In honor of International Record Store Day, I'm posting one of my favorite layouts from Beyond magazine called "analog kids and teen age riots" by Darren Hughes. This was part of our Adventure series which celebrated everything from whale watching without whales to exploring the work of one of Canada's greatest iconographers.
I like the four pages together:
And then the way they looked all fluffy with paper and in-the-tactile-worldness once they were printed.
I love that little subscribe tape too. As you may know we are selling off our Beyonds at 50% off now so jump on over if you like the look and taste of this bit. And we post the article here to encourage you to go out and get some vinyl:
Adventure: Analog Kids and Teen Age Riots
by Darren Hughes
This year will mark two significant turning points in my life as a music consumer. It’s tempting to say it’s “the year I went digital,” but that isn’t quite accurate. While it’s true that over the past twelve months, I’ve discovered, purchased, and downloaded more music from the Internet than from any other single source (that’s turning point number one, by the way), I actually abandoned the world of analog audio back in 1988, when, on my sixteenth birthday, instead of pooling my fast food paychecks for a crap used car like most hot-blooded American boys, I bought a CD player. I was the first kid in school to have one, and a significant percentage of my disposable income has been spent on those sterile plastic discs ever since. Which brings me to turning point number two: this will be the first year in nearly two decades that I will have bought more new music on vinyl than on CD.
I’m a child of the 1970s, the last generation of kids who were raised to respect and admire their fathers’ hi-fi’s (always from a distance and under direct adult supervision). My dad’s was a wooden console unit with a turntable at one end, two built-in speakers, and four or five linear feet of storage, which he loaded with his collection of big band and comedy records, all of them alphabetized by artist. I assume he picked it up soon after college, right around the time he bought his convertible Corvette and before he met Mom. Today, that console stereo would be considered the height of Mid-Century Modern and would likely fetch a good price at some trendy thrift store. He must have taught me how to use it when I was only five or six, because I remember lying alone on my back in his room, my arms fully extended above my face, holding an LP jacket in the air and studying the names and designs while I tried my hardest to make sense of the music.
The vinyl record is really without peer in the history of recorded media. Thomas Edison built his phonograph in 1877, and in the 130 years since, the record has fended off competition from the reel-to-reel, the 8-track, and the cassette. Even after CDs revolutionized the music industry in the 1980s, vinyl stuck around, finding new life on specialty labels and in clubs, where DJs scratched it into hip-hop.
And MP3s aren’t killing vinyl either. While the major media companies scramble for market share in a consumer landscape rapidly shifting under the pressures of file-sharing, iTunes, and Digital Rights Management, a few of the smaller labels and independent music stores have held onto customers by putting a new spin (no pun intended) on an old trick. Leveraging both the “indie cred” of vinyl and the wired nature of our contemporary lives, new LPs are being packaged with a password that entitles the buyer to a free download of the album. It’s the best of both worlds – the nostalgic pop, hiss, and hum of analog; the convenient portability of digital.
Which is why I’ve bought so many damn records this year.
I’m not a vinyl fetishist. I’m not like Rob, Dick, and Barry from Nick Hornby’s novel High Fidelity, who, in stereotypical music-geek fashion, catalog their collections obsessively and finger through record bins with an air of superiority (though I’ll admit to sharing their weakness for Top 5 lists.) But vinyl has, in the past year, helped me to rediscover the simple pleasures of listening to – and really hearing – music.
Case in point: Daydream Nation. I discovered Sonic Youth late one night in 1990 when I happened upon the video for “Kool Thing” on MTV. Like tens of thousands of other suburban kids before and since, I was changed by my brief encounter with their arresting brand of guitar noise and New York cool. The next day I bought copies of their most recent release, Goo, and the CD that came immediately before it, Daydream Nation. I’ve listened to those discs regularly ever since, but – warning: cliché ahead – I swear I hadn’t really heard Daydream until I broke open the four-album vinyl box set that was released this summer.
The front and back covers of Daydream Nation feature paintings by Gerhard Richter, both of them called “Kerze,” or “Candle.” To my embarrassment, I’d always assumed they were photographs. Richter is known for his “photo-paintings,” which start out as snapshots that are then projected onto a canvas and recreated to exacting detail with paint and a brush. The five-inch paper insert in my CD case never did his work justice, so I’d lost out on the clever ironies in Sonic Youth’s decision to adorn their post-punk record with a post-photography painting. Likewise, the single-sided, seventy-minute CD I’d spun so many times had made the careful sequencing of songs on the original double-LP release irrelevant. “Cross the Breeze,” which opens Side 2, for example, soothes listeners into a false sense of calm with its 30-second intro of melodic strumming before exploding into the fastest, loudest riff on the record. “Trilogy,” which closes Daydream Nation and fills all but three minutes of Side 4, is Sonic Youth in concentrated form, all noise and mayhem. I’d never really noticed.
The experimental filmmaker Peter Hutton has defended the slow pacing of his silent films by claiming they’re a corrective to the “emotional velocity” of our times, and I think vinyl offers the same healing charms. My workdays are accompanied by the droning white noise of random sound, as my computer shuffles through its stock of nearly three thousand songs. Sitting down with an album, though, is a deliberate act, a discipline. I have a specific chair that I like to sit in. I turn on the lamp beside the chair so that I can study the cover art and read the liner notes. I sit for fifteen to twenty minutes at a time, and then I get up to lift the needle, flip the record, and place the needle again. There’s nostalgia in those movements, and comfort, too. It’s like I’m five years old, lying in the shadow of a hi-fi, hearing music for the first time.
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