vinyl is dead, long live vinyl

i've been djing since 1992 and have amassed a record collection i'm happy with. i've got lots of classics, including my father's copy of trout mask replica. i have to admit that i am addicted to the aesthetic of vinyl. the artwork(just a little better than itunes' implementation of artwork), the size of the record, watching it turn around and around on technics 1200s - which, in addition to the bicycle count as my favorite inventions of all time - make the perfect package.

recently, i was poking around deephousepage.com and came across an old david morales wbls mix from 1990. it's phenomenal. really good house from that golden era of house, when house music was innovative and interesting. on listening to the mix, i found a track that i fell in love with. it sounds like an old ron trent jam - something on prescription records, with heavy usage of the genre defining minor chords played on organ. love it. i don't know what the track is.

there is a guy who i work with who is a dj veteran, who claims to have had a residency with walter gibbons at a place called the sanctuary in seattle. he's a good trainspotter, usually on target. i wanted to know what this track was and asked him to identify it for me. within about 20 seconds of hearing it he had an answer - chris cuevas, hip hop, masters at work dub mix. i immediately went to discogs.com and found a copy in england for 25 pounds sterling. it was the cheapest copy available, the other copies were going for about 40 pounds. there were no copies available domestically.

25 pounds, with the current exchange rate is $50, plus there was shipping, which made the total above $55. this is a lot of money for one song. i don't usually spend this kind of cash on records, but really wanted this track and would make an exception.

so after about a week of waiting, it arrived. i have all my deliveries sent to my job, for fear that some bad person will grab them from my residence as the front door is often broken. i work left a few minutes early and pedaled a bit harder than normal to get home as soon as possible. upon looking at the label i noticed that the track was listed as only being 3 1/2 minutes long. this was a odd as the song on the mix had to have been at least 5 minutes. i placed it on the turntable and put the needle on it. it was the wrong record. i listened to the other tracks to see if i could salvage something from this purchase, to no avail.

the vast majority of good and great american dance records from late 80s and early 90s ended up in europe. europeans were much more receptive to black music that wasn't littered with language of: black on black violence; violence against women; guns; hos and all that other bullshit that the majority of young & angry, middle-class american white kids were obsessed with. if it weren't for europe, to a degree house and certainly techno would be footnotes in the history of music, much like washington dc's "go go" or the little known and yet dazzling, post-disco genre "boogie." european collectors and djs bought the latest releases from cutting edge labels in detroit, chicago and new york in far greater numbers than their american counterparts. what this means is that the vast majority of these records are in europe. if you go to discogs or gemm or musicstack and look for some rare kenny larkin record, chances are you will only find available copies in the uk or germany. with the exchange rate, being what it is and shipping, at least from germany being ridiculously expensive, the simple act of buying records has become like traversing a minefield. making a few mistakes like this one can be fatal. in addition to the classics being in europe, new records, such as recent re-issues and/or re-edits of classics and new releases, like sleeparchive and marcel dettman are available from sites like hardwax, phonica, boomkat or hardtofindrecords, all in europe. with the demise of the dj record store, the act of purchasing most new records is restricted to the internet. there are a few american sites such as calsound(good for disco re-edits, but with terrible, awful service) and bentcrayon(good selection of techno, but no re-edits), but there are a lot of records that don't even end up here, in the states, which forces me to pay that exchange rate.

i would be lying if i said that i hadn't noticed more people are playing cds and/or using serato as an alternative to playing vinyl. i dislike cds as playing them is tedious and don't like serato as the sound quality of mp3s is lacking, but the appeal of installing soulseek on my laptop and being able to download, for free, hundreds of tracks that on vinyl would cost $50-$100 per item would allow me to make mistakes like the chris cuevas fiasco and not feel like a sucker.

UPDATE - the track was a masters at work remix of debbie gibson. bought it for $8 plus $8 for shipping on ebay.

link | rss | share | posted: 2007-05-06 19:44:55