smartly and so as to invoke only pleasure, does Paradise Bound, pipe lovely tunes into the street for curious passersby to become enchanted. speakers attached to the outer building (which if youll permit me, fittingly resembles a large old-style jukebox), send out music to reel you in beyond their simple sandwich box out front.
(the extravagant pleasure of this music reminds me of a similar time when i lived in nyc and awoke to sounds of a jazz band playing on the flatbed of a truck outside my first floor apartment window. people in the neighbourhood gathered around with lawn chairs, sitting on stoops, swaying the the melodies. it was lovely.)
take a walk up a flight of stairs and slink into a corridor of a space which combines mostly vinyl records and books and then some cds, dvds and vhs as its wares. at the back of the store youll find a few shelves of books forming an arc around what visually appears to be the centrepiece of the the archives which is its turntable.
it is at this turntable where you can, as has become the custom, listen to a record of your choosing before you buy it. i am a newcomer, of sorts, to records, in that i, like many other people of my age and older, left the cumbersome size of records for the more compact tape and its successors that came. so i grew up listening to records, damning a scratch on my favorite songs, terrorizing my mother when i was two to play the same sesame street fever record over and over and over again and probably discovering music in general through my parents collection.
so it was with that history that i approached the guy at the front to ask him why people have stuck with and are slowly flocking back to the vinyl experience. though i still would have lots of research to do to fully understand the mechanics, he parlayed the fact that there is much more detail recorded onto records and the transferring of that original sound loses some of that detail along the way. it has sparked an itch in me to be sure.
for the time being though, i enjoyed snapping photos of cool album covers that adorned the wall or the wooden cases of port that now held all the records for sale. i challenged myself with purchasing the largest compact book ive ever touched (the count of monte cristo).
god help me for being so bold. read more