“Although there was a small collection of vinyl in my house growing up, it never really played a part in my musical education. It was more of a novelty to occasionally rifle through, and even more occasionally actually listen to. There were some pearls in there, don’t get me wrong, but the good ones would be taped onto cassette and the records left alone.”
“It was later on that I discovered the delights of buying vinyl. I started off buying 7” singles from the HMV in Liverpool, and was drawn to them by the gimmicks of coloured discs, limited editions, and picture discs.
I found a self-loading turntable complete with speakers at a jumble sale for 50p, and my collection started to grow. Mainly mid-nineties indie and Britpop (I still have most of them; the bright orange 7” of Sixty Foot Dolls’ “Talk to Me,” the ice white 7” of “Milk” by Garbage with the fold out sleeve etc.) From here I started to venture into second-hand record shops and charity shops, and digging through crates, and this is where the love of it really started.
There really is no better feeling than venturing into a small provincial charity shop, searching through the couple of boxes of records shoved into a corner, and emerging with something special that you have never seen or heard before.
I think what makes it special for me is the idea of finding things that I didn’t expect and never knew I was looking for. Nine times out of ten it does end up with dejectedly buying yet another James Last album to add to the pile at home, but that one trip when you end up with a strange Daphne Oram 7” of electronic sound patterns from 1962, or even those weird records of the sounds of trains makes the journey worthwhile.
This is something that I have found no digital replacement for, and something that I will continue doing forever.”
—Matt Wilkie
Glyphs’ “Out To Sea” EP is set for release on 20th October 2014 via Small Sounds.
