Records!

I collect records (I mean vinyl records, or LPs, if you prefer); actually one can say that my preferred form of music is through records. Of course I am not a fundamentalist – if I haven’t got the record or it does not exist in old school format, I consume it in the way it presents to me, disk, virtual or cloud!

I started around 10 years ago, when I moved from my parents’ place. I was wandering in the city center and entered into a great music place (when itunes wasn’t around yet) and felt in love with this old sound system for sale, with one of the first record players to come to Brazil. I bought and then on my Saturday mornings suddenly become scavenger hunt in downtown Sao Paulo after records.

However I have never truly figure out the answer for one of the questions I get the most, which is, why do you like / prefer records? I don’t use the vague “records have a better sound than other formats”. Honestly I probably wouldn’t be able to use this bullshit sentence and get passed a blind test.

A good explanation could be that I truly enjoy the whole process involved, in shopping for great records in obscure locations, the interactive process of browsing through used (or new ones, since they started pressing again) and eventually discovering a great artist that would have gone unknown to me if I just shopped as a responsive effect (i.e. looking for an artist I know) as most of online purchase I usually do.

Another very plausible explanation is that I love the social aspect of owning a good record collection (as I write I have something like over 350 records in Brazil and close to 100 here in the US). I have lost track of how many times that was the excuse to gather some friends at my place, to listen to some records and have beers and good talks from dusk till dawn.

Whatever the explanation the truth is that I like and it makes me feel good, so why the hell do I need to know the reason? To get by this question lately I just borrow my brother’s punch line: “ I like music with texture”.