50 Hallucinations and Visions of Rare and Strange Vinyl

Vinyl, to: vb. A neologism that describes the process of immersing yourself in an antique playback format, often to the point of obsession - i.e. I’m going to vinyl at Utrecht, I may be gone a long time. Or: I vinyled so hard that my bank balance has gone up the wazoo. The end result of vinyling is a record collection, which is defined as a bad idea (hoarding, duplicating, upgrading) often turned into a good idea (a saleable archive).

If you’re reading this, you’ve gone down the rabbit hole like the rest of us.

What is record collecting? Is it a doomed yet psychologically powerful wish to recapture that first thrill of adolescent recognition or is it a quite understandable impulse to preserve and enjoy totemic artefacts from the first - perhaps the only - great age of a truly mass art form, a mass youth culture? Fingering a particularly juicy 45 by the Stooges, Sweet or Sylvester, you could be forgiven for answering: fuck it, let’s boogie!