bigideas

About this time last year I posted about what Big I webmaster Danny referred to as “the dematerialisation of music”, and suggested I was reconciled to it and everything was OK. Today, on Record Store Day, I’m feeling more ambivalent. The attraction of physical LPs and CDs was, I’d convinced myself, just a kind of fetish; a desire to turn music, which should be a transitory experience, into a commodity that we buy. The collector’s pawing of a beautiful record sleeve, the fetish for coloured vinyl and boxed sets and limited editions and the rest all seemed like a diversion from the main event. The music is the sounds, after all, not all this cardboard and plastic.

Well, yes and no. Because something else is missing from my world now that I buy almost all my music online. Not music itself: using specialist MP3 web sites you can easily get an album for under a quid, sometimes only pennies if it consists of one long track. My recent purchases in the latter category include albums by Pauline Oliveros, Morton Feldman, Scorn, Controlled Bleeding, Z’EV, Charlemagne Palestine (pictured right), Muslimgauze, Merzbow, Christian Fennesz, Keiji Haino and Morton Subotnik, so I’m not short of new things to listen to. A couple of hundred quid in physical form: a couple of quid in MP3s.

No, it’s not the music that’s missing, it’s everything else. This was brought home to me today when, for other reasons entirely, I took a short cut through Soho and decided, for old time’s sake, to have a look around Berwick Street and see whether any of the old record shops were there. And they were, although some of them had changed names since I was last there a couple of years ago. Since I wasn’t in a hurry, I decided to indulge myself and pop into Sister Ray, an old haunt from my days of buying physical media.

Sister Ray is everything that’s good about record shops. It’s dingy. It has staff who wear T-shirts for obscure bands with swear-words on them. They sell photocopied fanzines and stuff released on small labels, the kinds of CDs that come packaged in tins or wooden boxes. They’re always playing something on the shop stereo that sounds brilliant, although you’ve no idea who or what it is. Sometimes they even squeeze a live band in there. Perhaps most importantly, as your eyes adjust to the gloom you see lots of other people shuffling about between the racks, flipping through records, looking for that elusive thing you didn’t know you want until you came in but now know you have to have.

This isn’t about buying the new album by X that you’ve seen reviewed in this week’s NME. You can do that on Amazon, or iTunes, or your ultra-low-budget Russian equivalent. The point is to be surprised by something, and seduced by it. To look at it, and think “Yeah, that looks interesting”, and move on. Then flip back to look at it again. Then carry it around the shop with you for a bit. Then finally give in and buy it, because it’s calling to you in the way that only a commodity can.

That’s the difference between Sister Ray, Rough Trade or Liverpool’s much-diminished but still great Probe and a rubbish place like Zavvi (whose defunct Oxford St shop is unmourned, and which is now a clueless online retailer instead). There’s a curatorial function being performed by those skinny guys and girls behind the counter who look like either nerds or nutters. They sometimes flatter you (I was delighted by how many items on the “Sister Ray Recommends” stand I already owned), sometimes intimidate you and sometimes confuse you. But they’re doing it with passion and dedication. They reflect and direct: the avant garde bay now has a “folk” section, for instance, which I bet it didn’t a few years ago, a sign of the current revival of interest in folk on the fringes. And if, as with my brief moment of smugness, we recognise ourselves a little in the selections they’ve made, then a shop can start to feel like home, and our fellow, anonymous customers look like a community.

New CDs and LPs are still selling for between £12 and £18, depending largely on the label, which is up to ten times the cost of MP3s. Even so, though, a visit to a good record shop can make for a more adventurous purchase. The things we buy there, where choice is limited but carefully-selected, are different from the things we buy on web sites where everything is available. Online we have to search, and we buy the things we searched for and the things that customers who bought those things also bought. We rarely discover something completely off the wall. One of the records I was tempted by today was a compilation called The Sound Of Wonder!, a retro Lollywood-originated collection of “Space-Age Cinematic Surf and Urdu Funk”. I can find it on Amazon, too, but only because I’d already seen it in Sounds of the Universe, a tiny but wonderful shop round the corner from Sister Ray. I could have shopped on Amazon for the rest of my life and never turned it up; today I saw it because one of the blokes in the shop liked it and stuck it in the window.

It’s been suggested before that the more we rely more on online shopping the more we risk getting into a rut with our music- and book-buying. I’m not sure that’s entirely true, but I do think our relationship with music is in danger of becoming one of mere consumption. We need to keep the spontaneity and challenge in there. We need a sense of community, too, even a “scene”. You can get that from going to gigs, but it’s harder because you have to go to a lot of gigs before it starts to feel that way. If the record shop is dying out, maybe we need some forum for all the other stuff that doesn’t involve buying and selling physical objects. I don’t know what that is yet, but I know it’s not a web site. It has to have a smell and an atmosphere, and perhaps a sticky carpet.

Last year it was reported that Sister Ray was in severe financial trouble. That kind of thing can come and go for small businesses run on enthusiasm, whose main raison d’etre isn’t paying the dividend at the end of the year, but even punks and metalheads can’t live on fresh air. I hope they make it, although I understand that unless people like me start regularly spending our money there again they can’t last forever.

The pic of Sister Ray’s frontage is by ebotunes.