Flossmoor, IL | Vintage vinyl and furniture store comes to downtown Flossmoor: Record and furniture store The Conservatory Vintage and Vinyl is having its grand opening Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. in downtown Flossmoor. The Conservatory, located at 1042 Sterling Avenue, is the area’s only store that sells vintage furniture and records. In addition to vintage vinyl, the store includes mid-century modern furnishings. Chogie Fields, co-founder and owner of the store with her husband, Anthony, says if she had to be a piece of furniture, she would be a light. “Light guides people, it helps to illuminate things that you can’t see. Light helps you feel comfortable, it gives you peace, gives you joy,” Chogie said. The Conservatory Vintage and Vinyl deals in two trades: vintage furniture, and vinyl records — but maintains the streamlined, curated feel of an art gallery. For this, the owners credit Collete, a shop in Paris, where the couple’s dream to open up their own place was born, 17 years ago.
Devon, UK | For the record – vinyl is back, according to a new documentary: Stars from Radiohead and Pink Floyd feature in The Vinyl Revival, a documentary about the resurgence of the record. Devon filmmaker Pip Piper made The Vinyl Revival as a follow-up to the acclaimed Last Shop Standing, based on the book by Graham Jones. Having been launched in April to tie in with Record Store Day, the film will be screened at the Exeter Picturehouse on July 26, followed by a Q&A with the director. Mr Piper, who moved to Exmouth in September, said Last Shop Standing was about the danger that with the growth in online music streaming, independent record stores could be a thing of the past. “I mean at that point there were 269. There had been 2,200 in the 1980s,” said 55-year-old. “So here was something about which I was just fascinated as a film director, in the sense of losing things from our culture and how important some of these things were.
Storing your vinyl records: You’re a vinyl junkie, always have been. You were there from the beginning, you probably gathered cassettes and CDs too along the way, maybe even some minidisks around 1997, but you were always loyal to the record. Your collection is epic, rare, it spans whole walls. Chances are then, you know it’s important to store your precious library carefully and intelligently, so here are our cardinal rules for getting vinyl storage right… Paper inners become much like a fine grain piece of sandpaper, adding surface noise over the years every time you take your record in and out of the paper inner. Instead, opt for either a delicate plastic liner within a paper inner or as a round-bottomed plastic-only variant. Then, pairing this with an outer sleeve that goes over the cardboard sleeve will go a long way to shielding your record from dust entirely. Choose a light and smooth material – heavy plastic sleeves will weigh onto your vinyl, stick to your artwork, and peel it off over time. With this in mind, you also need a sleeve with plenty of room!
Black Sabbath Prep ‘Vinyl Collection’ With Bonus Rarities: Ozzy-era, vinyl-only collection will include album of mono mixes of their singles, including two that never came out. Black Sabbath wrote the book on heavy, and their first decade’s worth of albums represent the Old Testament in the book of metal. From the clanging opening chords of “Black Sabbath” and lumbering siren’s call of “War Pigs” to the demon’s cry of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” and proto-thrash riffs of “Symptom of the Universe,” the Iron Man laid the blueprint for the genre on their first eight albums. Those LPs will now make up a new vinyl-only box set, The Vinyl Collection 1970 – 1978, which is due out September 6th. And because die-hard Sabbaholics likely already own the band’s canon, the group is including a reproduction of “Evil Woman” seven-inch (backed with “Wicked World”) and a new 12-inch compilation of their mono singles, dubbed Monomania (a pun off their Sabotage deep cut “Megalomania”), which includes two previously unreleased mixes. The set will be available only as a numbered collector’s edition, limited to 3,000 copies.
Freddie Mercury new music CD and vinyl release date: Exciting news for Queen fans: It is still difficult to accept there will be no new recordings from Freddie Mercury. However, there is still the Holy Grail for Queen fans – lost or archived material. Some have never been released to the public. There was huge excitement recently when a stunning new version of a lesser-known track was unveiled, stripped back to just Freddie’s spine-tingling vocal and a piano. The track is not a Queen song but a cut from the 1986 rock musical, Time. Written by Freddie’s friend, Dave Clark, the Queen frontman covered two numbers for an all-star concept album, including Time Waits For No One. Clark has uncovered the original recordings. It has taken two years to painstakingly remaster them without all the subsequent synthesiser and instrumental tracks. Fan excitement was inevitable and the new video of the recording has already racked up almost 12 million views.
