The Man Who Created a Record Store That Only Buys One Album: Rutherford Chang’s White Album Project

In an era when dig­i­tal algo­rithms can sum­mon near­ly any song on demand, the late Ruther­ford Chang’s obses­sion with a sin­gle album, The Bea­t­les’ 1968 self-titled LP, uni­ver­sal­ly known as The White Album, felt like a delib­er­ate act of ana­log rebel­lion. His long-run­ning con­cep­tu­al project, known as We Buy White Albums, is less about The Bea­t­les and more about what hap­pens to objects, and the lives that pass through them. It’s one of the most qui­et­ly rad­i­cal record col­lect­ing exper­i­ments in mod­ern art.

Launched in 2013 as a pop-up instal­la­tion at Recess Gallery in New York City, We Buy White Albums took the form of an uncan­ny record store, with a catch. Chang’s shop doesn’t sell records, it only buys them. And not just any records. Specif­i­cal­ly, first U.S. press­ings of The Bea­t­les’ White Album, iden­ti­fi­able by the stamped ser­i­al num­bers on their oth­er­wise fea­ture­less white cov­ers.

Inside the gallery, pris­tine racks and shelv­ing over­flowed with what appeared to be the same record, repeat­ed end­less­ly. But a clos­er look revealed sub­tle, and some­times pro­found, vari­a­tions: yel­low­ing from sun expo­sure, water dam­age, per­son­al­ized doo­dles, lost stick­ers, mold blooms, and scrib­bled mes­sages to for­mer lovers or long-dead friends and rel­a­tives. Each copy, though mass-pro­duced and orig­i­nal­ly indis­tin­guish­able, has become a unique arti­fact of time and use. Chang calls the project a “store,” but it’s as much a med­i­ta­tion on entropy as it is a col­lec­tion to be bought or sold.

Thousands of Copies In One Place

When the orig­i­nal instal­la­tion opened, Chang had some 700 copies, hav­ing been steadi­ly col­lect­ing them since he bought his sec­ond copy when was 15 years old. By the time of his untime­ly pass­ing in Jan­u­ary of this year, Chang had acquired at least 3,502 copies of the White Album (with each one of those doc­u­ment­ed and uploaded to his insta­gram @webuywhitealbums), mak­ing his col­lec­tion pos­si­bly the largest known accu­mu­la­tion of a sin­gle edi­tion of a com­mer­cial­ly released album, and he showed no signs of wind­ing down his obses­sion.

Each album was doc­u­ment­ed, archived, and often dis­played spine-out­ward to show­case the ser­i­al num­bers, an inver­sion of the col­lec­tor’s usu­al desire to spot­light cov­er art or mint con­di­tion. Here, the wear is the point.

Sonic Layering: A 100-Album Sound Collage

Beyond the visu­al impact, Chang’s project also lives in sound. In 2013, he cre­at­ed a lay­ered sound piece by simul­ta­ne­ous­ly play­ing 100 dif­fer­ent copies of The White Album, each one hav­ing been cho­sen by vis­i­tors to his orig­i­nal instal­la­tion. The result is a ghost­ly, warped ver­sion of the famil­iar song, voic­es phase in and out, tem­pos wob­ble, scratch­es inter­rupt. As you play the piece, ‘Back In The USSR’ sounds rec­og­niz­able, if a bit tin­ny, but fur­ther through the first side every­thing goes awry, as the indi­vid­ual man­u­fac­tur­ing imper­fec­tions, wear, dust, and so on cause the sound to skip, alter, and fall out of sync with the oth­er instances of the album. It sounds like The Bea­t­les, but sub­merged in the sta­t­ic of time. Many have com­pared it favor­ably to James Ley­land Kir­by’s (bet­ter known as the Care­tak­er) mus­ings on mem­o­ry and the pas­sage of time as well as William Basin­ski’s exper­i­ments with sound, most notably his Dis­in­te­gra­tion Loops.

This mul­ti­track col­lage was pressed into its own lim­it­ed-edi­tion vinyl release of 800 copies, with the cov­er itself being the result of the 100 orig­i­nals being super­im­posed on one anoth­er, effec­tive­ly turn­ing a com­mer­cial pop object into a dete­ri­o­rat­ed son­ic sculp­ture and visu­al col­lage.

An Archive of Mass-Produced Individuality

Chang’s project flirts with the lan­guage of muse­um cura­tion, pop cul­ture detri­tus, and fan obses­sion, but it lands some­where more unex­pect­ed: acci­den­tal anthro­pol­o­gy. The White Album, orig­i­nal­ly con­ceived by the Bea­t­les as a blank can­vas of sorts, an anony­mous sleeve con­tain­ing an over­whelm­ing range of musi­cal styles, becomes even more of a mir­ror in Chang’s hands.

Each copy he buys offers a tiny, unin­ten­tion­al auto­bi­og­ra­phy. Own­ers wrote their names on them. They drew peace signs or hearts. They added stick­ers or obscured the band name with ink. Some played them to death; oth­ers seem­ing­ly let them sit and col­lect dust, unused. Some used them as cof­fee cup coast­ers, one copy even has a cig­a­rette burn all the way through the vinyl. “Poor con­di­tion albums are not nec­es­sar­i­ly more desir­able,” Chang said in an inter­view, “Rather it’s the dif­fer­ences between every unique copy in this mas­sive edi­tion that make the col­lec­tion inter­est­ing.”

In col­lect­ing these phys­i­cal traces, Chang is also gath­er­ing sto­ries, unwrit­ten, but leg­i­ble in wear and scuff and Sharpie ink. One copy seem­ing­ly has auto­graphs from all of the mem­bers of the band, with the only caveat being the auto­graphs all have the same writ­ing; oth­er copies have love let­ters writ­ten on them, and still oth­ers have breakup let­ters, but the lat­ter both fur­ther hint at how often this record in par­tic­u­lar, has inten­tion­al­ly changed hands over the years, a sort of lit­er­al cul­tur­al cur­ren­cy.

While the pla­ton­ic ide­al of this project would be to col­lect all of the copies out in the world, Chang real­izes it’s an impos­si­ble task, and regard­less, he claimed he nev­er spent more than $20 on a sin­gle copy. Most of the work was find­ing peo­ple to acquire the album from and con­vinc­ing them to part with their copy.

Since hear­ing the news of Chang’s pass­ing, many peo­ple took to the inter­net to recall their encoun­ters with the artist, whether in per­son or over email, dur­ing which they sold him their copy of the record, with many men­tion­ing how inspired they were by Chang’s vision behind the project and his steely ded­i­ca­tion to the album.

Why The White Album?

Why this album in par­tic­u­lar? The White Album, released in 1968 at the height of The Bea­t­les’ glob­al fame, is arguably one of the most over-pressed records in his­to­ry. Out of the orig­i­nal press­ing, there are least three mil­lion sur­viv­ing copies out there, accord­ing to Chang. Each of those orig­i­nal press­ings bore a unique num­ber. That seri­al­iza­tion, com­bined with the unadorned white cov­er, made it ripe for rein­ter­pre­ta­tion. Min­i­mal­ist, mys­te­ri­ous, and near­ly blank, the record invites cus­tomiza­tion, degra­da­tion, and pro­jec­tion.

More­over, The White Album is famous­ly eclec­tic, con­tain­ing both Lennon’s harsh exper­i­men­tal­ism, McCartney’s soft pop, Harrison’s mys­ti­cism, and Ringo’s sin­ga­longs. It’s a record of con­tra­dic­tions, and so too is Chang’s project: order­ly in appear­ance, chaot­ic in mean­ing.

Organized by Nature

The project itself is a reflec­tion of Chang’s over­all phi­los­o­phy and lifestyle, that of being a col­lec­tor and an archivist, and this reflects in his per­son­al life as well as his oth­er projects. As a col­lec­tor, Chang got his start ear­ly as a school­child, when he took the small stick­ers attached to fruit at the super­mar­ket and attached them to his binder. From then on he con­tin­ued to col­lect, work­ing his way up from hotel sta­tionery, post­cards, base­ball bats, and receipts (not for tax pur­pos­es, but mere­ly to keep) all the way to his career col­lect­ing objects as a con­cep­tu­al artist.

One of his oth­er notable projects is Cents, a 2017 project in which he col­lect­ed 10,000 pen­nies from the years of 1910–1982, end­ing just before the US mint stopped cast­ing them in cop­per (today’s pen­nies are main­ly cast in zinc), and pro­ceed­ed to pho­to­graph and cat­a­logue each one. After that was com­plet­ed, he encod­ed each image of a pen­ny as a satoshi, the indi­vid­ual ordi­nal for bit­coin, or in lay­man’s terms, the pen­nies of cryp­tocur­ren­cy, effec­tive­ly cre­at­ing trad­able NFTs out of them (remem­ber those?). The pen­nies them­selves he melt­ed down and forged a 68-pound cube with them which lat­er sold for $50,400 at an auc­tion last June. Not a bad return on invest­ment. The project is all the more poignant now, con­sid­er­ing the US gov­ern­men­t’s re-eval­u­a­tion of the worth of a pen­ny fol­low­ing the US Mint’s announced plans to phase out the pen­ny from pro­duc­tion next year.

Oth­er projects of Chang’s involve rear­rang­ing news­pa­per text in alpha­bet­i­cal order, col­lect­ing the mega­phones of Bei­jing street ven­dors with pre-record­ed announce­ments (and cacoph­o­nous­ly play­ing them all at once), and livestream­ing all of his attempts at becom­ing the num­ber one glob­al­ly ranked tetris play­er, report­ed­ly reach­ing the rank of num­ber two, only to be dis­put­ed by none oth­er than Apple co-founder Steve Woz­ni­ak, who claimed he nev­er­the­less reached a high­er score in the past.

As an archivist, Chang is a believ­er in main­tain­ing sys­tems and dis­tances him­self from any charge of being a hoard­er (he’s referred to his apart­ment as “metic­u­lous­ly clean”), argu­ing that the dif­fer­ence is in his approach to col­lect­ing. All of these attempts nev­er­the­less cir­cle back to Chang’s attempts to bring atten­tion to the mun­dane, to zoom in and try to doc­u­ment the details of every­day exis­tence that may not be read­i­ly appar­ent from a dis­tance.

Notably, Chang also came to the real­iza­tion that even our inter­ac­tions with these objects as observers can anchor us to spe­cif­ic moments in time, as he dis­cuss­es in one inter­view, refer­ring to his habit of col­lect­ing every sin­gle receipt for over a decade (as well as cre­at­ing a list to keep track of every flight he’s ever been on), he began to look at them as “diary entries” and sub­se­quent­ly noticed, as well, that the “White Albums are start­ing to have mem­o­ries asso­ci­at­ed with them too. I can remem­ber actu­al­ly, it’s strange but yes­ter­day, when I was set­ting them up, putting them in the record bins I was remind­ed of times and, on occa­sion, when I bought them.” In oth­er words, it’s quite pos­si­ble that you, the read­er, will one day remem­ber where you were when you read this arti­cle, or I, the writer, will remem­ber where I was when I wrote it, and it seems that this feel­ing of remem­brance is the essen­tial mis­sion behind Chang’s col­lec­tion.

A Living, Growing Artwork

Since its incep­tion, We Buy White Albums con­tin­ued to grow through the years. Chang has brought ver­sions of the project to Liverpool’s FACT gallery, Taipei’s MoCA, and beyond. In each instal­la­tion, he reshaped the space into a hybrid of retail envi­ron­ment, lis­ten­ing sta­tion, and liv­ing archive. Vis­i­tors were invit­ed to flip through the records or lis­ten to them on turnta­bles, or even sell Chang their own copies of the record to add to the col­lec­tion, turn­ing the exhib­it into a par­tic­i­pa­to­ry expe­ri­ence.

In the age of dig­i­tal music, where every­thing is avail­able and noth­ing is phys­i­cal­ly touched, Chang’s col­lec­tion reminds us that phys­i­cal media is haunt­ed by its own­ers, its con­di­tions, and its trav­els. He turns a sym­bol of mass pro­duc­tion into a study of imper­ma­nence, turn­ing a pop object into some­thing qui­et­ly ele­giac.

Final Thoughts

Ruther­ford Chang’s White Album project is more than an art instal­la­tion, more than a col­lec­tor’s eccen­tric­i­ty, and more than a Bea­t­les trib­ute. It’s a pro­found explo­ration of rep­e­ti­tion, mem­o­ry, mate­r­i­al decay, and human traces left on culture’s most durable arti­facts. As his archive grew, so too did its mean­ing: a thou­sand albums, all the same, all com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent.

What will hap­pen to the col­lec­tion now is whol­ly unknown at the time of this writ­ing, per­haps they will once again be sold off to col­lec­tors, or ide­al­ly the record store finds a per­ma­nent loca­tion where the albums can be lis­tened to in per­pe­tu­ity. Either way, the sto­ries of these objects will con­tin­ue, it’ll be up to us whether we choose to lis­ten to those sto­ries.