Category Vinyl Hunter Gatherer Tales
STRANGE THINGS
This week I noticed that Vinyl Connection was about to turn four. There have been a few stutters, but we are still spitting out regular posts on everything from 60s folk to twenty-first century electronica, from funked up Miles Davis to European Prog. Along with periodic celebrations of album cover art, of course. Vinyl Connection has […]
2016 REPORT FROM THE FIELD — PART 1
Top Five Secondhand Record Purchases It is revealing that there was more than enough material in the acquisitions book to produce a Top 50 list of secondhand records entering the Vinyl Connection domain during the past twelve months. We are talking fifty highlights, by-the-by, not gap-fillers, pass-markers and also-rans. So much good music and such […]
7 STEAMIN’ ALBUM COVERS
When the boy was little we took an afternoon drive around the ring road to Altona, home of Victoria’s Railway museum. To me it seemed, on that Autumn afternoon, a windswept mausoleum, but the youngster enjoyed clambering up, through, and around the old steam engines. Despite their size (big to enormous), it seemed to make sense […]
KEEP OR CRATE?
Record collectors know how there slowly accumulates, around the gems and the sparkling finds, a considerable meterage of albums having an unsteady foothold on the beachhead of the collection. Those LPs plucked from the bargain bin where they rightly languished; that gap-filling reunion album that should have stayed where it was; the so-called ‘supergroup’ that […]
THE ROAD TO RESTRAINT
I remember seeing a striking cover on shelves in the mid-70s… a slender wrist rises up, clasping a silver ingot like a futuristic advertising photograph. The skin tones are dull, muted, as the shot is taken against a bright white light, a small bright rising star behind the argent rectangle. Behind, surrounding all, a deep […]
RSD 16: COMMUNITY AND COMPETITION (QUIZ #3)
Chatting to several Record Store owners in the lead up to this year’s ‘International Record Store Day’ there was a sense the hype has well-and-truly overpowered the original idea. The releases were patchy, the prices exorbitant (and margins reduced); there was a sense of store owners being blackmailed via RSD propaganda into ordering LPs of […]
IS YOUR DEODORANT STRONG ENOUGH?
Just recently, while introducing an album with significant input from Steve Winwood, (Stomu Yamashta’s GO), I wrote about Terry Hounsome’s Rock Record 7. To illustrate both the intricacies of the book and the impressive count of Winwood appearances, I cited an example of an album not worth pursuing. With self-assurance and confidence, it was noted that […]
HILLAGE RIFFAGE
In some ways, packing for a year in a different hemisphere is easier than preparing a suitcase for two weeks at the beach. I pondered this conundrum back in 1996 as I prepared for an extended relationship cultural exchange in Germany. Often the answer to the question “How many? How much?” was answered with the […]
SPIRITS AND GREMLINS
Last summer holidays I made a two hundred and fifty kilometre round trip to visit a Sunday Market. A mate was holidaying nearby –or rather, we were staying near the newly acquired beach house of he and his partner– and I discovered that Geoff (unlike Vinyl Connection readers) had not been to the Kongwak Market. So off we […]
A KIND OF 2015 LIST
Biggest crush What does it mean when you go, in a mere few months, from never having heard of an artist to buying four albums new? Probably that you have too much time on your hands and money in your pocket. Nevertheless, I became very taken with the lively retro-electronica of Zombi. They combine elements […]
vinylconnection.com.au 