Marshfield, WI | New record shop opens in Marshfield welcoming vinyl enthusiasts new and old: In 2020 vinyl outsold CDs for the first time since the 90′s proving to Anderson that a new record ship was something Marshfield needed. One Marshfield woman is on a mission to bring music to her community in a classic and familiar way. Wednesday Danielle Anderson opened the doors to the Good Day Sunshine Record Shop in downtown Marshfield, welcoming vinyl enthusiasts both new and old. In 2020 vinyl outsold CDs for the first time since the 90′s, proving to Anderson that a new record shop was something Marshfield needed. Anderson grew up around music at her grandfather’s instrument store. After re-evaluating her life during the pandemic, she decided to take the leap and invest in her dream of working with music every day. Through her journey, Anderson has been pleasantly surprised by the number of young people that have fallen in love with vinyl. “I’ve just been blown away by the amount that the younger kids have taken to it. The teenagers the twenty-year-olds. They’re all asking their grandparents for record players for Christmas, so it’s it seems like a really good fit,” Anderson said.
Hackensack, NJ | Hackensack’s Record King still selling vinyl like the past 40 years never happened: Vinyl is dead. That was the prevailing sentiment when Craig Stepneski bought Hackensack’s Record King in 1992. Back then, Sir Mix-a-Lot just released “Baby’s Got Back,” and West Coast rapper Tupac was only a few years from dissing East Coast’s Biggie Smalls. All over teenagers only listened to music one way — CDs — while vinyl records died upstairs in the attic. None of this stopped Stepneski from buying the Main Street store and selling whatever he could. “What I started doing was buying used CDs and used DVDs, said Stepneski. “Then baseball cards got hot and then comic books. I thought, if records don’t sell, I’ll sell anything else.” Entering the Record King now is like stepping back in time. Stepenski’s 56-year-old store is cluttered with more than a half-million 45 records (also known as “singles”) and another few thousand 12-inch albums. Crate diggers are rewarded with deep cuts of Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin.
Toronto, CA | Shopping for vinyl from Los Angeles to Tel Aviv: “I love flipping through vinyl — the sound it makes and the tactile feeling of it,” says Toronto native Mike Milosh, better known as the intoxicating voice behind R&B’s Rhye. Milosh — who just released a new album, Home, to critical acclaim — grew up loving now-bygone city stalwarts like Penguin Music and Vortex Records, where he spent hours wandering the aisles digging through piles of LPs searching for new music. Now, as a touring musician (pre-pandemic, of course), he skips the typical tourist attractions and looks for the coolest record shops he can find so he can get a feel for whatever city he’s in. “In São Paulo, Brazil, I found a Japanese tea spot that also had vinyl, and it was an amazing way to just enjoy hanging out,” he explains. “I found something similar in Seoul, South Korea. I couldn’t even read its sign, but it was so cool to have tea, read magazines, and look through their vinyl collection.” Here are some of his other favourite spots.
Record Store Recs: The Knocks Reveal The Grooviest Shops In Brooklyn And Online: The beloved New York electro duo The Knocks take us to their favorite vinyl stores in the Big Apple and on the World Wide Web. With the unprecedented global disruption of COVID-19, it’s important to support the music community however we can. With Record Store Recs, GRAMMY.com checks in with vinyl-loving artists to learn more about their favorite record stores and the gems they’ve found there so you can find some new favorite artists and shops. New York-based electro-pop duo The Knocks–consisting of Ben “B-Roc” Ruttner and James “JPatt” Patterson—have made a name for themselves with their upbeat bops and energetic live shows. Their last album, 2018’s New York Narcotic, is a kinetic tribute to the city they love and that loves them back. On Feb. 5, after a year without concerts, Ruttner released his vibey debut solo album, Holiday87(opens in a new tab) (which is also his solo project’s name). While New York may have finally caught up on sleep in 2020, the pulse of the city—its music—never really stopped. For the latest Record Store Recs, Patterson shares the act’s favorite vinyl hot spots and what’s on their vinyl wishlist.
San Marcos, TX | Pop-up shop celebrates life, legacy of San Marcos music legend: Records once dangled from the ceiling as music memorabilia lined the walls, while the smell of incense filled the room and melancholy tunes of blues drew customers in. Recognized as a true haven for music fans in San Marcos, Bobby Barnard’s Sundance Records and Tapes rocked the city’s soul. Since the record shop’s closing in 2012, the San Marcos music community has been without its staple music pit-stop. However, former Sundance frequents will have the chance to relive the shop’s legacy and pay homage to the late Barnard, former owner and manager of Sundance, with a new pop-up shop set to open in San Marcos. Named Sundance Records & Vintage Memorabilia, the shop will possess memorabilia Barnard collected throughout his life. The passing of Barnard in August 2020 struck a chord in the hearts of long-time Sundance staff and community members. When rumors of the shop’s reopening began circulating earlier this year, the public response shocked the store’s former employees.
Sydney, AU | Vinyl revolution: $400,000 later, Australia’s first new press in 30 years is here: Steve Lynch looks harried. TISM LPs have been flying out of his enormous mechanical baby – Australia’s first new vinyl pressing plant in three decades – but there’s a problem with a vacuum sensor. It is not sensing the vacuum. Lynch scurries about for 20 minutes, creases his forehead a few times, and… then the automated WarmTone press is back up and humming, spitting out two discs a minute for an increasingly vinyl-hungry world. The pressing plant, Program Records, has been running under the radar for a couple of months now in a brown-bricked, green-floored warehouse in Thornbury, intriguing the neighbours. It came about after Lynch and his business partner Dave Roper noticed that local acts, including buzz bands such as Boomgates, kept running out of vinyl that took months to replace from overseas. So they spent $400,000 of their savings on a crazy plan that just might work: reviving one of the oldest technologies in the recording industry, using the latest technology.
Impulse! Records Announces 60th Anniversary Release Campaign: Including Alice Coltrane rarities, a deluxe box set, a video series on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, and more. Famed jazz label Impulse! Records has announced a campaign of new releases to celebrate 60 years in business. The first round of titles includes a best-of box set and an Alice Coltrane album that was never widely released, with more to come. The label’s efforts also include an album-focused video series, with the first episode about John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme—watch that below. The label’s first anniversary installment is Impulse! Records: Music, Message & The Moment, a 4xLP box set covering its heyday of Quincy Jones, Alice and John Coltrane, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Albert Ayler, and more in the 1960s and ’70s. Turiya Sings, an album of devotional music by Alice Coltrane that had previously only been available for purchase at the her ashram, arrives next in the summer. A 1968 Thelonious Monk concert recording, released last year as Palo Alto, will also get a vinyl edition for Record Store Day in June.
The turntable that makes vinyl records levitate: Its name is Levi, it comes from Korea and is a wow-factor-based concept caused by magnets. Created by Jihyo Seo and Jimin Hwang, two Seoul designers, Levi is a turntable concept that will attract the attention of audiophiles and not only: this project features an original reproduction system that magically makes vinyl levitate. As revealed through its creators’ Behance profiles, unlike traditional record playing systems, the platter of this player is able to rise and rotate suspended in the air thanks to coils and an electromagnetic action. There are four different listening modes – Soothing, Refreshing, Sweet and Bittersweet – which can be operated via a lateral sliding switch that, by adjusting the height of the platter and then moving the record up or down, would change the sound output by acting as an equaliser; in addition, a dedicated button would allow the playback speed to be changed from 12 to 17 rpm.
