“There are few sounds more satisfying and soothing to me than the crackle and pop of a vinyl record when you first drop the needle in the few seconds right before a song starts.”
“As a kid, I never really understood what an incredible format that records actually are—my curiosity began when I was snooping around my parents’ basement and stumbled across some dusty albums from my dad’s old collection. He didn’t have many records but a few of the ones I found made an impact on me. Some of them included ELO’s Out of the Blue, Cat Stevens’ Greatest Hits, and Crosby Stills & Nash’s Daylight Again.
It wasn’t until about a decade later while in high school that I began listening to records while visiting my hometown’s favorite record store, ear-X-tacy. My friends and I would always go and check out the newest releases before buying anything since we didn’t have the money to buy more than one record every now and again. Apple had just released iPods and a lot of the way that we consumed music was through burnt mix CDs and mp3 players like that, but my best friend had begun digging through crates and collecting random albums for the purposes of chopping up samples and making beats with his MPC2000XL. At the time, I was becoming absolutely obsessed with hip hop music and once he played J Dilla’s Donuts and The Shining for me, I became interested in the idea that one could manipulate the records’ sounds and turn them into entirely new forms of art.
At this point, I wasn’t exactly a full-blown crate digger yet, but we would always be searching random records for interesting segments in the songs–one particular record that blew my mind was The Land of Cockayne by Soft Machine. Around the same time some of my friends and I took a quick trip to Chicago and visited Reckless Records. I walked away that day with a copy of Illmind’s Behind the Curtain, an instrumental album that I wanted to use for sharpening my freestyle skills, and never looked back. This last Christmas season, my sister and brother-in-law gifted me a few of my favorites (Maggot Brain by Funkadelic, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by The Beatles, The Waterfall by My Morning Jacket, and Views by Drake).
Nowadays, some of my favorite record stores are Friends of Sound in Austin, TX and Grimey’s here in Nashville, where I found the soundtrack album for Spartacus by Alex North for just $1 on Record Store Day. My housemates and I have a pretty extensive collection at this point and one of my favorite rituals is to put on a random record while cooking meals, doing dishes, and cleaning the house–it not only helps the time pass but also makes the process more enjoyable because the music aids in transporting me to another time, place, and feeling.
I’m beyond happy to see that vinyl sales are on the rise again. And even though I could spend multiple hours every day thumbing through the racks at record stores all over the world, I can’t wait until I finally release one of my upcoming projects on vinyl. Maybe someday when I have kids of my own, they can stumble across my old album and hear that same crackle and pop that got me so hooked all those years ago.”
—Jung Youth
“Ambrosia,” the new EP from Jung Youth arrives in stores in October.
