SLATE AND VINYL PARADISE
- DEW ARIZA
- Oct 4, 2024
- 2 min read
A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be able to go to the International Record Fair in Madrid. I found out about it almost by chance thanks to one of those annoying and, most of the time, useless advertising stories. Well, this time it did help me. Thanks algorithm, I guess.
As a great lover of this musical format, of analogue, and having recently celebrated my father's birthday (the biggest vinyl record collector I know), I decided to investigate a little more about what the event was about. It looked good. Nothing extraordinary but enough to make me want to enter a world full of vinyl and, perhaps I could find some other gem or special edition of some mythical record, by unknown artists (especially electronic artists) or, my favs, test pressings or vinyls that were not made to be sold.
When I got there I found what was waiting for me after seeing the images on Instagram: a vinyl market. That's it. It is true that at the entrance there was a contest to sign up for in which the guys from Audio-Technica were giving away a turntable and headphones. Otherwise, a market full of different vinyl shops, some foreign (from Germany or France), or from other parts of Spain. There were plenty of shops specialising in the rock genre, which had endless classics and were aimed at an audience that listens to Rock FM on the way to work.
For €5 it was fine. However, even though I love rock (and all music in general), I missed more variety of genres, groups,... There were a couple of different stands dedicated to pop or some electronic music, but as a general rule we are talking about a majority of classic rock, together with the typical stands with 4x10€ posters where you had to be patient and go looking through the multiple boxes full of records, one by one to try to find some treasure (and often successfully).
Also, I would have taken advantage of the opportunity to bring some artists or even emerging artists who have music in this format to give them a voice, as well as dynamism to the event itself, or some kind of workshop.
As an extra, while I was having a beer in the bar area, we saw how a man from one of the stalls started to place towers and towers of singles (small vinyls) next to the trash. We were all watching because we didn't know if we could pick them up, if he was throwing them away or not... Until the cleaning staff arrived and asked us. I pointed out who was doing it and asked: indeed, they were throwing them away. At that moment, a flood of people who were watching everything went to pick up the records before they were thrown away for good. I attach graphic proof of what I took:
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