Sunday, March 22, 2009

Vinyl Pornography

Like the guitar stores in Ochanomizu, the record shops in Shibuya are equally as salivating. This afternoon, I took a little field trip to the music block. A bib would have been helpful. I had to keep reminding myself that A) I have no money, and B) I have no record player (at least at the moment), or else I would have cleaned out the shops.

The best one I found was Recofan, a glutinous mess of incredible music covering a whole floor of an office building. The store was so overloaded with CD's and vinyl that it was difficult to browse through. Some sections were filled with boxes of cheaply priced albums organized solely by genre, as if the management didn't have time to properly catalogue their monstrous inventory. Hipply dressed DJ looking types could be seen everywhere flipping through hundreds of boxes searching for that one gem.

My litmus test for any record shop is letter "P" under Soul. If I'm impressed by the Prince and Parliament selections, then I know I've come to the right place. Sure enough, they had something like 4 copies each of Purple Rain, 1999, Parade, Around the World in a Day, and many many more, all reasonably priced.

This photo captures just one row of many in the store.
Another shop I saw sold DJ mixers and turntables. This sign was hanging outside.

It says, "Fuck PC. Real DJ's play vinyl."

Damn straight.

1 comment:

Alex said...

Awesome article Ethan. I HAVE to take you to Taiyo records in Kagurazaka. It's groovy little store that sells import CDs mostly from South America.