print update for vinyl feature

The soundtrack to my life is absolutely unique, and the records slowly massing in my crates will continue until I do not. My final wishes involve the funeral procession trudging past my good-looking corpse and each selecting a piece of vinyl from my coffin to be played later at the party. This will amuse me greatly from beyond the grave, good music and smooth grooves translate easily across the ether. The only slight depression I may feel while haunting friends and family at my own party might be buried with me. Knowing my tendency to along better with records than people, my friends probably help themselves to a couple rare selections in excess-this is okay; like Latin, the eight-track, laserdiscs and Betamax but unlike vinyl, I will be dead.
Maintaining and cataloging “dead” mediums evokes the individual past a mindset of nostalgia into the realm of investment preserving the moment and spirit of a time. Records bring people together to trade, discuss and covet the music that represents genres, stories and experiences to a thriving hoard of ever-shifting collections and curators in negotiation, dead indeed. The world’s largest record collection, clocking in at 3 million discs and counting, is for sale at about $1 per record. This offer reverberates within the skulls, ribcages and loins of myself and the millions of crate diggers aching to

spend the days, months and years it would take to scour, dust, sample, scratch, fade, catalogue and most importantly: share the incredible well of lost and obscure records. Every one of these collectors incapable of paying the hefty price for the collection is still accumulating their own world’s largest collection in their own style. My own collection is nowhere near what I want it to become and the more I consider it, the less I want it to reach any goal besides continuing expansion. This torment of the collector is unending by definition; collections never reach completion and no collector believes they should.
These collections change and shift like populations within the geography of our lives as collectors, our soundtracks fill idiosyncratically with every record we find. Specific albums fill our collections and represent us. More than an excuse to avoid social situations or hoard impressive forts of brimming milk crates, records are totems we hand between collectors, friends or down to children. Each disc carries a unique memory for every collector as it passes hands, a forgotten attic crate of gems or the haunted artifacts of a broken relationship stick to the wax like so much dust. Collectors know and appreciate this unique attachment to antiquated mediums. When media becomes outdated, its further collection and use becomes removed from the practical and into the artistic; we spin not because it has the edge of technology, we spin because the records themselves are part of our lives. Record collection transcends race, age and country in a community bound through vinyl.
My record collection will never end. I have several repeating items, each unique in the small ways that appeal only to the neurotic or fanatical. As humans we accumulate any

bizarre assortment of things from concepts to objects and even ideologies for our personal collection. Concerning personal preference many define a personal brand and mixture of media to define a collection. Collectors, particularly record collectors, have this same mentality: holding onto fragments of recorded sound however obscure and inefficient, creates a community. There is no absolute way to define and isolate the mentality of a record collector, like the numerous discs haunting our shelves we are far too eccentric and numerous to be entirely understood without a lifetime of digging. As the record shops and vinyl factories become rarified, the collections grow even more characteristic, each catalogue the trove of an individual.
The people and records included in these photos are testament to unique perception and catalog. Every record on display carries a story exemplifying reason for collection, when the story behind a disc is told or presented a personality is laid bare. Every human has a rhyme or reason for the things they carry and the personality of a collection can be seen through its components whether focused on rarity, sentimentality or just one beautiful inner panel. The pieces of these soundtracks are whole in themselves; our experiences tie them together in crates and blend their sounds into life.