Innervisions.

This classic album by Stevie Wonder is 40 year old. You may know the hits, you may know the vibe, the cover art, etc. But do you know the stories behind the recording and production of this seminal album, Stevie's best one ? If not, Wax Poetics fills the gap, by interviewing one of the man who's responsible for the particular sound of "Innervisions", Malcolm Cecil. A career musician on his own, Cecil provided Stevie Wonder with his unique TANTO synthetizer system to create the sound which revolutionized R&B in the mid 70's. 

Shigeto.

As I remembered the episode of "In The Studio" by the good guys at XLR8R with Toro Y Moi, I just browsed again through what they had to offer recently. And well, they had just posted an episode with another talented beatmaker/producer, Shigeto. And I gotta say I'm impressed by the interior design the dude built around his gear. Pretty impressive and neat, especially considering it's located in the city of Detroit, which is sadly kinda devastated by the crisis right now. Also, watch out for Shigeto's new album. 

While you're there, get a glimpse on other episodes of "In The Studio", with acts like Mr. G (actually not hosted by XLR8R), Jon Hopkins, Laurel Halo, Kingdom, Silent Servant etc. 

Jeff Gold.

As usual Dust & Grooves serves the perfect interview, this time with Jeff Gold, a record collector (what else ?), and record/memorabilia dealer. 

Some nice records displayed. 

Afrika Bambaataa's record collection.

The co-founder of hip hop is having a second youth nowadays. As a lecturer at the Cornell University, he apparently decided to donate his huge record collection to the Cornell University Library. This collection is huge by its volume but also by the influence it got on the birth of hip hop. One can easily imagine that all the music Bambaataa embraced until the early 80's contributed to the sound(s) we hear today. 

But before being donated, the collection is exhibited at the Gavin Brown Gallery, Manhattan, NYC. There have been lots of articles about it on the web lately, so here's a selection : Wax Poetics, Egotrip Land, Village Voice, Dust & Grooves.

the ultimate largest collection.

This time it seems it's for good. Following what I stated yesterday about Mr. Kallman's record collection, a bigger collection does exist, and it seems it's really the biggest collection in the world. 

This collection sits in Pittsburgh and was built record after record by Paul Mawhinney. It is made of 1 million albums and 1,5 million singles. It is huge. 

A short documentary was shot about it, and notably about Paul's failure to sell his collection, which is officially worth $50 million. If you have $3 million to spend, and a lot of room for storage, the collection could be yours.  

vinyl, an investment ?

These days, people are trying to find new values to invest in. And it seems vinyl records are becoming one of these assets people collect in order to speculate. Well, there's a huge matter in this business, which is time (today's records might be valuable only in a decade or more), not to mention the relatively small market (high bidders are not so numerous). 

Anyway, Channel4 posted an article about this investing trend, as well as the very serious Wall Street Journal. You might be interested in the story of Craig Kallman, CEO of Atlantic Records, who owns nothing less than 750,000 records. Yeah, that much. Probably one of the world biggest private collections. 

another Beatles rarity.

This album is the world famous "Sgt. Peppers' Lonely Hearts Club Band" album by the Beatles. What makes it rare is the altered cover : it looks like Xeroxed pictures replaced the heads of the Beatles and other genuine features of the cover. These faces belong to former Capitol employees, who printed a very limited edition to celebrate a successful year. 

Now, this piece has never seen the light of an auction. So, for the first time ever, people will battle over the ownership of this true collector item. Auction is up until August 10th. Needless to say, you will need to be wealthy to get your hand on this record.