Amoeba Records’ Pot Club Plan Gets A Second Spin: Global music brand Amoeba Records in Berkeley will get a replay of its bid to open a pot shop, thanks to a Berkeley City Council vote to add two more medical cannabis dispensaries last night. The Telegraph Ave. music store and institution seems strongly positioned to obtain one of those two new permits. Berkeley lawmakers added the new permits during a consent calendar vote Tuesday night. Berkeley has three dispensaries — Berkeley Patients Group, CBCB, and BPCC — and added one new permit in May. Faced with multiple, highly qualified applicants, the Council promised to potentially add two more permits, given high consumer demand and the relatively low amount of clubs per capita in the college town.
Meet the genius behind Todd Terje’s spectacular record sleeves: Norwegian illustrator Bendik Kaltenborn’s hand-drawn lettering and quirky characters have adorned sleeves and posters for the likes of Norwegian jazz trio Listen, British band Chicken Lips and composer Daniel Herskedal. Drawing on a life-long love of comic books, the artist creates a cast of characters that exist in a bright and angular world that’s miles away from the status quo of Marvel or DC Comics. However it’s Kaltenborn’s collaboration with Norwegian DJ and producer Todd Terje that helped springboard the illustrator into sleeve design, and has catalysed a creative partnership between the pair that’s produced one of the most recognisable visual identities in music today.
The 57 Most Influential Album Covers: A critic once conceded that writing about music is like dancing about architecture. They had a point. Painting or drawing about music, however, is another subject altogether. Album cover artwork is a case in point, often helping to encapsulate the emotional direction of an entire album. Sound and vision come together in our list of 57 of the greatest ever album covers, while restricting ourselves to just one cover per musical artist.
The Mad Scientists Of Vinyl Record Design, Gotta Groove Records produces technicolor LPs that look as beautiful as they sound: Making a vinyl record out of coffee grounds was an ambitious—and weird—request, but Gotta Groove Records entertained the idea. A client of the Cleveland-based record press wanted something that smelled like coffee and looked like grounds suspended in a clear substrate and it seemed feasible so they gave it a go. What they got was a greasy, brownish mess. “We were cleaning coffee out of our factory for two weeks after,” says Matt Earley, the company’s vice president of sales and marketing. Since opening in 2009, the Gotta Groove Records has earned a reputation for being the mad scientists of vinyl manufacturing for its technicolor records and willingness to push the envelope when it comes to fabrication.
Is Wayne Anderson’s vinyl collection a record-breaker? Wayne Anderson might just own New Zealand’s largest vinyl record collection. The South Auckland entertainer is known as “the singer of songs” and has amassed more than 11,000 music albums since the 1970s. They’re stored in alphabetical order in stands placed in almost every room of his Manurewa home. Manurewa singer Wayne Anderson has been collecting vinyl records since the 1970s. “There’s about 1000 artists in my collection and of those I collect 50,” Anderson says.
