Monthly Archives: July 2008

The Yellow Stereo

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While The Yellow Stereo isn’t completely vinyl-centric, I really enjoy it and thought it would be fun to share. Anybody who has the patience and endurance to cover Pitchfork deserves their props, and besides all that, TYS is pretty sweet. The Yellow Stereo does give mentions to new bands releasing stuff on vinyl and that’s more than enough for me, especially when there is plenty of free music on offer to help you decide which indie bands to support this week with your MP3 purchases.

The thing I like most about this blog is that the About section reveals TYS to be a fellow traveler: “(The Yellow Stereo is) A place for friends to keep up with a lot of the music I was listening to. Usually it would fall upon deaf ears, but I figured someone out there liked the same music as me.”

This sums up the purpose to Turntabling.net quite well, and a lot more succinctly than my own About section! Please drop by The Yellow Stereo and have a look, it’s well worth the time. If I could remember how I stumbled across this one, I’d give props…

JapRockSampler: Julian Cope on Far East Psych Vinyl

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I picked this up yesterday in one of Chicago’s finest vinyl sources, Reckless Records. I’m already four chapters into this amazing tome and I must say, Copey is right on the money. I got addicted to his confessional acid-soaked memoirs Head On and Reposessed ; since then Cope has written a slew of books including the vital KrautRockSampler.

Julian Cope has a fascinating brain. He’s not content to look at the music–he examines the cultural forces which shaped Japan’s psychedelic music explosion–including the seeming contradictory anti-drug stance of some of these performers. Acid music without the acid? A stretch for the western mind, to be sure until you understand that Japan has a long-standing cultural association with meditative states and free-form musical expression. Take one part Shinto, one part Zen, and mix in an obsession with death and rebirth and you have a quite fertile breeding ground for the imagination.

Cope hits all this, plus Commodore Perry’s “opening of Japan” and more. I’m a huge fan of this book already and haven’t yet put it down except to write this. All the bands listed in this book are on vinyl, glorious vinyl and I am afraid that I’m about to be drawn into some kind of obsessive tunnel-vision quest for all these and more. Any musical omnivore will love this.

I foolishly paid $30 for this, only to find it JapRockSampler at Amazon for much cheaper. This will teach me to fall in love with hardcover books before doing my research. Still, I don’t begrudge Reckless Records–I never would have found this otherwise until getting clued in by some fellow traveler.

Call It…Pathetic

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I am ashamed to admit this. I was scouring the net this evening looking for online vinyl shops for a new feature I’d like to start on Turntabling.net…basically a regular spotlight on vendors selling albums online and in local shops where I find them in my travels. Here in Chicago, there are more stores than I can count, all selling albums of every description, and I know plenty of other shops across the country also in the business of catering to obsessives like me.

Hell–I even looked on Amazon.com to find vinyl–admittedly just for laughs–but turned up a 180 gram repressing of a couple of Velvet Underground records and some new pressings of Beatles albums. Not that I’d buy THAT stuff–the Velvets sound just as low-fi as ever on CD and while I’d love to hear em on wax, I would be more intrigued by an original pressing.

Tonight I found an online record store claiming a massive collection of albums…but they failed to pass my acid test. It’s not elaborate, it’s NOT that snotty “Oh, you don’t have the infamous Beatles “butcher cover” Yesterday and Today in stock? How sad for you” attitude. Quite the opposite really…but I just couldn’t take them seriously–any record store that stocks more Ted Nugent than Gary Numan just doesn’t have the right obsessions for me.

I realize this sort of thing is pathetic and sad. Why should I care that this shop had KISS in abundance, but no KLF? Still, I felt the contempt of the hopeless album addict rising within me. And me, a GROWN ADULT! Allegedly. This shop has more Elvis than you can shake a pill bottle at, but no Hawkwind. When you stock so many Monkees records that it takes an effort to scroll through them all but don’t carry the Mystic Moods Orchestra, I just can’t carry on. I am filled with shame to display all the worst qualities of the uber-album fanboy.

I didn’t think I was THAT far gone, til I ran across this site (which I won’t name)…but now I know that I am doomed to live in the land of the vinyl nerd-boys forever even if I don’t consider myself one of them. I buy records to PLAY them, so at least I’m not fussing over collector’s items or nicks and dings on the cover art and all…