“I have some very, very vivid vinyl-based memories from my childhood. I remember being about six of seven I think, and I remember Sundays being so boring with nothing to do—pre-internet era. To alleviate the tedium I used to spend the afternoons in the posh front room where the guests usually came when they visited.”
“There was a collection of ancient Arthur Mee’s children’s encyclopedias, a glass cabinet with my costume dolls from around the world, a three-quarter sized piano that looked like a sideboard, and a big box of my mum’s records.
My mum was then a student and had pretty eclectic taste, and I remember kneeling down, spreading out a pile of singles flat on the floor, staring at the labels, and being obsessed with the pictures on there wondering what was the meaning of these magical symbols and can remember them really vividly. There was a yacht on an ocean for the RAK label, a palm tree for Island, a bright green apple for Apple, and most mysterious looking of all, a black semicircle enclosing a black dot for Polydor.
That image really intrigued me. I thought it looked Japanese as it reminded me of pictures I’d seen of a Geisha Girl with a big round black wig, and I imagined a Geisha Girl peeking over a fence so that only the top of her head could be seen.
A memory has really stuck in my head of staring at the Polydor logo while listening to a jazz record—Stephane Grapelli and the Hot Club de France—playing “Limehouse Blues” and the sound of the music getting mixed up in my brain with the image of the logo and me thinking that the music sounded Japanese too!
Another strong vinyl memory was of listening over and over to a record I had of ballet music—like many little girls I was obsessed with anything ballet and had an LP with themes from the famous ballets along with a book of the stories. On the track for Swan Lake, there was a tiny scratch on the violin solo, and I used to listen in anticipation of the scratched part coming up as that was my favourite bit. I used to go into another world, reading the stories while listening to the music, imagining the action playing out.
As a teenager growing up in the countryside, listening to records in my friend’s bedroom was the most exciting thing imaginable, staring at the images on the gatefold sleeves as if they were portals into another dimension… I really miss that whole experience now—listening to an album from start to finish while doing nothing else but reading the cover notes and looking at the artwork, being absorbed in a whole multi-media experience.”
—Fiona Soe Paing
Fiona Soe Paing’s album Alien Lullabies is in stores on September 12, 2016 via Colliderscope—and can be pre-ordered here.
