Pure Vinyl—New record shop opens in Brixton: Specialising in soul, funk, r’n’b, and reggae, Pure Vinyl is London’s latest record shop. Open in Brixton’s Reliance Arcade, the shop will join the already established Supertone Records, Selectors Music Emporium and Music Temple as an additional haven for Brixton’s record collectors. The opening of the new store should help to fill the gap left following the closure of Blacker Dread last year. Pure Vinyl promises a wide variety alongside its specialist genres, with rock’n’roll, jazz and punk records also filling the racks.
“All Things Must Pass”, the Story of Tower Records, to Be Released on DVD: Established in 1960, Tower Records was once a retail powerhouse with 200 stores, in 30 countries, on five continents. From humble beginnings in a small-town drugstore, Tower Records eventually became the heart and soul of the music world, and a powerful force in the music industry. In 1999, Tower Records made an astounding $1 billion. In 2006, the company filed for bankruptcy. What went wrong? Everyone thinks they know what killed Tower Records: The Internet. But that’s not the story.
Rocktober Campaign to Feature Cool Vinyl Reissues from Foreigner, Alice Cooper, ZZ Top & More: A series of cool limited-edition vinyl reissues from Foreigner, Alice Cooper, ZZ Top, Deep Purple, Iron Butterfly, Faces, T. Rex and other artists will be released this October as part of a new campaign from the Rhino label dubbed Rocktober. The initiative will features various LPs, many on colored vinyl, released on each Tuesday of the month. The Rocktober campaign kicks off October 4 with the arrival of three discs, including a red-vinyl edition of Foreigner’s chart-topping 1981 album 4 and a clear-vinyl version of Deep Purple’s 1972 classic Machine Head.
How Engineers Got a Vinyl Record to Play in the Stratosphere: Getting a vinyl record to play in the stratosphere took some serious engineering. In order to get the record to accurately play a song in a near-vacuum, engineers working on the Icarus Craft first had to make sure that the record could actually play. While audiophiles may praise vinyl for its sound quality, Icarus designer Kevin Carrico knew that the extreme environmental conditions found at the edge space would not be kind to the record, The Guardian reports.
Nels Cline: His Upcoming Blue Note Debut and the Vinyl Trend: “I have about 2000 records, which is me really pairing down my collection. I have an insane number of CDs still. I don’t even know how many. I’ve never digitized them. One of the reasons I have them is this whole iTunes experience. I’m sure there’s some way around it, but everything becomes compressed and EQ’d in this way that’s not the same as the mastered version of the recording. Also, I’m the guy who likes liner notes and album art. I mean, who doesn’t? I guess a lot of people don’t now . . . but I do. I still buy CDs, which people think is insane, but that’s how a lot of crucial improvised music is being released still, and people in Europe and Japan still really like them. And I can travel with them to sell them, which I can’t do with vinyl, now that everything’s about vinyl again.”
