The Vaping Friar

The gramophone records Homokord (after 1923 some labels say also Homocord) were manufactured by German company Homophon Company GmbH established in 1905. The company headquarters was located at Alexandrinenstrabe in the part of city of Berlin known as Kreuzberg.

In the beginning they supposed, that Homokord will be able to establish itself on the Russian market, they even planned to open a branch in the Polish city of Kalisz. However, ill choices of artists and inadequate requirements to the artistic quality of the recordings had resulted in graduate reduction of this company business in Russia. The latest Russian Homokord recordings are dated by 1910, after that date all matrixes with Russian repertoire were sold to the gramophone company Stella Record.

On Homokord acoustic matrices present encrypted recording date. The code is interpreted as follows: the first letter of the code is the encrypted month (January = A, December = M), then follows the day of recording, and finally the last letter indicates the year of recording in reverse alphabetical order, starting from the letter V, that is the year of the founding of the company (1905) and ending with the letter A (1925). For example, H21S stands for 21-08-1908. In the last year of acoustic recording (1926) they used the letter W. For electric recording they started to use different encoding system.

The table below shows the decryption of months: