The world’s best record shops #074: Revelation Time, Osaka: One of several must-visit shops in Osaka (make a bee-line for Rare Groove too), Eiji Tanaguchi’s Revelation Time is something of a sanctuary. As his deeply recumbent chill-out vocal mix for VF last year shows, Revelation Time is a superb source of Japanese pop, cosmic groove and crisp boogie-funk, an area Eiji’s increasingly supplementing with choice cuts from Korea, Hong Kong and further afield in Asia. Opened thirteen years ago as an online business, Revelation Time went physical in 2009 and specialises in a broad sweep of leftfield dance music, whether riding high on disco, new wave, afro, house, drum ‘n’ bass and UK garage, or slowing things down with with reggae, Balearic and new age rarities.
Selling the 1960s on vinyl: Weird Harold’s on Jefferson Street has been selling music since 1972, and a good portion of that has been classic rock from the 1960s. “We would have bands come into the store and take pictures and sign autographs, but you don’t see a lot of that anymore,” said Weird Harold’s owner Danny Bessine. Ironically enough, Bessine, 69, didn’t listen to a lot of music during the 1960s. He was in high school at the time, and had a lot of other things on his mind. But music is unavoidable at any age, and he remembers the soundtrack to his teenage life. “I listened to The Beatles, and the Bee Gees were another big one I listened to,” he said.
Toronto Public Library gets in on the rebirth of records, For librarian Beau Levitt, choosing 100 records to add to the old collection was a ‘dream come true.’ Vinyl is having a major comeback, and the Toronto Public Library is getting in on the trend by adding 100 new records to their collection. The collection of more than 15,000 records is the largest of any public library in Canada. And librarian Beau Levitt had the honour of adding the new albums to the shelves at the Toronto Reference Library. “This was kind of a dream come true to be asked to do the selection. It was a lot of fun,” Levitt said in an interview during his morning break at the library.
Gillian Welch’s new vinyl reissues are in good hands – her own: Several years ago, Americana artist Gillian Welch and musical partner David Rawlings got hold of an early vinyl copy of Van Morrison’s 1968 album “Astral Weeks.” As soon as Welch dropped the needle, she was taken aback. “It was an astounding experience because this is a record I would have told you I knew intimately,” she says…That led the duo to pursue putting their music (made under each of their names) on vinyl for the first time. Frustrated by the inferior quality of many modern-day pressings, they spent $100,000 on a record lathe in 2013 so they could cut LPs and release them on their label, Acony Records. On Friday, the pair releases a vinyl edition of Welch’s 2011 album “The Harrow & The Harvest.”
Lead by Your Samples: DJ Shadow on Collecting Vinyl, Scratching, and His New Tour: I have a giant mountain of stuff I purchased in the past and never had time to listen to. All formats—hundreds of cassettes and CDs, thousands and thousands of records I bought from trips 15 years ago in Hong Kong, Korea, the United States. When it comes time for me to make music, I just kind of grab stacks at random. It’s something I’ve been doing my whole life; I’ve always bought more than I can process. I saw the writing on the wall early when records were becoming fetishized things. I spent a lot of time in the 1990s and early 2000s buying records to protect myself from the eventual scarcity, which is where we’re at now.
