FEDERAL RECORDS
Ken Khouri built the industrial backbone Jamaican producers needed before many owned studios of their own. Federal joined recording, mastering and pressing under one roof and helped turn local music into an industry.
Ken Khouri began recording Jamaican music with a portable disc machine, moved into pressing records locally, and gradually built an operation that could handle the whole chain from recording to manufacture. Federal Records took shape on Marcus Garvey Drive, with a major studio-and-factory facility operating there by 1961. Before Studio One, Treasure Isle and many producer-owned rooms were fully established, Khouri’s facilities were used by producers including Coxsone Dodd and Duke Reid. Federal was therefore less about one house sound than about infrastructure: engineers, recording rooms, mastering and a pressing plant that Jamaican music could actually use. The complex later passed to the Marley family and became Tuff Gong International.