Everyone remembers buying their first record. Or at least I could have made that statement just over a decade ago. In a world of music-on-demand, the physical act of owning music has become more of a sacrality, like gold dust outlining the plastic sleeve of whatever it was that you picked out in the first place.
On her way to a sold-out show in Alphabet in November, legendary multi-genre DJ Marcia Carr hauled bagfuls of hand-picked vinyl records across the London Tube to Brighton. Each record was chosen with a kind of time-traveling knowledge that no Spotify subscription could ever match. Interweaving world music among a shelf of other genres, such as jazz, tech house, disco, dubstep, and more, Carr’s collection spans the globe and provides those on the dance floor with the heart-thumping sensation of a nuanced life well and truly lived.
Every record tells a story, a time, and a place. Whether it evokes a rose-tinted nostalgia, a hard-hitting festival, or a buried wound, attending these events is like placing an ear against the walls of someone’s past and then dancing alongside them to recollections of their best nights out.
Like Carr, other diamond-weighted names have championed the eclectic craftsmanship of vinyl mixing. Take electronic extraordinaire Carl Cox, for example, a pioneer in the field for playing non-stop, expertly curated mixes for sets of up to 9 hours. Yet you don’t need to fly to Ibiza to experience this art form. This spin on human connection and escapism can be reached daily in Brighton. In fact, there’s a whole underbelly of live vinyl events in and around the city just waiting to press play.
Take Capsule Records in Hove, where you can sit and sip the simple joy of a well-made coffee as you bond with a friend over an unearthed record you’ve never heard before. Or Rarekind Records on Trafalgar Street, another frontier when it comes to in-store vinyl events and a favourite of techno connoisseur DJ Billy Nasty who was the first DJ to produce a commercially available live mix CD. Here jungle and hardcore-heavy sessions are squeezed into a mini boiler room of long-forgotten breakbeat bangers.
If you open yourself up to the city’s vault of vinyl DJs, then you’ll find yourself exploring a secret library of sounds, a Pan’s Labyrinth of music that shaped the person playing it. Some of these might even make it to your own treasure chest.
