PA 4: How to dig for records

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Despite having a DJ for a father, I personally first started collecting vinyl after moving into my first grown-up house not far from Whyte Ave near the Sugar Bowl in Edmonton. I lived with four other people and one of them owned a set of turntables (if this were a film about elder millennials, we’d all be using CDJs but we didn’t always have the newest technology right away back then).

My roomie was a techno-punk with a septum piercing and all he played was breaks and drum and bass. I’d practice with my house records on his setup and we’d throw parties at our place. It was the mid-2000s. Once I started travelling to Toronto to meet with my label and play my earliest out of town shows, I would always stop by Play De Record and load up on jams that I knew would be impossible to find at home.

The records were mostly what you might call indie sleaze today with a little electroclash sprinkled in. A lot of Kitsune Records, Ed Banger, Dubsided, Atlantic Jaxx. Some of the early singles that I can remember buying are “A Bit Patchy” by Switch, “Drugs in my Body” by Thieves Like Us, and Tiga’s cover of “Louder Than A Bomb.”

It’s kinda wild that I can still remember those records by picturing the album art in my mind two decades later. Seeing the titles is very similar to stumbling upon an old photo of myself. “Whoa, look at what I was wearing!” That’s the really special thing about collecting records. They also become a record of your circumstances at the time that you bought them: what you were into, where you found them, what your life was like, who you were.

When I moved to Montréal, I went digital and sold all my records. There is always someone doing this, a person who has simply had enough. I started back up when I moved to Toronto and my life became more stable. Since then, I’ve tended to my record collection like a Bonsai tree: trimming precisely, nipping at the edges, and occasionally doing some heavy pruning. Records can be a cumbersome object to collect, an expensive habit. The physical space they take up in your home is impossible to ignore. But having a means of playing records in your house immeasurably improves your quality of life.

You feel like Sisphysus with a rock on your back lugging these things into a club. But once the needle hits the groove, all is forgiven. The transmission has begun, the memories are ready to be made. Digging for records has become a regular part of my touring experience and I’ve gotten pretty efficient at finding good records quickly. Let me impart a few tips on how I find records.