For Ear Sake

Vinyl Lovers is a monthly post that premiers the love individuals have for vinyl records. Each month, one special individual will be chosen to share their love with For Ear Sake by giving a glimpse of their collection, certain records they adore, and stories surrounding their love for the forgotten medium. Vinyl Lovers is not only for vinyl collectors with large collections, but for all individuals that own and love records. It's not about the amount of records you own, but the love you have for what you own. Hopefully this monthly post will inspire people on the verge of starting a record collection, and motivate those that collect to keep digging!

Everyone meet Huw Gwilliam! He's a graphic designer from London, and I stumbled upon his love for vinyl due to his artwork that's featured on Booooooom. Gwilliam is the man behind the amazing Lost Gramophone series; which is a collection of well loved record covers redone to emulate the classic format of Penguin books. After catching up with Huw, and emailing back and forth about his love for music and his artwork, his love for vinyl was formed into an in-depth Vinyl Lovers post that I hope you all enjoy as much as I have.

Portrait - this is the Hifi and records in our living room. That's me pretending to look for a records, and then posing with Paddy (aged 11, and able to sleep through pretty much any audio frequency my amp can reproduce) and my first ever LP purchase, ZZ Top's 'Eliminator'

Tell me a little about yourself. Where did you grow up as a child? Was your household musically influencing? If so, what did your parents listen to, and what kinds of music helped shape your musical interests today?

I'm Welsh by birth but we moved up to the north-east of England when I was two. It's not really the 'green and pleasant land' most people associate with England. It's got it's green bits, but the main employer in the area I grew up in is the huge chemical company I.C.I, and large swathes of it are composed of plants built for the manufacture and shipping out of all manner of noxious materials. The film director Ridley Scott is from the same area, and the flaming smoke stacks and high-density industrial architecture was a big influence on his vision for Blade Runner. Growing up there in the 70s and 80s when things were in decline probably influenced my take on music more than I know.

I think it would have been hard for me not to become some sort of musical addict in that location; around that time the UK was going through a grass-routes folk-music revival (a lot to do with hardship in the area and a gung-ho approach to making one's own entertainment because it was cheaper to sing or play an instrument than to travel somewhere that a 'known' band might be playing). My folks were both involved with a local folk-club, and because a reasonably sized house came with my dad's job, we would often have musicians staying over at our house for the weekend so they didn't have to pay for lodgings. I'm not really a fan of folk music per-se, but think being steeped in music and musicians from day one just couldn't have aligned my magnetic grains.

My dad is a music lover and despite the leaner times, he somehow always managed to have a reasonably decent hi-fi, on which he'd play us all sorts of things, and certainly not just folk. We'd listen to pretty out there stuff considering we were just young kids - long instrumental stuff by Mike Oldfield, Jean-Michel Jarre, Tangerine Dream, Isoa Tomita. He had a love of harder rock and classical stuff too, but for me, at an age of about 6 where I wasn't really listening to the radio or immersing my self in 'Pop' yet, it was this seminal electronic stuff that I remember the best, and as I carry on talking in this interview, will reveal itself to have been the big primer for where my tastes lie now.

I think all of these were obtained free when we were kids. I actually think the Depeche Mode belongs to my sister. That song is universally loved in our family. We were all at a cousin's wedding a few years back, and we were all onto the dance-floor before the intro was over! Da Da Da is all built around a bleepy preset rhythm on an old Casio VL-Tone keyboard, something which always makes me smile. Tour De France. What can I say? Amazing.

When did you realize you had an interest for vinyl records, and what encouraged you to collect them?

Vinyl was everything until the mid eighties when CD players started to become affordable (I think I got my first CD-player in about 1989), and I was pretty lucky in the way we were surrounded by it at home. My dad started working as a volunteer, then part time freelancer as a presenter/journalist for the commercial local radio station. There wasn't much of a budget for his sunday morning show but one of the perks the station offered was a 'help yourself' attitude to promo records that had come from the record labels, that were either duplicates or inappropriate for the station's daytime musical output. This meant that 'free' records started to find their way into the house, and that my brother, my sister, and myself found that—almost by default—we were beginning to start our own little 7" vinyl collections. Some of it was just novelty stuff—kids music or TV themes (I think the first one I owned was some school choir singing a song called 'Wriggly, Wiggly Worms'!), but a lot was not, and I started getting a semi-random primer in pop - ex punk bands like Tenpole Tudor, Pigbag, The Dollops, early Adam & The Ants, as well as synth pop from the likes of Hazel O'Connor, Ultravox, Trio and Vince-Clarke era Depeche Mode. I even have 7"s by Art of Noise (Close to the Edit) and Kraftwerk (Tour De France) from this era.

Despite their prevalence, we were taught to appreciated their value and were careful when playing them and keeping the covers safe. I remember the shock of seeing records at friends houses out of their sleeves, being frisbee'd on to the bed, and stood on the floor. The Horror! We were even (lamentably now) encouraged to put little paper stickers on the front with our names on them so that we would not lose them. This, of course had nothing to do with my dad's anally-retentive cataloguing influence!

So right through my formative years there was an occasional but persistent trickle of music literally coming into the house and pulling my tastes in different directions. Naturally as time went on I started to listen more to the radio, watch Top of the Pops and have a more mainstream immersion to music of the time. But those days when I'd see a new record, and have no idea what it'd be like save for the clues the cover may or may not offer (a lot of promos were just in plain paper sleeves) really formed my inquisitive ear for things. My mum later worked at the station too, around the time that electronic dance music was making it's first big splash after the acid-house explosion, and my first exposure to The Orb was via a promo 7" of Little Fluffy Clouds she brought home; a record I still treasure today.

If you look you can see my Dad's lovely handwriting on the sticky label, in case anyone should want to make off with my Hazel O'Connor 7". Perhaps unsurprisingly, no-one ever did! 'Close (to the edit)' was a real game-changer musically. Early sampling and Fairlights; crazy stuff ilke using the engine sound from a Ford Escort as part of the rhythm. Like nothing before it - this and the LP it is from (Who's afraid of…) is a firm favourite of mine.

What was the first record you purchased with your own money? What caused you to purchase the album? Do you still have the record in your possession? Is it still playable?

Haha - this is kind of a curve-ball as I went off the 'electronic' rails a bit in the late 80s as chart synthpop faded and was replaced by terrible manufactured pop like Rick Astley et al. I was a bit young to be into the things my brother was getting into (New Order, Pet Shop Boys) and my older sister was getting into more rocky stuff - U2, Simple Minds. So anyway - I went to stay with my uncle and cousin up in the wilds of Scotland one summer when I was about 15, and he had an amazing hifi and one of the first CD players I'd got to hear. He had 'Eliminator' by ZZ Top, and the intro to 'Give me all your lovin' sounded just amazing on it so when I got home I just had to get a copy. I think it was bought as ASDA - the big local out-of-town supermarket, now owned by Wal*Mart. So for no seemingly apparent reason, the first 'proper' record I bought was 'Eliminator' by ZZ Top. I may have bought singles before that, but I honestly couldn't say what was the first; 'I Love My Radio' by Taffy, or 'Let's Go All The Way' by Sly Fox may pre-date the LP.

Of course I still have it - I have even in my time DJed with it too - the production on the drums played by Mr Frank Beard is amazing; so despite the incredible un-coolness of the thing when surrounded by more worthy-seeming electronica, it will remain with me always. Condition? Pretty good I think.

I think 'Swords of a Thousand Men' is the first 'proper' record I owned - i.e. It was an actual chart hit (as opposed to some novelty act or unknown artist). I can remember being in the schoolyard when it was a hit in 1981, so I must have been 8 at the time. Not really my sort of music now, but it's great nostalgia. My mum saved me the Orb 7" from the 'throwout bin' at Radio Tees. I'd never heard of them before but it was amazing - the lush tunefulness and the promise of more at the end (where it faded, being a radio-edit) that hinted would be there on the 12" mix or LP. My brother bought the 'Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld' LP days later, and since I had no cash, a tape was made for me that I bashed continually for some time after.

How many records do you currently own?

I've got a lot more than the average Joe who sold them all to make room for Tapes/CDs/Home Cinema systems, but it's certainly not a wall of records like a lot of vinyl-philes. Combined with my partner's records, the 12"s fill about six cubes of an IKEA Expedit unit - so that's a dense chunk of 12"x12"x72" of cardboard and plastic. In my time I've sold a few things - not really anything I regret, as for a while at college I was DJing house and techno for the college student union, and bought a lot of 'cool-at-the-time-but-ultimately-forgettable-genre' 12"s some of which have been purged at second hand stores.

Of the 72 square inches of records, about half are 12" singles rather than LPs. We also have a box of about 200+ 7" singles, and a lot of CDs; though I no longer have a dedicated player, using the computer (and usually losslessly ripping them when I do listen to them) I've gone over to the dark side though, and have an awful lot of digital music, which would probably take over if it were 'real'.

The bulk of it is from a period between about 1990 and 1998; it's electronic and dance music from that time. Mostly but not exclusively instrumental. i.e. music from the time when house, detroit techno, ambient, breakbeat and dub were all still in a sort of melting pot where the rules of genre were a lot less obvious as they seem in today's micro-fragmented electronic sub-genres.

So things like Acen, early Moby, early Jam & Spoon, Joey Beltram, LFO, Richie Hawtin, Bertie Aphex, Black Dog/Plaid, Sabres of Paradise. Spooky, FSOL, Orbital, Hardfloor, Pete Namlook; the Artificial Intelligence series. As the nineties progressed you'll find pockets of Drum & Bass (or Jungle as it was first known) along with the beginnings of the big Downtempo scene - Air, Kruder & Dorfmeister, Gentle People — that sort of thing. Then around the start of the 00s I got into the whole rejuvenation of the Electro and Synth-pop scenes (I hate the term electroclash) so there's tunes by Solvent, Miss Kittin, Dot Allison, Fischerspooner, Felix Da Housecat. But my Indie (James, Stone Roses) and Electronic Pop (Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, The Shamen) records all have their place in the slab. As do more leftfield bands like Rengade Soundwave, Meat Beat Manifesto, Finitribe, and Electronica like Bola, Boards of Canada, Ulrich Schnauss.

This is pretty rare - blue vinyl version of Keiichi Suzuki's 'Satellite Serenade', remixed by the Orb. I bought this via-mail order (pre-internet) with one of my first college grant-checks in 1991. It cost £8 ($11) - a hell of a lot for a 12" single at the time, but I'd read it was the best thing the Orb had done and I had to have it. The review was right and I still love this sprawling sparkly dubby Ambient epic, and that's my record player. I never had a pair of technics, but did have two lesser players for many years. Now I do my DJ stuff on my laptop. I opted to get a nice minimal 70s record player for the living room, and this lovely little silver B&O Beogram does the job just fine.

What genres do you normally look for while shopping for records?

Genres? Hmm. I'm a lot more eclectic as I get older. My 'path' goes something like this: Seminal Electronic (late 70s) > Synthpop (early/mid80s) > Rock (late 80s) > House (1989 onwards) > Ambient House (1990 onwards) > Techno (1991 onwards). From then onwards, my taste moved around in the Dance/Electronic area flirting with fashions, and a better 'understanding' of what had gone before. I think if I had to sum up my 'genre' it'd be to say 'Music that feeds into, is, or has come out of Labels like Warp, Guerilla, and Rising High." If there was one person I'd say was the biggest influence over my taste, it'd be Andrew Weatherall. From the early Bocca Juniors stuff, Screamadelica, the endless amazing remixes, the early 2000s Electro phase to the amazing Peel-esque radio shows he now does on BBC SixMusic his output and taste have always been an inspiration. Over the last 8-10 years I'd say James Murphy, LCD Soundsystem, and the DFA's imprint have been my consistent go-to for invigorating music that spans genres, is danceable, and makes me smile.

I don't stick to one genre, I like things that sound good because of the little things, or because they just don't sound like anything else. Either they're sublime, or have a clever little theft, a sound that makes you shudder, a porcelain little melody, or simply because it makes my neck-hairs bristle. It could be cold-as-steel-like Electro, or warm acoustic vocal Pop, or relentless but subtle like some of the Berlin dub-techno. Mostly it has to have some soul to it. However machine-like it is, it needs the humanity to cut through that layer and make itself interesting with a hook, a warm chord, a melody or such. I have very little time for the dense self-indulgent melée of noise that's coming out of certain parts of the electronic scene - I really don't 'get' current Autechre or Squarepusher. Seems like it's for the geekier fanboys to score points over each other about whether they 'get' it or not.

When I got my first job after college, and had a bit more cash, I started to delve more for older stuff that got referenced in interviews by bands I liked, so my tastes got wider, older, and more specific. That's really when I started to listen to the seminal stuff (of which everything else has been borrowing from). So it's your Kraftwerk, Neu!, Brian Eno, Afrika Bambaata, Basic Channel, Giorgio Moroder, John Carpenter, Talking Heads kind of deal.

Sun Electric's 'Aaah!' EP. Probably my favourite record sleeve, by the Designers Republic (no apostrophe). It's not their best work as a record, but the gatefold sleeve is just so cool with the circles, transparency, and experimental typography. I often pull this out just to look at it.

During the course of owning and collecting vinyl records, have you ever traveled in search of music? If so, what were the most reminiscent locations you've purchased LPs?

To be honest - not really. I mean - If I'm out of town and I have the time and I stumble upon a shop, then of course, but I don't really go on special hunting missions. Prevalence of online resources like Discogs, Bleep, and HardToFindRecords have created a strange situation I think. You can find pretty much anything you want nowadays, but at the same time the thrill of the hunt has gone. I still love spending an hour over in Soho (I live in London now) or in a local thrift shop looking through the crates, but because of the online stores, I'm probably not looking for something specific. It's still nice to stumble upon something unusual in that setting though.

I've always had a mild phobia in the smaller, specialist record shops (Haha!). It's the same in bike shops - any specialist shop really. I think it's that male tribal 'take it seriously' thing. Even though I'm clearly the sort of customer most proprietors would want in their store, my mind goes to mush in a record shop if anyone on the staff asks me what I'm looking for. I suddenly know nothing about music, have forgotten all the names of the bands, genres, sounds I like, and feel like a bit of a charlatan not being able to expound my tastes so that they may find me similar stuff in a similar vein. I'm also uncomfortable with that pushy feeling you get if a shop owner brings you a pile of things to listen to - like you have to buy one because of the time they spent rooting them out for you. So I guess I prefer to quietly dig in the corner at my own pace. I'm a graphic designer for my job, so often (and sometimes to my cost) I'll use cover designs as way of seeking out something that might be interesting if I don't know the artist. Sometimes this has worked well for me, but equally it hasn't. I've probably passed on a lot of things I shouldn't due to shonky cover art - but them's the breaks!

Two more 'DR' covers and two classic tunes. LFO's 'What Is House' (Warp) is an early techno classic, and has other great stuff on it not on the Frequencies LP. I bought this on a field trip to London with my Art class. We went to see a bunch of Monet's, but I slunk off early to find an HMV where I got the Orbital 'Mutations' EP as well as some Erasure. No regrets. The other is 'O'Locco', also by Sun Electric. They have so many nice sleeves I had to show more than one!

Give me some insight on where you reside. Is there a big record community?

It's London. It's a big city with many kinds of shops catering to all tastes and cultures. There are reggae shops, elitist techno shops, chain stores, second hand stores, and the list goes on. I'm mostly happy to be in the second hand stores or thrift stores as less and less of the 'current' music I buy is in a tangible real-world form. For good or for bad.

Due to the economy, many record stores were forced to close up shop. Were there any good stores in your area that had to throw in the towel? Also, how do you feel about the remaining stores still standing? What shops would you recommend to a fellow vinyl lover?

In London, the best record shops (in my highest opinion) are in or around Berwick Street in Soho. There's lots of second hand places to dig, prices are pretty fair, and there's a nice bustling feeling around that area. There used to be a great 'new' records store there—Selectadisc—that was my go-to place for a lot of electronic stuff as it was big enough to browse without intervention, which seems to have gone now, but it's been replaced with a good second-hand store now (with the same format!), so it's not like the sad feeling you get when a loved shop becomes a Starbucks or something.

Two favourite 12" singles. The version of 'Don't Fight It Feel It' on the Screamadelica LP is great, but the 'Scat mix' on the 12" is even better, with an amazing piano break in the middle. My brother was playing this to his son, aged two the other day and he was jumping around digging the piano. At the particular point in time this was made. Andy Weatherall could do no wrong. Transform/Transformations is a mostly-instrumental Trance Techno tune from around 1993, but has a sample of Jane Fonda singing (well humming) taken from the 60s movie 'Barbarella' on it. It just builds and builds to this crazy break in the middle. Real hair-tingling moments… It's also one of a whole batch of records I accidentally ripped in mono. Head-desk moment when I realised that!

Three LPs. My brother got me the Shamen's 'En-Tact' as a birthday present, and it's a classic I had on heavy rotation in about 1991. It's a bit of a cheat as an LP since most of the tracks on it (if you read the sleeve notes) are actually remixes by all sorts of luminaries of the time - Orbital, Evil Ed, Well Hung Parliament. But it's great and the last of the good stuff they did before the tragic loss of Will Sinnott and their more 'Pop' phase at the helm of Mr C.

Spooky's Gargantuan. If you don't have this and like Progressive House or Ambient Electronica you have missed out. 'Little Bullet' still sounds fresh now, nearly 20 years later.

Satyricon is a genre-busting masterwork by Meat Beat Manifesto. I got it when it was released, and it's always in a pile near the front rather than filed as I return to it often. It's in parts abrasive, tuneful, bass-heavy, kitsch, hip-hoppy and melodic, yet somehow it all hangs together. I don't think MBM ever really get the props for just how influential they've been. I saw them supporting PWEI around the time this came out and not since have I heard such clean, crunchy and shuddering bass coming from just two guys on a stage.

Two seminal classics. The Malcolm McClaren is actually my Dad's, on long-term loan. Amazing album mixing Hip-Hop and Birundi beats. Everyone knows 'Buffalo Girls', but for me the tracks 'Soweto' and 'Double-Dutch' are the ones with lasting appeal. I love listening to this and then to the Art of Noise as there are so many bits where you can see how the Art of Noise sound was born.

My Life in the Bush of Ghosts is a bit of a cliché in a music lover's collection and I'm an offender. My copy is pretty beaten up - I got it for like £2 (about $3) at one of London's 3 Vinyl exchanges about 10 years ago. It's a bit scratched but plays fine. Truly amazing work from Bryne and Eno.

This copy of 'Organisation' has been deleted from a record library sometime in it's life - you can tell by the notch cut in the corner and the gold 'not for re-sale' info emblazoning the front. Luckily this was ignored and I was able to pick this up for peanuts at my local vinyl thrift shop back in my home-town of Stockton-on-Tees in around 1988. The 'Record Mart' was great for more leftfield vinyl finds and I discovered loads of new stuff (Renegade Soundwave, Bassomatic to name but two) in that shop. Sadly it's no longer there.

You explained your decline of LP purchases due to the new digital wave. Have mp3's taken away your desire to shop for records altogether? If so, is this a phase that will blow over in due time, or do you see yourself sticking with mp3's until something new comes along?

I should say that after a dark period of lazy mp3 use I've recently seen the light on the benefits of lossless digital, and even 24 bit digital audio. I think the digital life in general erodes the desire to get outside and shop for most things: records being just one of them. As I said earlier, you lose out on the thrill of unearthing something rare, but you gain the chance to find it easily and do other things with it.

What's lost mostly is portion control. As a teenager without much cash for records, the ones you do buy you end up valuing more. Even the ones that weren't quite what you hoped probably still have room in your collection. With digital, and free music blogs, and iTunes' genius playlists you can have your cake and eat it, but I often feel you lose a lot in that process. I fear I don't sit and listen to music just for it's own end half as much as I should, and when I do, it's easy to go into attention-deficit mode and abandon an LP mid-way through because you've remembered something else you want to hear or you're bored. I have a lot of music in iTunes I've never listened to that I have on backlog, waiting to be listened to, categorised, and rated. Maybe it's taking the joy out of it?

On the plus side is the way you can play with, more than 'consume' digital music. I DJed at college and still dabble using tools like Ableton, so having music in digital form lets me do all sorts of stuff that I couldn't with 2 turntables. Mixing harmonically (within or across genres) is something I'm really excited about, and I'm currently in the midst of scanning all my digital music into 'key' (using a program called 'Mixed in Key') categories so I can better make choices about what sounds might work with that really cool break I've found.

When I do play vinyl now (which if I'm honest isn't as often as I ought), if there's time and it's rare, I do try to make a good lossless rip of it at the same time. I'm an Apple person so it's not FLAC but tools like Max can interchange between formats. To save on having to re-rip a lot of stuff I own, I do lurk at some of the FLAC blogs we all know are out there to replace things I don't realistically have time to re-rip. I don't see any problem with that. Lossless rips sound amazing through my Tripath 2024 amplifier.

I've always loved the sound of vinyl, but hated the fragility of it. I don't mind hiss, but pops and crackles on a lot of my played-to-death records does annoy me, even if that patina takes me back to a moment when it got scratched at some DJ venue, or fingerprinted by a less-careful friend. I think the world has forgotten about fidelity. I did for a while, but the price of digital storage finally being cheap enough to go lossless means I no longer have to compromise. The sad thing is it's still relatively hard to purchase a lot of lossless audio, and it's certainly not a mainstream thing. I dislike the way some people insult people's intelligence about audio quality with heavily compressed (at the mixing desk and at the data stage) music that sound pretty crappy, even to my cloth ears.

Thrift fun from my college sandwich year. The Donna Summer sleeve is held together by duct-tape at the top but the record is pretty good. Most of the album is pretty lame disco, but sneaking in at the end is the full 12 minute Giorgio Moroder/Summer epic that is 'I Feel Love' - the first ever House record.

'Tokyo Mobile Music' is a bit of an oddity and is one of those 'bought it for the cover' things. It's a compilation of new-wave and pop from Japan in the early 80s and some of it is pretty abstract and frankly unlistenable to an untrained western ear. The sleeve is so cool though. I'm not likely to ever part with it.

Three techno classics, all on the R & S label, and all bought around 1991-1992 at Alan Fearnley Records in the neighbouring town of Middlesbrough. This shop was amazing - Alan sat at the back with his beard and sage advice, and sold Indie, Rock, and (most importantly to me) proper dance music. All three of these 12"s are often cited as some of the most influential techno 12"s out there (Horsepower, Stella, and Energy Flash) and they make for a great triptych photo. Alan's record shop is now an Internet-only store, but the store itself is now owned by his daughter, who sells clothes from the same premises.

As a person that doesn't mind mp3's, do you believe records will become extinct to the dominating digital format?

I don't. I think we're on the cusp of a big digital backlash actually. I'm not saying we'll all trade in our iPods for Dansettes, but I think a lot of people my sort of age (38) are tiring of the sort of helplessness having an 'always-on' digital life can bring. I'm often paralysed by choice. "What Shall I Listen To?"—Sometimes I have no idea. So then I'll be weak and fire up a genre-based 'Genius' playlist to pique my appetite enough to actually find something I want to listen to.

What's missing is that old trope of tangibility I think. It's maybe a cliché to say it, but the tangible process of leafing through a pile of records, the smell, the yellowing edges, the nice big artwork cannot be replaced by the 'cover-flow' browsing mode in iTunes. I think that's really the problem. Digital is too clean. The sleeves don't age, don't get creased, don't have finger marks, or stains on them. The only way you can tell if it's a favourite is by looking in a database to see its play-count and rating stars. Too anal. Distant. Cold.

I had an idea a few years ago that seemed to me to be some sort of bridge for this problem and who knows - maybe it might become something that happens. The idea is you buy a 'record' that is still a lovely 12" sized piece of cardboard with artwork, inner sleeves - the works, but the 'record' itself isn't there. What is, is an RFID chip that you scan over some sort of interface that plays the record on whatever digital gizmo you have. Or it's got some solid-state memory in there and you slot that into a reader.

You keep these cardboard 'records' out in view (I feel its nice to have these things out rather than hidden away as 1s and 0s), just like records, they age just like records, and most importantly, you can browse them like records. I think you need to have the sleeve in your hands as you listen so you can read about the artist, enjoy the artwork, find out who produced it... So you're not browsing for other stuff, or correcting your ID3 tags or whatnot, but getting fully immersed. Other people can look and choose without having to get on your computer, so it's more sociable, and more democratic.

I think this sort of thing is starting to happen: I recently read about an RFID based Spotify player prototype that is dealing in a similar kind of concept. It has these neat real-world tokens that you use to help choose your music and create playlists. I think as 'the cloud' and physical space for digital files increasingly becomes an non-issue, that these more concrete, sometimes whimsical approaches may come into play to make everything more human again.

Sticky Labels: So there's my dad's careful handwriting and a promo sticker along with a library sticker from a deleted Radio Tees LP. Lastly a price sticker from the Music & Video Exchange - one of the better places to dig for records in one of three London locations

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fellow vinyl lovers?

1) Buy anything with a Designers Republic designed sleeve. It might not necessarily sound good, but it will always look good. :)

2) Get an anti-static gun for the dust that accumulates on records.

3) Don't stick with one band or kind of music for life. Don't flog a dead horse. Just because a bands' debut was life changing, doesn't mean their seventh LP is good for you. It's liberating not to slavishly follow one band or scene. They all have their moment, but it's usually not forever.

4) Read about what the artists you like listen to. Then read about what they listen to. So much of the most interesting music is widely unknown and digging through sleeve notes and interviews can yield just as many golden hints or happy accidents as spending time in your favourite record store.

5) Enjoy your records. Don't be too serious. Play your guilty pleasures; silly songs. Dance around the living-room. Music is about letting-loose, not sitting down and cataloguing!

Huw Gwilliam was not only nice enough to share his musical experiences with For Ear Sake, but he also allowed us to be a part of his record cover series by created us our very own cover! I fell in love with the series as soon as I saw it, and I was eager to find out what influenced him to breathe life back into a format many people overlook. Here's what I asked him, as well as his response:

Was your record artwork subconsciously done, or was your love for records on the forefront of your mind when you created the Pelican record covers?

Definitely my love of music and 12" record artwork. It wasn't a wholly original idea - I'd seen some by Olly Moss that did the same sort of mashup with computer games and old paperbacks, so doing it with Records, (and changing the Jan Tschichold-designed grid to square) seemed like a worthy follow up. It was really unexpected how popular they proved to be with people. I did one (Screamadelica) and posted it on the B3ta messageboards, where I instantly started getting requests for more. Even now, over two years since I created the bulk of them, I'm getting hundreds of hits a week on Flickr. I think that patina and nostalgia hit a nerve with people. Perhaps weirdest of all, the most popular one is the Phil Collins 'Face Value' cover.

I'd like to personally thank Huw Gwilliam for being apart of the Vinyl Lovers series. Also, be sure to check out his record cover series and the rest of his artwork on his website (here).