And Round It Goes | Vinyl is round. Vinyl is full and vinyl is emotion. But the only word, for me, that describes the vinyl sound, that evokes its special puissance is roundedness. Digital is bright while—vinyl is voluptuous and round.
The first turntable I owned was relatively late in my life—at 18 years old. Growing up in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, I only had access to cassettes and 8 tracks of new artists. Most of the record stores stocked local divas like Anita Sarawak and Sharifah Aini (think Shirley Bassey crossed with Eartha Kitt) but rarely anything interesting from the US or the UK. Once in a while a Queen record would arrive on our shores but I couldnt find any of the music of that period that would come to mean the most to me—the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Buzzcocks.
In the mid 80s, I moved to the United States charged with the vigor of immigrant dreams. I went over to a friend’s house in suburban NY. He had exquisite taste in sound and his music system functioned like an altar in the middle of his living room—Alpine speakers, a Kenwood receiver and a surprisingly good Sony turntable with a retractable arm. He played Mike Oldfield’s Etude, a reworking of Francisco Trrega piece “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” for me and I’ve never forgotten the pure alchemy of the moment—the strangeness and beauty of the Indochinese instruments furling and retracting like waves. It’s moments like that that create a musician.
Clara May | Hyderabad
A few months later, I inherited that exquisite sound system and all those 10 and 12 inch discs when my friend ended up moving out of the country. I set it up in my bedroom that first evening. With an excitement bordering on mania, I reached into his record collection and drew out Edith Piaf’s, Milord. I dropped the needle on the record and the chanson wheeled on, part organ grinder and part torch song. I remember stepping outside the door and listening from the living room and feeling this thing called the dynamic range—the diminuendos that dropped to nothingness and the lunges of sound that made it sound like Edith was sitting on my bed.
There is nothing to compare with the anticipation that attends reaching into a 12-inch vinyl jacket and then turning it over to read the liner notes. The gorgeous geometry of a vinyl sleeve, its expansiveness, its indulgence of space is part of the affective memory that stays with anyone who loves music and grew up before pixels and bytes. As I went through that first collection and quickly acknowledged its limitations, I began to experience the serendipity that is so much a part of the vinyl culture. Like forgotten pieces of art, vinyl alights in unexpected places—thrift stores, estate sales, book shops, garage sales, even dusty branch libraries. It was circumnavigating this loop that I picked up Giuseppe Di Stefano singing La Boheme—a moldy 1956 boxed set that preserved a gorgeous bound book with a full libretto.
I also found Luciano Pavarotti’s magnificent 1972 performance of Turandot with Joan Sutherland. So now I knew the high watermark of the male voice. I also remember my first encounter with another male voice from 1972—The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. “Starman” was the song that did it—the modernism of Bowie’s voice contrasted so stunningly by the tactility of that acoustic guitar. I have to believe that the sound of those guitars in that fidelity was in my head when we sat down to write the first Clara May songs. Trying to get at that fullness, that commitment to analog honesty and real instruments played by real musicians.
There was a strange mlange of stuff that appeared on vinyl courtesy of my library card—New Order’s Power, Corruption & Lies, Orchestral Maneuveurs in the Dark’s Crush and the Boomtown Rats’ The Fine Art of Surfacing. When the library stacks couldn’t salve my thirst, it was the independent record stores that did it for me. Chicago’s great Evil Clown was a great place to find shoegazer music and figure out what Mud Honey meant. Today, Reckless Records carries the banner bravely. Music is exciting again and vinyl is still here.
The shards of music that have lodged in my mind over the years have most often come from records. Vinyl has always felt like the most encompassing and human way to listen to recorded music. I ascribe human qualities to vinyl that I don’t to other formats. It’s robust and bold and full and dark and yes, round.
—Tom Silva/Clara May
About the video: Clara May’s video for “The Chosen” was released on the 8th anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq.
“In ‘The Chosen,’ we wanted to create a song that honors the people who paid the real price for the war in Iraq—our veterans and the people of Iraq. The song and video are woven from real headlines from the US’s invasion and is intended to make sure that we do not forget about our veterans struggling with PTSD (18 veterans commit suicide every day according to the Army Times) and poverty; and the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees living in Syria, Jordan, and other parts of the region, as well as the millions of internally displaced persons within Iraq, over 500,000 of whom live as squatters in slum areas with no assistance or legal rights.
At a time when the media has moved on to other conflicts, we wanted to recognize that the Iraq war is still very much with us. We hope the lessons of that conflict are not lost on future generations.”
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