Edinburgh, UK | International band Bastille performed for and met Edinburgh residents in Assai show: The English rock-pop band that feature four members, Dan Smith, Kyle Simmons, Will Farquarson and Chris “Woody” Wood, performed at Queen’s Hall Edinburgh as part of an Assai Records show. An international rock-pop band were spotted meeting fans outside their gig in Edinburgh on Saturday evening, as Edinburgh record store Assai Records welcomed the band for an intimate show. The pop superstars, whose hits include ‘Pompeii’, ‘Quarter Past Midnight’, and ‘Icarus’, returned to Scotland to perform an intimate Edinburgh Queen’s Hall gig as part of their album release. The gig was organised by Edinburgh record store Assai Records, who also have a store in Dundee. The record store were ecstatic to land such a high-profile star for an intimate concert, and spoke to Edinburgh Live this afternoon. Speaking to Edinburgh Live, Keith, the owner of Assai Records, said: “It was surreal to host Bastille in such an intimate setting for a incredible stripped back performance at the Queens Hall the weekend the album was released.
Toronto, CA | Dropping the needle on Kops, the city’s oldest indie record store: “If we give (a record) away for free, our hope is that someone else discovers it, it’s found a home, and it lives on.” Some may think of them as platters du jour. But if you believe the resurgence of vinyl is just a passing fancy, let the numbers speak for themselves. More than a million new vinyl records were sold in Canada in 2021, according to sales tracking company MRC Data, a 21.7 per cent increase over 2020. In the U.S., vinyl sales more than doubled in the same period, with 42 million units sold last year. “Every year people say it’s a fad, and every year sales go up,” says Andrew Koppell, of Kops Records. Since 1976, Kops, Toronto’s oldest independent record retailer, has been buying and selling new and vintage vinyl to generations of music fans. It was Andrew’s father Martin’s love of 45s, and the sizeable collection he amassed as a young man in the north of England, that first enticed him into dealing records as a side hustle in the mid-1960s. He recognized that fellow music lovers shared the idea that some of these items held a greater worth.
London, UK | The art of album covers celebrated in new exhibition: Featuring work by Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mapplethorpe, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, Nan Goldin, Irving Penn and beyond. A new exhibition at London’s The Photographers’ Gallery celebrating album cover artwork, titled For the Record: Photography & the Art of the Album Cover, is opening this March. Bringing together over 200 album covers, the exhibition aims to shine a light on the role art plays in defining artists and band’s visual and musical aesthetics. For the Record features work by artists and photographers including: Annie Leibovitz, Robert Mappelthorpe, Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, David LaChapelle, Ed Ruscha, Nan Goldin, and Juergen Teller. The exhibition is curated by and presented in collaboration with Antoine de Beaupré, with his collection of over 15,000 records forming the basis of the exhibit. For the Record will run from the 25th March — 12th June 2022.
Bloomington, IN | Old Sounds and New Beginnings (3rd Annual Music Expo was Saturday): I set up my long-neglected turntable at the start of Covid, hoping it would help me maintain my sanity and reconnect with the music of my youth. After years of letting that connection flag, it was the perfect escape from a world often hard to endure. I had never stopped listening to music but it was mostly single tracks on Youtube, which lacked depth of sound and the context of a whole album. I rarely got beyond a few dozen favorites and had forgotten the flow and rhythm of a well-crafted album side, where the placement of the songs was done with a purpose, with the goal of creating a cohesive and encompassing listening experience. Soon I was rediscovering forgotten albums and deep tracks. Hero and Heroine by The Strawbs is a perfect example of an album I loved and played more times than I can count, during some of the most troubling times of my life, but had mostly forgotten. Hearing it again not only brought back memories good and bad but also allowed me to reconsider my past, my choices, and how I got from an often misguided youth to where I am today at 56 years of age. I found my record collection was full of such forgotten gems and the stories of my life that they told me.
Renaissance Records reaches for the stars and reissues NASA’s 25th anniversary commemorative album by The Ventures: The Ventures are considered by many to be the greatest “surf band”. While it is true that The Ventures style and music helped define that musical genre as much as anyone, they are much more than that. Surf is just a subset of what The Ventures are…the Best-Selling Instrumental Rock Band in Music History. The Ventures are an American instrumental rock band, formed in 1958 in Tacoma, Washington, by Don Wilson and Bob Bogle. …The Ventures enjoyed their greatest popularity and success in the US and Japan in the 1960s, but they continue to perform and record. With over 110 million albums sold worldwide, the group remains the best-selling instrumental rock group of all time. The Ventures NASA’s 25th Anniversary Commemorative Album was the official album of the L5 Society promoting Space Development and features many legendary themes used in films such as Star Wars, Close Encounters, Star Trek, etc.
New York, NY | Is the Vinyl Boom Actually Hurting Independent Music? Supply chain issues are still plaguing indie labels, artists and record stores, but are huge pressings by pop stars like Adele and Taylor Swift to blame? …“It’s been a problem for every person that I know on every side of this — for bands, for labels, for fans getting stuff,” Pete D’Angelo, label manager at Ernest Jenning Record Co., tells InsideHook. “It’s changed drastically over the last two years. We’ve gone through a few different cycles of having to deal with it. We had records coming out at the beginning of the pandemic, and it was fine. The biggest issue at the beginning was getting them to us. Some of our records are pressed outside of the U.S., and shipping all of a sudden became a nightmare. We couldn’t get our hands on anything. And then there were issues getting the lacquers from some of the mastering places we work with. And everyone slowly started to mention a different issue, and they just kept building and building. And by the middle of last year, it came crashing down on everyone. Everything got bumped.”
