Beloved San Francisco Record Store Aquarius Records to Close, The shop will reopen under new name and management: Today, owners Andee Connors and Allan Horrocks announced via their website that Aquarius would be closing on July 4 and re-opening as the second brick-and-mortor location for re-issue label Superior Viaduct under the Stranded name. The new management are named as “worthy successors,” and Connors and Horrocks note that while Aquarius is closing, there are plans in place to compile the “Big Book of aQ Reviews.”
New Record Store Cafe Baby’s on Fire Opens in Mt. Vernon, Local musicians launch dream project 15 years in the making: Though streaming services and digital downloads now make listening to music easier than ever, there is still something about dropping the needle on a vinyl record. Hampden locals David and Shirlé Koslowski agree and recently opened Baby’s on Fire—a new Mt. Vernon hangout where music lovers can savor light fare while flipping through bins of new, used, and collectible albums.
Culture Shock celebrates a decade in business: Along with the trials and tribulations of opening a new/very niche boutique and record shop in a destination-location of Rockford as two young inexperienced business owners, came additional concerns and hardships. In 2006 and 2007 the store flooded during the legendary Labor Day floods. Skyler Davis and Lauren Vanags both worked additional part time jobs just to keep the store’s lights on, and try to lightly stock the walls and racks.
Shady Rest Vintage & Vinyl joins Pilsen’s booming record-store strip: This past weekend Pilsen welcomed its third record store in a year: Shady Rest Vintage & Vinyl, at 1659 S. Throop. Owners Nuntida Sirisombatwattana and Peter Kepha, a longtime couple, officially opened the shop Saturday. They’re also longtime vinyl collectors, and knew the ins and outs of crate digging before they met. Prior to finding a permanent storefront, they’d sell their wares at record fairs—which increasingly exhausted them. “I would pretty much carry the entire store with us,” Kepha says.
The world’s best record shops #024: Public Possession, Munich: A hub for all of long-time friends Marvin and Valentino’s creative endeavours, Public Possession is more than just a record shop. With an aesthetic that would make most design studios look kitsch, the hyper-cool Munich outpost the nerve centre of a label that, with the likes of Bell Towers on board, is honing a post-punk, post-boogie sound that’s sent tremors through the European underground. The record shop itself is a thing of beauty, housing a highly curated selection in minimal surroundings, defined by a “Bavaria tropical” combination of pine and palm.
My Record Collection by The Charlatans’ Tim Burgess (hmv Vinyl Week special!) In My Record Collection, we dig down to the bottom of musicians’ souls to find out what the most treasured parts of their record collection are. This week being hmv vinyl week, we’ve got a special edition for you with Charlatans frontman Tim Burgess. The first vinyl I ever bought was…”Long Haired Lover from Liverpool’ by ‘Little’ Jimmy Osmond from Woolworths in Northwich. Not sure my copy got played much after 1975 though – it’s not one I’d take to a DJ set but that’s no disrespect to Jimmy.”
Meet the Twin Cities mega-collector who’s selling off his record collection: Five years ago, Kristin Gillespie could hardly walk around her own house. Her husband’s vast music collection kept getting in the way…For more than 30 years, James Gillespie filled his house with vinyl, CDs, cassette tapes, and instruments, the spoils of decades spent working in the music industry. At its peak, his collection included 20,000 pieces of vinyl, 5,000 CDs, 500 cassette tapes, and dozens of instruments — from guitars to banjos to drum sets.
