
Photo courtesy of Scilley.
A custom wooden turntable by Joel Scilley, called “Amoeba”.
In April, 2008, Rasputin Music record store in Mountain View, California hosted an appearance by the legendary heavy metal band Metallica as part of the inaugural Record Store Day—a coordinated attempt to breathe new life into the near-obsolete vinyl record industry. By all accounts it worked; that first Record Store Day is credited with launching a revival of interest that resulted in a 147% increase in sales of vinyl records that year. And sales have been going up ever since.
When the revival came, artist Joel Scilley was ready. He’d grown up revering the experience of playing records, rushing home from school each time he got hold of a new album to lay it on the turntable, then study the album cover graphics, lyrics, and liner notes while he listened. “That was like the best thing ever, right?” he said.

Courtesy of Joel Scilley
The Audiowood Black Barky
In 2008, Scilley was working as a custom carpenter and designer in the San Francisco Bay Area—a career that followed a decade spent studying English, art, design, and architecture at Hobart College, Parsons School of Design, and Carnegie Mellon University, and earning a Ph.D in Rhetoric and Communication at the University of Pittsburgh.
“The way I would describe the carpentry I was doing is ‘design-and-build’ work,” he said. “I was essentially doing whatever people wanted me to do. Sometimes that was restoring murals in their houses. Sometimes I was building kids’ playhouses. If I was building out an office space, I might end up building the desk that goes in the office, do the tile and walls and lighting. I was building out wine rooms for people.”

Courtesy of Joel Scilley
Artist Joel Scilley's replica of Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop Bar
When he wasn’t working, Scilley was still indulging in his love for music—“I was going to see, probably, two to three live shows every week,” he said. “That was part of my day-to-day experience.” He was exhibiting charcoal and graphite drawings, as well as some photography, in art galleries in San Francisco. And he was experimenting with woodworking projects at home.
One of those projects involved adapting a “really ugly” vintage turntable into something more aesthetic. “I took it apart, and fitted the parts into a piece of live-edge redwood,” he said. “I had these friends, artists, who would come to the place and say, ‘That’s the coolest thing I’ve ever seen.’” So he began making more, each one unique and carefully constructed to balance optimal functionality with beauty, using high quality, sustainably sourced materials.

Courtesy of Joel Scilley
Artist Joel Scilley's replica of Maple Leaf Bar
Inserting himself directly into the first wave of the vinyl renaissance, Scilley launched his company Audiowood later that year, and found himself instantly catapulted to boutique audiophile fame. The nature of hand-crafted wooden artistry spoke right to the very nature of the new generation’s captivation with vinyl—its appreciation of nostalgia and tactility. What’s more, at that time, most of the legacy audio brands had ceased or diminished turntable production in response to lack of demand. “There just weren’t that many places to get a new turntable any more, back then,” said Scilley.
Over the course of the next few years, Scilley and Audiowood were featured in dozens of major design publications across the world, including Apartment Therapy, Gizmodo, Thrillist, The New York Times, and others. His “Barky” design was especially popular—“embarrassingly simple” as he describes it, but gorgeously assembled from slices of ash wood sanded flat and individually designed to embody the wood’s natural shape and grain. The press the “Barky” drew attracted the attention of fashion and home goods retailer Anthropologie, who placed a large order from Scilley.

Courtesy of Joel Scilley
Artist Joel Scilley's replica of Tipitina's
Works of art that meld form and function, Scilley’s turntables have been exhibited in galleries across the country and are owned by celebrities that include Adrien Grenier, J.J. Abrams, and Elijah Wood. Scilley himself has garnered a trove of awards for his designs, including being named one of Apartment Therapy’s “8 Tech Designers to Watch” in 2008, receiving the “DANDI Award for Accidental Entrepreneurship” in Tallahassee in 2011, and being named one of New Orleans Magazine’s “People to Watch” in 2015. In 2013, a turntable he dubbed “The Bachelor” was featured as Captain Kirk’s record player in the film Star Trek: Into The Darkness.
That same year, Scilley followed his love for live music to New Orleans, and quickly tapped into the local creative scene, joining Where Y’Art Artist Collective and exhibiting at Ariodante Gallery and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art. He described his first showing at the juried Contemporary Crafts showcase at the Jazz and Heritage Festival as “a big step forward”. Today, he still operates his studio in New Orleans, where more than a decade on, custom turntables remain his signature product.

Courtesy of Joel Scilley
Artist Joel Scilley, of Audiowood
The surge of business Scilley experienced in the wake of that initial rebirth of vinyl has now quieted—though not because of a loss of interest in vinyl, of which production is currently almost doubling each year. “It’s that there is competition where there wasn’t before,” said Scilley. To meet the demand, there are now far more businesses manufacturing turntables, “and I’m no longer the only custom option out there,” he said.
This has allowed him time to explore his other creative interests and explorations—pushing his interests in combining organic design and technology in ways that go beyond the scope of function or even beauty. This hatched Scilley’s ongoing project, Hybrid Relics—which he began developing while an artist-in-residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in 2021. “I had this crazy idea, which is kind of a science fiction art project,” he said. “The idea is to create these sculptures that are sort of—it’s as though someone made a discovery of these mysterious sculptures and has no idea where they came from.” Hybrids of technology and natural forms, some of Scilley’s Relics include a “Dead Canary Finder,” which looks like a tree trunk with wires and electrons, spinning around with feathers attached to it. There is also a “Tree Washer,” a mechanism that has bristles and spins to hit a tree branch. “Like, why would we wash a tree?” asks Scilley, laughing. “It’s sort of got this comic element, but it's also sort of weird and spooky. What was this meant to do? Who did this?”

Courtesy of Joel Scilley
Joel Scilley's "Tree Washer"—part of his Hybrid Relics series of sculptures.
More recently, he’s been working on a series of hyper-detailed miniatures of New Orleans music venues. Created mostly using scrap wood, the architectural sculptures depict instantly recognizable spots such as Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop Bar, The Maple Leaf, or Snake and Jake’s Christmas Club. The kicker? They’re all designed for audio integration, turntables and stereo systems behind the backdoor or in the “basement”.
Just imagine, “Your favorite bar, it’s your stereo.”
See more of Scilley’s work at audiowood.com and keep an eye out for a future (secret, for now) project in early 2025.