Union City, NJ | Promoting local musical talent is shop owners’ cup of tea: Musicians Jonathan Rivera and Jay Herrera combined two of their passions a few months ago and opened one of Union City’s most singular stores, Arawax Records & Teas. Located at 601 11th St., just off Bergenline Avenue, the small shop offers vinyl records as well as a collection of organic teas, art, books and apparel. It also hosts DJ sets by local emcees and a video podcast called “Shop Sessions.” On Friday, Feb. 7, Arawax will participate in a tribute to the late rapper J. Dilla by sponsoring a free show at 414 38th St., Union City, with DJ sets and live music. “We decided to take everything we care about and turn it into this store,” co-owner Rivera said. “We’re really into vinyl and we both have our own collections. We just wanted to do something that reflects what we want to do with music as our careers. We’re just spreading the musical knowledge we have to the community.” But Arawax is much more than a record store.
Lafayette, IN | West Lafayette’s ‘new downtown’ plan panned by property owners who see city muscling in: The longer Jim Pasdach sat listening to city planners talk Monday night about a proposed West Lafayette Downtown Plan – one meant to shape the look and feel of the city’s Village and Levee areas over the next half-century – the madder he got. Halfway through what turned out to be an hourlong discussion in front of the West Lafayette City Council, Pasdach, owner of JL Records at 380 Brown St., said he’d had enough. “See that blue line?” Pasdach asked, on this way out of the makeshift city council chambers at the former Happy Hollow Elementary. The blue line was part of a grid of imaginary blocks superimposed over existing businesses and parking lots in the Levee Plaza meant in the proposed plan to give the area between River Road and the Wabash River more of a traditional downtown feel, on par with the layout of streets in downtown Lafayette.
A new book looks over the environmental toll of music consumption: An excerpt of Kyle Devine’s Decomposed: The Political Ecology of Music appeared in The Guardian this week. “…PVC contains carcinogenic chemicals, and the operation produces toxic wastewater that the company has been known to pour into the Chao Phraya River according to Greenpeace, which says TPC has ‘a history of environmental abuses’ going back to the early ’90s,” Devine writes, going on to note that stateside PVC manufacturing in the ’70s also led to illegal pollution including “exposing workers to toxic fumes, releasing toxic chemicals into the air and dumping toxic wastewater down the drain.” Online streaming, however, does not present a responsible alternative according to Devine: “[Streaming music relies] on infrastructures of data storage, processing and transmission that have potentially higher greenhouse gas emissions than the petrochemical plastics used in the production of more obviously physical formats such as LPs. To stream music is to burn coal, uranium and gas.”
Questions for a Wedding D.J.: Monique Proctor, who changed her name to DJ Smiles Davis 11 years ago, talks about playlists, fees and her favorite wedding moments. Monique Proctor became known as DJ Smiles Davis 11 years ago. “My career as a D.J. happened organically,” said Ms. Davis, 35, who grew up in Grand Rapids, Mich., in the 1980s and was introduced to music at her grandparents’ record store there. In her early 20s, she began working at Amoeba Music, where she was in charge of organizing cassettes and doing inventory at one store. “I’d take home 10 CDs a day and burn them,” she said. “During that time, my neighbor had a turntable and I become obsessed with mixing vinyls. [DJ or not, the plural of vinyl is vinyl. —Ed.] It was stimulating and exciting. I started doing parties and that took off.” At 24, Ms. Davis left Amoeba to become a D.J. full time. By then she had amassed a collection of more than 100,000 songs. And during the last seven years she has worked at more than 200 weddings. In addition, she has been a D.J. for various celebrities, including Martha Stewart, Gwen Stefani and Bruno Mars, and has performed at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.
NEW RELEASE PICKS: Arbor Labor Union, New Petal Instants (Arrowhawk) Some will listen to this record, Arbor Labor Union’s second after 2016’s I Hear You for Sub Pop (well, third if you count Sings for You Now, released in 2015 under prior name Pinecones), and find the connections to punk and hardcore dubious. The reason comes down to Arbor Labor Union’s sound, self-described as “Cosmic American Music.” Now, those doubting folks likely consider the punk milieu and hippiedom to be largely incompatible, rather than distinct but complementary offshoots from the same countercultural impulse. The band additionally describe their thing as CCR meets the Minutemen, but on a purely musical level New Petal Instants reminds me of the Meat Puppets circa Up on the Sun, and that fantastic. A-
Jeff Parker & The New Breed, Suite for Max Brown & “Max Brown Part 1” b/w “Max Brown Part 2” (International Anthem / Nonesuch) Guitarist Jeff Parker is surely best known as a member of Chicago’s foundational post-rockers Tortoise. Debuting with them on wax via 1998’s classic TNT album, he helped to accentuate the group’s jazz angle, with a clean tone and dexterousness that one could associate with the classic post-bop string masters but totally at home in what was often a decidedly Fusion-descended context. Well, the jazz influence is strong on his latest LP, which includes an interpretation of Joe Henderson’s “Black Narcissus” (titled “Gnarciss”) and a reading of John Coltrane’s “After the Rain,” but there’re enough category defying passages to spark the interest of the old Tortoise fanbase.
But I have a feeling many of those folks have kept abreast of Parker’s activities, as this is his seventh solo album (or “as a leader,” in jazz parlance), and his second for International Anthem, though this one inaugurates a label partnership with the folks at Nonesuch. For those unfamiliar with International Anthem, the relationship with Parker is fitting, as they are extending the sort of boundary defying material that reaches back to the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, of which Parker belongs. Suite for Max Brown is named for and is a tribute to Parker’s mother, who is pictured on the record’s cover. The set concludes on a high note with the ten-minute title track. It’s also featured on the pre-album single, broken into two parts but also over three minutes shorter. A- / A-
REISSUE/ARCHIVAL PICK: East Village, Hotrod Hotel (Slumberland) Even though they opened for House of Love and McCarthy, this indie-pop outfit, formed by brothers Martin and Paul Kelly as Episode Four in the mid-’80s in Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire UK, found their greatest success posthumously. It’s a familiar story. This singles collection, initially issued in 1994 on the Summershine label, is arguably their finest achievement. After the name change the band ended up on the Sub Aqua label, cutting two EPs before the imprint went kaput. Both of those records are here, as are a few 45 and their half of a split flexi disc (not here is the “Strike Up Matches” 12-inch as Episode Four). The sound leans to the sophisticated side of the C86 spectrum, but the focus never wanders from the guitars. That’s spiff. A-
Los Angeles, CA | Amoeba Hollywood is Moving: We are excited to announce the next home of Amoeba Hollywood will be at 6200 Hollywood Blvd! We are humbled by the massive outpouring of support throughout this search from our customers and the LA community. We aim to do you proud and continue on as your supreme source for music, movies, and so much more. We will bring that familiar Amoeba energy into this new space and you can be sure it will provide the “true Amoeba experience” as we will carry the same breadth and depth of selection. We look forward to seeing you at our new home on the corner of Hollywood & Argyle this Fall, and have provided more details for you below. Thank you for being a part of this journey with us. We’re moving to 6200 Hollywood Blvd! We’re going to take up a huge ground level space on the corner of Hollywood and Argyle in the new “El Centro” complex in downtown Hollywood. This is just 2 blocks east and 2 blocks north of our current location, and right next door to the Fonda Theatre so 
Waco, TX | Vinyl records live on in Waco shop: Across the world, hipsters and collectors alike continue to support the decades-old industry of vinyl records. Despite being one of the oldest forms of recorded music, vinyls continue to make a way for themselves in the age of streaming. In recent years, vinyl sales have been on a continuous rise in the United States, according to Statista’s data recording LP album sales between 1993 and 2019 in the United States. During a time when you can stream any song imaginable within seconds, this continual growth is somewhat of a phenomenon. Vinyl album sales in the United States have shown consistent growth since 2006. By 2019, the industry was up by 14.5% from the previous year, having sold 
Scarborough, UK | Meet Paul Toole owner of Record Revivals – Scarborough’s longest-established record shop: His Scarborough shop may be called Record Revivals, but when chatting to Paul Toole it quickly becomes apparent that vinyl records have never really been away. There’s no doubt about it – record sales are on the up. Last year, around 4.5 million chart-eligible LPs were sold in the UK – a huge jump from 3.2 million in 2016. And it’s not just nostalgia for the glossy black disc which is driving sales – a YouGov survey showed that one in four 18 to 24-year- olds bought a vinyl record in the last month. Paul believes there are various factors that drive the love of vinyl. “In recent years a strange thing has happened. Young people who have grown up with downloads and streaming – not even CDs – have really embraced vinyl. They understand it’s something you have to look after,” he says. He also thinks that people love the fact that a record is a tangible object, adding: “There’s something about the imperfection in the sound that people really relate to 
Embrace to reissue early albums on vinyl for the first time: Indie heroes Embrace have announced their first three albums will be reissued on vinyl for the first time since their original release. The titles—The Good Will Out, Drawn From Memory and If You’ve Never Been—are available through UMC on March 6th for the UK, with the latter two being released through Craft Recordings on March 20th for North America. The vinyl format of these have been long out-of-print since their original release, making them 
