Aylesbury, UK | Record fair at Aylesbury’s The Hop Pole a great success: A record fair proved popular with music fans at The Hop Pole pub on Saturday. Stallholders were happy to see plenty of visitors to the pub, to the first event of its kind, which was organised by Mark Bradley. The event was a treat for music fans, with a range of vinyl, CDs, books and t-shirts on offer. There was also a chance to listen to some music in a number of DJ sets on the day, from guest DJs including music journalist Kris Needs, and Mark Gerrard. Following the success of this first event, organisers have announced that a second fair will be held at the pub on December 7.
Brooklyn, NY | Safe to Say This Is Williamsburg’s Only Record Shop/Cafe With a Bathtub? Most coffee shops don’t have a usable bed in them, or allow entire motor vehicles inside, but it’s safe to say Etiquette isn’t your ordinary coffee shop. Vincent Marino, part of Four Happy Men Hospitality and one of Etiquette’s owners, is hesitant to even call the south Williamsburg space a coffee shop. Though the room was filled with laptops on the afternoon we met, he also doesn’t call it a coworking space. In the back, there are drawers of vinyl courtesy of Halcyon, a long-running shop formerly at the nightclub Output, but Etiquette isn’t mainly a record store, either. The best way Vincent can describe the curious, multifaceted space is a “place where people hang out.” Etiquette, which opened in late July on Broadway near the East River, is from the same team as nearby bar Loosie Rouge. As per Vincent, Etiquette should feel like “an extension of your living room,” and the space looks the part.
Sydney, AU | Discogs Presents: EMC Record Fair at EMC 2019! Discogs to Host Free Record Fair at Electronic Music Conference in Sydney Australia. October 30, 2019: Discogs, the leading online physical music exchange, announced today its first-ever physical event in association with the Electronic Music Conference in Sydney, supported by Pioneer DJ. Discogs Presents: EMC Record Fair will take place on Saturday, November 16th from 10 am – 6 pm at The Factory Theatre Courtyard and entry is free to all. Discogs Presents: EMC Record Fair will feature a selection of DJs such as Aroha, Daniel Lupica, Merph, Sampology, Simon Caldwell, Toni Yotzi who will be exclusively spinning records purchased from vendors at the fair making for one-of-a-kind sets followed by a brief Q&A. Discogs celebrates all vinyl-junkies, music fans an avid collectors and welcomes them to the EMC Record Fair. Numerous stalls will be filled with great amounts of records covering all genres of dance music. Be a part of the community, meet specialists, other collectors and find the gems you never knew you needed!
UAE | Check out The Flip Side, UAE’s only independent record store: Tucked away inside the bustling lanes of Dubai’s art district Alserkal Avenue, record shop The Flip Side is its owner Shadi Megallaa’s way of paying homage to the glorious medium of record music. The 40-year-old professional DJ’s love for vinyl dates back to his time working at a record shop in New York. Noticing the lack of any record stores in the UAE, he decided to fill the void by establishing his own in the year 2017. “I loved it and other than that I wanted to buy records as a customer and it didn’t exist here,” explains the music aficionado. Although a commercial enterprise, Shadi, who is of Egyptian origin, refuses to view it solely as a business set up. “The way I see it is that we deal with music. I am a DJ and musician. My colleague Jedd is part of a band. We are not just business people, this is what we do, it’s our life. This is just an extension of our lives basically.”
Bridport, UK | Vinyl fans will not want to miss this event: Vinyl lovers will want to take note of this event coming up. The quarterly Vinyl Saturday returns on November 16, from 10am to 4pm. The record and CD fair will be held in Bridport’s United Church, with other shops and market stalls selling a range of quality vinyls. For more information, search for Vinyl Saturday Bridport on Facebook.
‘Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood’ 4K Blu-ray Details Announced – Including Awesome Limited Edition: Sony has just revealed details of the 4K Blu-ray release of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood. And it’s fair to say fans have plenty of reasons to be excited about it. For starters, when the film arrives on 4K Blu-ray on December 10 (two weeks after it arrives on streaming platforms) it will be available in two versions: a standard release and a seriously cool limited edition. This Limited Edition version (which is available to pre-order today from Amazon, Walmart, BestBuy and Target) will ship with premium collectible packaging containing: a 7-inch vinyl record containing two of the soundtrack’s songs; a turntable adapter; a collectible vintage poster for the Rick Dalton film Operazione Dyn-o-mite!, and an exclusive new MAD Magazine parody of the Rick Dalton TV series Bounty Law. Both 4K Blu-ray editions will feature more than 20 minutes of additional scenes that didn’t make the film’s original 161-minute cut. These will likely include the 10 minutes or so that found its way into the extended cut Sony released theatrically a few days ago.
Toronto, CA | How streaming killed underground micro-labels: The vital role once held by small record labels has all but vanished, writes Arachnidiscs Recordings founder Jakob Rehlinger. It’s Nanaimo, BC, in the late 90s. Looking impossibly cool behind the pulpit of the Blackball Records cash register, Andrew hands me a cassette. The J-card is just a cheap black-and-white photocopy, like an 80s hardcore punk demo. He declares it comes from “the real underground” and bestows upon it (with his clear disdain for everything that’s not on this cassette) an impossible aloof and authoritative coolness. Listening to the music on the store’s overhead, I am confused. To my uninitiated ears, it’s clearly music for and by weirdos – shambolic in the extreme, just pointless noise. Why would someone make this? And why would someone else release it? And why on a dead format like cassette, of all things? But someone did, and that is how I heard the Tower Recordings, a band whose music I never would have encountered if not for the micro-label that put it into Andrew’s hands and then temporarily into mine (I didn’t want it and Andrew wouldn’t have sold it to me anyway). Without that tape I never would’ve found myself deeply submerged in the improv-psych scene 10 years later, proudly putting out music for and by weirdos on my own label.
