Michael’s work is restoration as archaeology-pulling performances off deteriorating tapes, damaged acetates, and obsolete formats, then deciding how much intervention is too much. He’s done this for recordings by Hank Williams, Aretha Franklin, Stax songwriters, and field recordings from Cambodia, Sudan, and Mississippi. His most recent Grammy came in 2024 for Written in Their Soul: The Stax Songwriter Demos.
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The deeper question his work raises is curatorial: where does restoration end and revisionism begin? What gets rescued, and what stays buried?
