UK | HMV faces the music in Christmas crunch test: Since Doug Putman rescued UK music retailer HMV in February, he has thrown himself wholeheartedly into running a transatlantic retail empire. The Canadian businessman has found himself jetting back and forth between his Ontario-based Sunrise Records chain and his newer acquisition. On average, he spends one week a month in the UK. “I must do about 500,000 air miles a year,” he says. Now he faces his latest challenge, the all-important Christmas period. “That’s crunch time,” he says. “All the hard work you do for 10 months of the year, that period is when you see it come to fruition and you see how good a job you did.” A lot is riding on the chain’s performance over the festive season. HMV has twice fallen into administration, in 2013 and 2018, and Mr Putman acknowledges that many people didn’t expect his relaunch to last six months.
Washington, DC | Dropping the Needle: The Resurgence of Vinyl. An Odyssey Through DC Record Shops. …The way a record is made is one of those ordinary miracles that one is simply accustomed to. Mixed sound is played into a record cutting lathe where the sound waves move a needle head, cutting grooves into a thin lacquer disc. The depth of the grooves represents the shape of the sound-wave. Then the lacquer copy is used to make a stamper, a perfect negative image of the record made of metal with ridges instead of grooves. The stamper is loaded into a hydraulic press, pushed into soft vinyl, and that becomes the record. From there the record’s needle rests on the ridges and the needle’s movement shakes a magnet inside a coil of wire which induces a fluctuating electric current. The current travels to a speaker, which converts electrical signals into kinetic movement, in turn creating the music.
Saskatoon, CA | The Vinyl Diner changes hands, but keeps its spirit: “There just has to always be a record store on Broadway,” McKay said with a laugh. “How could there not be?” Past the poster-plastered stairwell there’s a record spinning in the corner; people sifting through row upon row of wax; a couple chatting with the owner. But the Vinyl Diner has always felt like a sanctuary for audiophiles, a place where the only noise is the stuff you want to hear. Stewart “Stu” Cousins has run this shop for 24 years, after his wife convinced him to quit a Toronto advertising gig to open a record shop in Saskatoon close to her family. “We came here in winter because my wife didn’t want to pull the wool over my eyes,” Cousins said with a laugh. “It was freezing. December, -15. I got the real Saskatoon.” Since 1996, Cousins has built the Vinyl Diner into a Saskatoon institution — and now, he’s ready to pass the torch to good hands.
Des Moines, IA | The Return of Vinyl: …Steve “Ratt” Ratcliff, owner of “Ratt’s Underground Rock Shop,” located in Merle Hay Mall, has owned his store for 10 years. Ratcliff is not only here for the comeback, but he lived through the era of punk rock, which he claims has the fans who kept vinyl alive all these years. He’s been listening to records since he was a young boy, so he never knew a life without them. Ratcliff’s store consists of vintage goods, with the exception of a few newer patches and local band CDs. He has vintage clothing, CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks, posters, autographs, buttons, and most importantly a huge selection of vintage vinyl records. Not having newly-pressed records is important to Ratcliff because original pressings “have the best sound, an authentic sound. New vinyl doesn’t have that original sound.” Because remastered versions of old records and modern records are pressed using digital audio, the sound isn’t quite the same as the original pressings.
Barrow in Furness, UK | Family business in Barrow wins ‘Record Shop of the Year’: A record shop in Barrow-in-Furness has been named the UK’s ‘Record Shop of the Year 2019’ just 12 months after opening. TNT Records were awarded the prize by Long Live Vinyl magazine after customers voted for the shop in an online competition. Owner and founder Dave Turner said the win came as a huge surprise to him. “It’s been a crazy first year for us, but being recognised as the best record shop in the whole of the UK is something that I could never have expected. “It’s obviously thanks to our amazing customers that we won the public vote, and they are the whole reason we have been successful this year. “When we opened we wanted to just give the people of Furness a decent record shop because there is nothing like this within about two hours of here – and the people have shown us 
Birmingham, AL | Charlemagne Record Exchange, a fixture of Birmingham’s Southside, closing after 42 years: Marian McKay Rosato, owner of Charlemagne’s Record Exchange, remembers a very different Five Points South than the one that exists today. In the late 1970s, parts of the neighborhood were somewhat rundown and unsafe, Rosato said. But all the business owners knew one another, from the long-gone Little Bombers Lounge to Rosato’s Charlemagne Record Exchange, which has occupied the same spot on 11th Avenue South since 1977. Today, the area is very different. Many corporate-run chain hotels, restaurants and shops occupy the spots once held by local businesses. With those changes came rising rent costs, something that damaged the longtime record store, especially over the last two years. Rosato said that in the last two-year lease she signed, rent on the building increased another $250 per month in the first year and, by this year, had risen to an additional $400 per month. “The rent was 
NEW RELEASE PICKS: Shasta Cults, S/T (Important) Canada’s Richard Smith is an electronics technician who for two decades was the go-to repair person for Buchla & Associates, a job that put him in contact with a variety of musicians and institutions. Smith’s work as Shasta Cults, with this LP preceded by the CD Configurations (recorded in 2017 and issued in September), has its roots in demo recordings of rare equipment he’s worked on over the years, with both of his releases thus far derived entirely from one instrument each; for Configurations, it was the Buchla 700, and for this follow-up (recorded in 2018) it’s the Buchla Touché. Records featuring the Buchla are often spacy and swirly, but this outing is more drone-oriented and impressively layered, though Smith’s work is still quite transportive. A
The Gonks, Five Things You Didn’t Know About the Gonks (Rocks In Your Head) This is a fine batch of fringy-pop from a San Fran-based combo, first heard by moi on this label’s nifty recent Hot Sick Vile and Fun comp (their tune titled the collection). They cover a range of appealing territory, like the black turtleneck art-angst of “I Hired a Hitman” (like a song from the soundtrack to a Beth B. flick), the gal-voxed melodicism (briefly intruded upon by maleness and roaring engines) of “I’m a Lonely Night Driver,” the vaguely Television Personalities-like “My Glamourous Mother,” the decidedly warped jangle and thump of “I’m a Leaker,” and the sax honk meets indie pop strumming of “I’m Dead.” That’s five tracks. There are five more, including a closing theme song of sorts. Altogether, a 16-minute stunner. A
REISSUE/ARCHIVAL PICK: Cecil Taylor, Indent (ORG Music) This label’s Black Friday Record Store Day releases didn’t reach me until right at the cusp of finalizing last week’s column. As RSD selections often linger in the bins for a while, I would be remiss not to mention a few in our final New in Stores of 2019. Along with Silent Tongues and The Great Paris Concert (aka Student Studies), this is ORG’s third installment (all from this year) in what’s hopefully an extended reissue program devoted to this incomparable pianist and cornerstone of the jazz avant-garde. Indent was the first solo Taylor record to hit stores back in 1973 (but not the oldest chronologically; that would be Praxis, a ’68 recording released in ’82), first on his own Unit Core label and then with wider distribution through the Freedom imprint.
Glasgow, SCT | Popular record store and coffee shop closes in Dumbarton East: A popular record store and coffee shop has closed in Dumbarton East. Big Sparra Music Cafe shut its doors for the final time last month after hosting a farewell party for customers. However, it won’t be empty for long because a new coffee shop and bakery will be opening in its place. The Glasgow Road shop opened in February last year after Dumbarton music lover Robert McKain revealed plans to bring his love for vinyl to his own home town. Robert and Don Cunningham are opening a new chapter with plans to focus on their coffee roasting business. Robert and Don created Pure Roasters while running the Dumbarton cafe in their bid to learn about making good coffee. Announcing the news they said: “It’s come time for team Sparra to sell up and move on with 
Technics reintroduces classic turntable: Great news for audiophiles, vinyl lovers, disc jockeys and those with extensive collections of long-playing records: Technics turntables are back and better than ever before. You can add an iconic SL-1200 to your stable or go for the reimagined SL-1500 which combines Technics’ turntable technology with a dose of digital flair, making your stereo system capable of delivering vinyl through to the modern convenience of streaming music, wireless speakers or your favourite headphones. There’s something about the added ambience delivered through the gentle hiss of the stylus traversing vinyl grooves which takes you straight back to golden days gone by. And it doesn’t get more nostalgic than this; the ‘Wheels of Steel’, as Technics’ iconic SL-1200 turntable is fondly known, has quite a history – first introduced in 1972, little has changed in its design and 
