he continues in his roles as music producer and mixer, label head of NewSong Recordings, and organizer and co-founder of the internationally recognized NewSong Music Performance & Songwriting Competition.

Photo: Courtesy Citizen Vinyl