Shira Medina – Connect Through Music
We're meeting Shira, 35, at her apartment in Rehovot, where she had moved with her partner almost a year ago: record shelves are sharing the room with instruments and sound gear, and nothing really hints at her day job as an English teacher. Growing up surrounded by music from day one, she jumped into the vinyl rabbit hole only in her 20’s. Yet, there’s very little randomness in her modest collection; every record has its value, personal meaning or cherished memory. Every piece of vinyl is a treasure, which she enjoys sharing with anyone willing to listen.
Christine Renee – Hesse Wrote the Permission Slip
It’s hard to miss Christine Renee when scanning a crowd--she exudes a certain level of effortless cool that comes from having lived many lives. From her electric looks and magnetic energy to her spectacular vibe when in action, she’s become what I’d consider a musical chameleon. We met some years back, when I was starting my path in the world of DJing and we’ve been in each others’ orbit for some years, having shared the odd intimate moment that being out and about affords you.
Ellen G | My Lord Sound – Ramat Gan, Israel
Israeli selectress Ellen G may be part of a couple, one half of Tel Aviv reggae DJ/party My Lord Sound, but she has a style all her own.
While Ellen's artistic roots go back to childhood, her reggae art has grown alongside her love of the music and its many subgenres. From her home in Ramat Gan, a few miles outside of Tel Aviv, Ellen designs album covers, posters, flyers and more for reggae artists and her own parties under the banner My Lord Graphics.
Morgan Jesse Lappin
It somehow seemed perfectly normal that Sol, the ghost of an elderly Jewish New Yorker trapped inside a muppet, would join our interview with Morgan Jesse Lappin. Morgan is a multi-hyphenate collage artist, musician and occasional puppeteer, based in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, who brims over with the same gleeful energy as a Jim Henson Studios creation. He has a magpie’s drive towards serendipitous collecting: rescuing records, books, comics and paper ephemera, often plucked right off the streets.
Anya Karmanova & Julia Rodionova – Moscow, Russia
Try and imagine how many records there are in this world. Think of all the places they exist. Record Shops, swap meets, thrift stores, yard sales. Listening rooms, living rooms. Boxes gathering dust in attics and water damage in basements, buried in the backs of closets and storage units. LPs in tote bags and 45s in hard cases, mailers traveling by air. Decades of pressed wax, resting and turning over, recorded, released and collected everywhere.
Most of us will only ever see a small sliver of it all, hardly more than what our little corner of the world contains. We frequent our record shops and thrift stores, we know who’s who of the local collectors, and we stay up on what we know to look for online. Maybe we even get to travel now and then and hit up shops in other cities, or drive through other small towns. But in terms of what’s really out there, the sheer volume of what the world holds, we are left imagining.
Barbie Bertisch & Paul Raffaele
Barbie and Paul are highly ambitious and successful people but extremely humble to the point of self-deprecating, despite being the preeminent documentarians and torch-bearers of the scene. Their current projects include producing the well-curated and beautifully designed (by Paul) zine on a roughly monthly basis for the past four years; hosting monthly sessions of the NYC arm of Classic Album Sundays, an international series of hi-fi vinyl listening events; holding down a weekly radio show at The Lot every Saturday morning from 10-12 (Friday night gig or no)...
Spinna
Vincent Williams, known to the world as DJ Spinna, and I are old friends. I have been lucky enough to work with (and for) him many times over the years. From spinning Brooklyn basement parties together in the ‘90s to all-night mixing sessions at my studio. He has also been something of a record collecting mentor to me, as I’m sure he has been to countless others, directly or indirectly.
Jonny Go Figure
I'm sorry I didn’t pretty this up for you guys,” Jonny Go Figure says, walking into the center of his Flatbush, Brooklyn living room which is littered with records. “I know it looks like a clusterfuck in here, but this is just how it is. And I know where everything is.”
Jonny closes his eyes and thinks of a record he hasn’t played in a while before digging into a stack and pulling out reggae breakbeat LP by Paul Nice and DJ Wisdom called Beef Patty Breaks. He explains the history of the album cover, which features an iconic image of model Sintra Arunte-Bronte in a wet, red Jamaica t-shirt.
Binky Griptite
For more than a decade, Binky Griptite was the voice of the Dap-Kings, the hard-hitting funk and soul eight piece behind the incomparable Sharon Jones. As the band’s guitarist and emcee, Binky would introduce the group as it warmed up, then in the style of James Brown cape man Danny Ray, announce the arrival of “100 pounds of soul dynamite” as Jones danced her way to center stage.
Lexis
Montreal-based collector Alexis Charpentier is nothing if not eclectic. He’s equally comfortable digging for fusion jazz records in Serbia as he is vibing to Quebec hip-hop. With a voracious appetite for musical knowledge, DJ Lexis’ collection spans genre and medium to create the best collection in the world—for him, anyway.