In the mid 90s, I found myself playing cultural catch up. I’d resisted the charms of raving and electronic music that had taken over my little group of suburban pals. I saw myself as the last bastion of some sort of authenticity. So, while they all bought decks and developed tastes in techno and jungle, I evangelised about Mudhoney and mourned the end of the Pixies. I had plenty of records, that’s for sure. My Saturday job wages were spent on whatever new indie delights were on offer in the local Our Price. I had my uncle’s old ‘studio separates’ in my bedroom and an ongoing war with my mum and dad about volume (arguments about Ride and the necessity of hearing their FX up loud made little difference). I didn’t have any electronic music though. I resisted it. I never went raving or clubbing and said that people who did were pricks. Of course, it was me who was the prick. I was (and am) a contrary bloke and my resistance was nothing to do with the quality of the music or the culture. It was just me seeking a bit of attention. All it took was a night out in London to change it all. Reluctant at first, I went along to see Josh Wink DJ at Sound Shaft. He played ‘Higher State of Consciousness’ and I heard a 303. Bang. I love acid now and I love the 303. On the rare occasions I get to DJ at parties I always work my way towards an acid wig out. I’m a late adopter that’s for sure but now records that screech, whine and blip are religious icons. Three of them in particular. This is the story of how I found them, when I’ve played them (and what decks I’ve played them on) and what they (sort of) sound like.

In 1983 my father inexplicably decided to buy a stacking hi-fi system to replace the 1960s Boots amplifier and turntable that sat on a teak effect sideboard in our living room. This resulted in a trip to the big city – Sheffield – to a specialist audio store. Not normally one to spend so freely we came home with boxes of the most expensive Technics equipment, soon to be encased in a self-assembly dark oak chipboard and smoked glass cabinet. My brother was at the time too young to have his own records and so my records went in the lower section of the cabinet, carefully filed away slowly being added to by purchases from Our Price, Andy’s Records, Foxes Music and Track Records from Doncaster’s Arndale Centre. As the teenage years took hold I naturally withdrew to my bedroom and my Walkman and cassettes took over. Then I moved to University and the stacking hi-fi system became unloved and unused. Furniture was placed in front of it entombing my records inside. Around thirty years later the cabinet remained where it had always stood, now seemingly part of the fabric of the house. In a moment of nostalgic yearning I unearthed these signifiers of youth expecting to find the coolest of albums. In the subsequent years my collection of tapes had been discarded and I had built a collection of CD and playlists. Yet this cabinet held a physical archive of who I had been and therefore who I was. Initially met with the kind of record I had expected, a rare Beastie Boys white vinyl 12 inch of Pass the Mic and a Dinosaur Jr 10 inch of Just Like Heaven. Further excavation led swiftly to forgotten prog rock, a momentary dalliance with metal before comedy records, Neil’s Heavy, Heavy Concept Album, and then artefacts from childhood; Favourite Children’s TV Themes and Willy Rushton and Johnny Morris reading Thomas the Tank Engine. I was beset with an overwhelming sense of melancholy. This chapter will examine the function of the physical artefact as a tangible connection to the past. Via an analysis of the melancholia associated with hauntology and the concept of ‘lost things’ the narrative will speak to the importance of the record as archive and as central to self. It will also speak to the physical presence of the record player in the home, something lost in a digital age.

The outskirts of Hyde. A pebble-dashed semi on a Wimpey estate – a hill-top view of Manchester stretching away. It is April 1974. I am nine years old, and this is my childhood home. There is – has always been – a record player on the living room floor underneath the window. Propped next to it is a stack of records – L.P.s at the back, E.P.s in front. The stack is in constant growth – mainly L.P.s, the E.P.s seem to be a thing of the past. Purchases come from either the tiny record shop in Hyde Precinct or, more thrillingly, from special shopping trips to Manchester. It is Dad, not Mum, who hunts for new records in these dingy basements. He has added Toots and the Maytals to the stack and will, five years hence, bring London Calling by the Clash into the house. Dad is the one who is culturally fluent in music. The LP he has just bought is I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, by Richard and Linda Thompson. Its sleeve is a strange mise-en-abyme of the window it is propped beneath – a glass surface coated in condensation, with sodium light seeping through. Someone has scrawled I WANT TO SEE THE BRIGHT LIGHTS TONIGHT on that surface, in the same way I scrawl my name on the window and watch beads of water slide away from the letters. But there is a problem with Dad’s copy. It won’t play on our record player. Every time he lowers the arm, the needle stays in the run-in groove. It fails to find the first track and the vinyl rotates soundlessly. There are several trips back to the shop; copies returned, new ones bagged and brought home. But nothing works. The needle never moves. My chapter will evoke and interrogate this vinyl failure. It will become an emblem of cultural anxiety in a specific geographical and historical location as I look back at my dad – and myself – trying to find a place in British post-war modernity.

1986. A 24-year-old man picks up a copy of The Smiths’ The Queen is Dead from his local record shop in Middlesbrough town centre. He takes it home to his parents’ mid-terrace house, runs up to his bedroom, and places Side A on the turntable. Over the next few months he plays it on repeat, poring over the lyrics inside the record sleeve. 2015. Christmas day and I receive a vintage, brown record box. Inside, there is a curated selection of my dad’s old records, including his copy of The Queen is Dead. The selection of post-punk and indie records symbolise our overlapping musical landscapes. This is the start of my record collection. 2020. I am 24 years old and the UK is in its first Covid pandemic lockdown. Isolated from friends and family, I play my records as a distraction and to track time. My copy of The Queen is Dead crackles as Morrissey’s voice is slightly distorted. Switching to Side B, ‘Bigmouth Strikes Again’ has seen better days. I have played this record many times but the warped melody is only partially my fault. Rather, the distortion is from my father playing the same record repetitively in 1986. By inheriting my dad’s record collection, I also inherited his memories. Over time, my mmemories became attached to the records. In some cases, both our stories exist in the grooves of the vinyl. Although the memories attached to the record are different, sharing a music collection reveals our connection to the same music during similar eras of our lives. Part-memoir and part-essay, this chapter will explore the inheriting of memories through shared possessions. In conversation with John McCarthy, my father, this chapter will explore how music and memory intertwine and how life narratives are threaded together through a shared record collection.

When a person walks through the third floor of George Hall at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, they will likely hear a distinct collection of music near the bend before the main office of Ethnic Studies. Emerging from Dr. Rod Labrador’s office are the sounds of his previous time as a party deejay, a mix of freestyle, jazz, hip hop, and, more recently, K-pop. Across the hall, students are greeted by Professor Ethan Caldwell’s collection of rhythm and blues, sharing childhood memories of 1980s and 1990s & and soul from his family with his students. In an adjacent building, students are greeted in the ACCESS lounge by Dr. Ruben Campos III’s eclectic collection of Latin grooves and international hits that connect students transoceanically to hits from a variety of diasporic productions. In each of these cases, the professors bring glimpses of their past and present to their students, inspiring a new wave of listeners that reconnect with analogue mediums of music and life. In “Professors’ Plays,” I highlight the ways these three professors share their love of music through their record collections as a way to build community with students. From the variety of equipment they use to the notable vinyl in their collections, these images will highlight their stories surrounding what they play for their students, including their earliest memories with music on vinyl records, how they crafted their setups, the importance of music in their everyday lives and in their offices, and why it is an important form of engagement between faculty and students. This photo essay will provide a glimpse to how these professors share their passion around vinyl to cultivate connections to musical journeys that span beyond generations and spaces.

Berlin is well-known for its vibrant night life, top-tier clubs and momentous DJ performances. What the casual visitor might not be aware of is that the German capital also hosts a rich and varied selection of venues that cater to niche audiences and selected music scenes such as Northern soul, funk, reggae, punk, and rock & roll. Among these venues, one of the most peculiar and long-lasting is the bar Konrad Tönz, located in a characteristic area of Kreuzberg. Borrowing its name from a regionally famous radio and TV personality, it displays a modernist décor that is not uncommon in Berlin, especially in the former Eastern part of the city (though after the construction of the Wall Kreuzberg found itself in the West sector). As in most bars in Berlin, it hosts regular DJ-sets. What makes it an oddity is its DJ console, consisting of two separate vintage portable turntables. This means, first of all, that DJs cannot rely on headphone monitoring. Moreover, since there is no mixer, the only way to blend two records is by turning the respective volume knobs up or down. If they really want to be audacious, DJs may mess with the tone knobs. In this context, what would appear like the opposite of classic DJing – no pitch control, no separate monitoring, no direct traction, no beatmatching (unless you are lucky) – makes for a unique experience both for the performer as well as the audience. A welcoming place with accessible prices (and low DJs fees), Konrad Tönz possibly epitomises the well-known saying about Berlin being poor but sexy. This chapter draws on personal experience as a DJ in the years between 2006–2009, as well as on ethnographic work (Nardi 2014) and interviews with bar owner, manager, booker and bar keeper Jens Maeß. It will discuss what makes Konrad Tönz an original venue that expresses a side of Berlin that, although not as glamorous as that associated with the most celebrated clubs, is worth looking in depth.

In the early nineties, a new alternative club opened in Richmond, Australia. My crew was fond of all the usual suspects – Clockwork Orange, Earwigs at Night, Oblivion –but this one promised something different. It was smaller than the others, for a start, and it played some lesser-known favourites to get us moving. More than that, you could take your own records for the DJ to play. And to his credit he did, Even if the songs weren’t immediately danceable and even if it meant only four people were swaying on the floor for those glorious, eternal three minutes. The club, and the DJ’s openness, bridged the space between large-scale venues and parties at someone’s house. It also brought the distant world of our music heroes (who were mostly from the northern hemisphere) a little closer. My memories of that time are defined by distance: a six-week wait for the NME to come off the boat with all the ‘latest’ music news; only rare appearances of the bigger indie bands, with no hope of seeing the smaller ones listed so prolifically in the UK gig pages. This DJ (who happened to be a very convincing lead singer of a Smiths cover band) brought some of that distant world into ours by letting us dance in public to music we’d likely never hear live in Melbourne. In this short memoir, I explore the wider significance of this democratisation of the deck, locating it alongside other analogue technologies of the time that encouraged a hands-on involvement with music and with community.

Let me state quite categorically, from the start, that in applying to write for this anthology I am a fraud. I was a minor face on the London gay scene for more than 15 years. I worked as a DJ, technician and producer. As a DJ, I’m ashamed to say, I never once used turntables. I was lazy, CD-wielding trash. I have no place here. I do not belong. Though I still feel I have a story to tell. Mostly I want to tell you about DJing at Marvellous, an under-rated Sunday night gay club that ran in a back street venue in Brixton in the early noughties. I want to talk about the joy of Sunday night clubbing in this underground sanctuary. Escapism was the key, and the real world felt a million miles away. I want to describe the parade of characters, on the staff and on the dance floor, that made Marvellous a unique environment. I want to introduce the drunk drag queen host, the flamboyant goth-legend DJ, the punters who would bring in enormous fans to dance with, the stunning trans supermodel who would drop by. I want to talk about the music – disco, baggy, indie, funk. I want to talk about the power and euphoria of controlling a dance floor. I want to talk about the lack of inhibition, the sheer state of abandon and the vital role clubbing has played in queer culture. I’ll probably talk about some other venues too. I haven’t decided yet. So, what do you think? Would you care to listen? Shall we drop the needle on the record? Ha ha, yeah right, let’s just press ‘play’ and I’ll begin. (Parental guidance: will contain bad language.)

My whole childhood experience of (and exposure to) music was founded upon vinyl; in particular, vinyl spun on my parents’ turntable, mounted atop their Sanyo separates system which cost, they related, a whopping £200 in 1979 (equivalent to around £1200 today). Whilst this system also had a cassette player, it was always the turntable which was in use, and vinyl the chief source of music (the tape player only ever really used (a) to record music off the radio and, most significantly, (b) to record borrowed vinyl). But it was only in my early-teens, in the nascent 90s, when I finally had my own player, a gift from my parents: a belt-driven turntable built into an Argos-bought, mid-budget Alba midi-hi fi system complete with a sophisticated (!) 3-band graphic equalizer, twin cassette deck and CD player. And it was in white (an aesthetic decision entirely out of my hands, my mum thinking it wouldn’t stick out so much from the décor of my bedroom… and a detail which would become the subject of much teasing from friends). Finally, though, I had something upon which I could play my parents’ vinyl – The Beatles, Donovan, Isaac Hayes, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald all graced the platter and I soon started curating my own record collection. ‘White Midi’ will be a love letter to that white Alba; to building my vinyl collection which I bought and played on it; and to a rudimentary turntable which helped shape my intricate taste in music, right up to its sad demise in my early undergraduate years at university, a tragedy which saw my betrayal of the midi for the micro system, and an end to my relationship with vinyl. For a time, at least.

This turntable story examines the track ‘The Party’ (made in 1988 by Haitian producer Richard Jean Laurent aka Kraze) and its impact on the reception of house music in the European cultural context. Laurent's career provides an interesting case for ‘microhistorical’ inquiry. With this research method, the partiality and fragmentary nature of the case under examination are made to emerge, along with its symptomaticity with respect to processes that sometimes escape larger analyses. Microhistory privileges anomalies in order to bring out a ‘normal exception:’ an oxymoronic expression indicating how a seemingly isolated case can erode the opacity of a homogeneous series of historical narrations. In this case, this is the ‘canon’ of US house music in the 1980s. In this microhistorical excursus on Richard Laurent, I will show how 12-inch house records produced by the Haitian musician spread globally. Laurent’s music was then hijacked by the European media industry, who then appropriated the festive side of house music, setting aside any aspect of social criticism and countercultural commonality. The Party is only one of the many instances in which this ‘heterogony’ took place, however, it is a conspicuous example that highlights a trend that is scarcely detected. In the microhistory of The Party, the heterogony of ends acts along two lines. On the one hand, Laurent’s intention to publish his vocal track determines practices and uses other than those desired and from which the author does not even profit. I will trace the history of the first acapella bootlegs and how they were sampled hundreds of times and ended up in other records. European producers who appropriated snippets of The Party misrepresented its message and released highly derivative tracks with almost the opposite content. Following the turntable story of Laurent’s single and its acapella version, I will expose the mechanisms by which house music was received and assimilated in Europe, particularly by the mainstream media, which took musical and textual elements of The Party and placed them in products that were far removed from the original context of house music creation and enjoyment.

There are records in my collection I simply cannot part with. Much ink has been spilled by authors and journalists espousing the role of record collecting as curating identity – this is not that. Rather, I want to consider the records that I cannot remove from my collection for reasons other than the ‘grand project’ of record collecting. There are records in my collection that, beyond being about my personal taste, mean a great deal to me, much like Davies’ Darling, They’re Playing Our Tune phenomenon. There are other records that were gifts whose quality range from the perfectly judged to wildly off-base – what if the gift-giver pops in for coffee and wants to see your record collection? Surely, they’ll look for their contribution to your life’s passion. There are other records that were handed down from friends and family now passed: being the custodian of those LPs is done out of love and respect rather than what it says about your own personal taste. What about that Santana record where the shop owner gave you the wrong record? You now have the wrong record in the wrong sleeve and no way of correcting it without buying both records. There are, however, other records that simply cannot be allowed back into the wild –records with sexist covers, inappropriate or outdated ideas, or even a peculiar Brazilian percussion record that, upon getting it home and inspecting it properly, features someone in blackface in the background of the cover. In fact, what about every record you’ve ever owned? If you send them to landfill, they will take millennia to degrade and leech incredibly dangerous chemicals into the ground water. Record collections are an emotive passion and constant burden.

1998: An unlisted mixtape made by a soon-to-be-dead friend leads to a search for a record that takes place over the last twenty years via bands, record label contacts and blind luck. Spoiler: Ends with a grown man crying at a parcel from France on a pavement. THEN Searching for music in a pre-internet world was an absolute pleasure. But was it? NOW Screening every bit of available music on the world wide web is as giving as it is taking. A man lost in a swirling fog of his own making tries to find a way out via releasing his own records, building up contacts for his band but it all the while trying to search out this mystery sound. And then, it landed.

Playing music with friends makes me happy. There is something about the shared experience that lifts me up and although many people raise an eyebrow when skimming through my record collection, I can assure you that if they were standing in a room surrounded by people dancing and singing along to that 7” they would also be feeling the joy that can come from a good old bit of classic eighties pop found in the singles box in Oxfam on Kentish Town Road. This chapter tries to communicate that not only can standing behind the decks be a great way to hide from the party whilst also being part of the party, but somehow finding the right records to play in the right order for a group of people who are unwittingly relying on you to make a soundtrack of the night and keep the fun going in to the early hours…and nailing it, can somehow be one of the most uplifting and connective human moments that you’ll experience.

In March 1998, I took the money my parents had saved for a car—my eighteenth birthday present—and returned (by taxi) with two turntables and a mixer. I was happy to walk, so long as I could mix. The frosty reception thawed when Dad recognised the beginning of a lifelong pursuit and, for over two decades, I’ve been resident at some of Australia’s best- known nightclubs. Mum came around later when my practice-led research turned into a PhD. This chapter shares some of the tools, texts, and techniques I discovered on a quest to understand what DJs do. My transition from aspiring bedroom banger to aging veteran has coincided with new genres, futuristic instruments, and old formats in parallel with an evolving discourse on authenticity and virtuosity. The DJ’s instruments are subjective: Technics SL1200s—the turntables I valued more than a car—were at the time considered the ’industry standard’. Today, the CDJ3000 ‘professional DJ multi player’ is a digital equivalent. Notwithstanding continual advances in technology, my connection to the turntables was revived during the pandemic. When clubs closed and I could no longer play, I directed that energy toward Discogs, the online record marketplace, to buy any release containing ‘locked grooves’: a record-cutting technique that traps the stylus in an endless loop. As an enthusiast, practitioner and academic, I’ve encountered myriad labels for the DJ: ‘shaman’ (Rietveld 1998), ‘custodian of aural history’ (Miller 2017), plus ‘God’, ‘rave dad’, and ‘glorified jukebox’. I’ve seen how trends inform these terms, but how do they align with the tools and the work? Drawing upon archival material, interviews, scholarly discourse, and first-hand experiences, my objective for this chapter is to better articulate what DJs do, and to discuss how the work of DJing aligns with popular views of the craft and culture.

Using textual, visual, and audio data from interviews and in-depth conversations, this chapter hopes to sketch out holistic biographies of residential expatriate DJs living in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), Vietnam. A vibrant city full of global opportunity, a hot spot for intercultural exchange, and an economic pivot of Vietnam’s speedy growth, Saigon brings opportunities for local residents reaching out to global interactions but also challenges regarding uncertainty of gentrification. Residential expatriates refer to the group of foreign-identified migrants who mainly came to a different location other than their homeland and sought out vocational opportunities. While not working, they either choose to mingle with other peers who hold the same kind of visa as theirs or work their best to integrate with the locals, whatever emotions may result. These experiences vary from one to another based on what they do in the daytime and which “outfits” they choose to dress up at night. Using a multitude of ethnographic methods, I hope to draft out the diverse, complex biographies of some residential expatriate DJs, who either took music as their career or just as a hobby, currently based in Saigon to further understand the network of transnational music that these DJs have created in both connecting the local with foreign DJs and amongst foreign and residential expatriates themselves. The outcomes this chpater hopes to achieve are the culmination of an audio-visual essay and an in-depth interview with at least three residential expatriate DJs currently based in Saigon.

October 5th, 2022. It’s still less than two weeks since one of my heroes left earth for a higher plane. There’s a reverential silence that fills the liminal space between my final syllable and that mystical moment when the needle lands effortlessly onto the record. I feel the weight. Literal and metaphorical. An expectant audience gathers in front of me ready to listen. DJ, record collector, jazz lover, and now host, I introduce the record to a hushed room, explaining why I’ve chosen this particular track tonight. As lights are dimmed and the needle drops to unleash the screaming sax solo that ushers in Pharaoh Sanders’ totemic “You’ve Got to Have Freedom”, I can’t help but reflect on how the simple black vinyl disc spinning on a turntable in front of me has not only woven together different strands of my life, but also signalled my eventual liberation. This autofictional piece moves back and forth between the present, as the narrator hosts an immersive listening event in a plush cocktail bar in the heart of Belfast, his memories of a tear-stained conversation on a Dublin sofa with devastating repercussions, and personal experiences exploring and documenting the uniquely intimate world of Japan’s subculture of jazz kissa, listening spaces dedicated to the music that binds these three disparate scenes together. I remember it as clearly as if it was yesterday. That moment when I pulled across the rickety bathroom door with its frosted glass window, above which someone had hastily scrawled Monk’s famous axiom. The fading black marker read simply: ‘Freedom and Jazz go hand in hand’.

I am proposing to write a memoir-based, creative nonfiction essay on the role of vinyl in an immigrant South Asian family, spanning the 1970s to the early 21st century in Toronto, Canada. I want to share stories about the role that records played in my parents’ connection to the world they left behind, especially for my father who was renowned musician in southern Ontario’s classical Hindustani music scene. However, the thrust of this essay will be on how me, my siblings and other South Asian friends in our social circles relied on vinyl to cultivate our unique sense of cultural identity, one that was undeniably hybrid, but not in the East-meets-West sense of the term. While cultural identity is the key theme of this essay, it will also branch out to reflections on professional identity, and how vinyl latter helped me as well as my brother find careers in music journalism, DJ culture, turntablism, electronic music production and in his case, songwriting and production work for artists such as Drake. In many ways, this essay is about disrupting the two meta-narratives of second-generation, diasporic South Asian youth in the West: the one of “culture-clash” and the one of reconciling “the best of both worlds”. Music plays a critical role in enabling these disruptions, especially since the anecdotes here will deal with multiple genres including post-punk, hip-hop, and the many sub-genres of electronic dance music, not to mention the variety of subcontinental Indian forms both traditional and modern. Vinyl records will play an important role in the piece, but it also opens the ecosystem of record shops, cassette culture, radio media and nightlife as the spaces through which my now multi-generational diasporic South Asian family’s identities were (and continue to be) created.

The fact that my relationship with turntables started with a free flexi disc on the cover of Oink magazine probably explains why it was my fourth decade before I started to grow my vinyl collection properly. Despite growing up going to the record library with my parents (where I learnt to move from cartoon theme songs and kids’ comedy records, onto the likes of Abba and Stevie Wonder), I only ever amassed enough of a collection that it could comfortably be contained within one box. The majority of the records were obtained from hanging out in a record shop in Lincoln, where me and all my mates worked (except that most of us didn’t officially work there). There are so many stories to tell about Radio City. Once, for example, we all pooled our money to help a customer buy all his records as he was a bit short of cash. I lost hours of my time and most of my limited finances on the first floor where the vinyl and my mates cohabited. I did, however, hone my tastes and explore countless genres. I carried my box of vinyl around with me for a good 20 years without ever owning a record player. Until, that is, one fateful day in 2016 during the football World Cup. The pub we were watching the game in was too busy so we couldn’t see the screen. To fix the situation, we went to the nearest house that one of us lived at. Post-match, my friend started pulling his vinyl out and we lost hours. I was rekindling my love affair with the format I’d faithfully moved around various parts of the capital. This kickstarted a habit. So, this is the story of two record players and about 500 slabs of vinyl.

This chapter is a piece of creative nonfiction which tells the story of my first record player but in doing so positions the experience within early family dynamics, the formation of an identity connected to an emergent music taste, and the desire to differentiate from my older sibling. The Ferguson 3006 Mark II was given to me by my parents on my 8th or 9th birthday in the early 1980s (neither of them is sure). It was a classic, black vinyl suitcase record player with a Garrard turntable. It represented freedom from my father and sister’s domination of the turntable in the living room. It presented the opportunity to make my own choices and develop my own musical tastes and fascinations away from the – admittedly perfect – musical foundations laid by my young parents. Seeing that record player, decorated with a single bow, in my parents’ bedroom on the morning of my birthday, was revelatory. I spent the next few years, until I tired of it, enjoying its crunches, its clicks, and the whirring, grinding sound of the turntable getting up to speed, as though two plates were moving just a little too closely to one another. I built my vinyl collection using pocket money, birthday record tokens, and the generosity of Simon Frith, who was a passing acquaintance of my father and kind enough to let us rifle through hundreds of ‘not for resale’ albums he’d been sent to review. The Ferguson 3006 Mark II was an early entry-point into adulthood, gave experience and understanding beyond the family, and a blistering sense of individuality.