In a time where we’re all trying to navigate space and distance (or just being in public again), the idea is to foster community around music, even if the spirit of competition is still there. More often than not, you can judge the music by its cover (if a band from the ’70s had the word “Ensemble” in its name, the album is probably great). But the trick to crate digging is to simply go at it: Dive into the sections, flip through the jackets and trust your gut. A turntable is there for you to sample the work, and of course they’re around to answer whatever questions arise. Store employees tend to let you do your thing. I visited a few weeks back and landed an original copy of the Fugees’ 1996 album “The Score.” Every place is different: Where Head Sounds is in the back of a barber shop, Academy is a vast spot with a bit more dust on the album jackets.Ī new shop, Legacy Records, just opened on Water Street in Dumbo. But clicking around doesn’t replace the act of visiting your favorite record store and discovering a rare find that either you’d been looking for, or didn’t know you needed until you saw the cover. A stroll through the virtual music emporium Bandcamp can unearth everything from South African boogie to forgotten ambient. Nowadays, crate digging is done as much online as it is off. Other stores like Academy and Limited to One, also in the East Village, managed to keep their leases, but pivoted to online sales to make ends meet. When New York City became the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, local record store owners found themselves in familiar territory: Even though vinyl sales had surpassed CD sales last year for the first time since the ’80s, would the record shops, along with many of the city’s other indie storefronts, survive? Turntable Lab, a niche record shop in Manhattan’s East Village, closed its doors that year to focus on online sales.
There’s also nothing like poring over the album jacket and diving into the liner notes. While digital music sounds cleaner, vinyl sounds warmer and fills the room. Fellow heads will tell you there’s nothing like analog sound. There was no clear-cut answer for the resurgence. The Recording Industry Association of America found that the shipment of LPs jumped more than 36 percent between 20. Just as record stores were failing, vinyl also started to make a curious comeback. Madell, whose store eventually closed in 2016, was onto something. “On the other hand, there is still a space in the culture for what a record store does, being a hub of the music community and a place to find out about new music.” “Record stores as we know them are dying,” Josh Madell, co-owner of Other Music in Downtown Manhattan, told The New York Times in 2008. It was the mid-2000s, music streaming was starting its domination of the industry, and many mom-and-pops were being forced to close. It seemed there weren’t that many shops to choose from. Long before I moved here in 2016, I’d hop buses to New York City to dig for records. The hypnotic swing of the opening track, “ Healing Song,” was the meditative balm I needed to quell my writer’s block. I had to snatch it before some other crate digger scooped it up. I went right for the jazz section, and that’s when I saw it: Pharoah Sanders, “Live at the East,” released on Impulse! Records in 1972 - nine years before I was born. On this day I also needed some air, so that meant walking 15 minutes to Head Sounds Records in Fort Greene to plow through the stacks. These are the songs you hear in a bar or a film and try to Shazam before the final note fades. I’ve learned that this is the music that people come back to decades later. Something with noticeable ringwear and audible crackles. Perhaps an underground spiritual jazz reissue from 1974 or an Afro-disco record from ’80.
I was stuck trying to write in my Brooklyn apartment, overthinking a sentence as usual.įor inspiration, I tend to need music from some faraway place and time.