Thomas MacMillan Photo
When Matias Anaya got into collecting vinyl LPs this year, it was already too late to shop at Cutler’s. Anaya found a new place to pick up albums like Herbie Hancock’s Mwandishi and Art Blakey’s Moanin’—and discovered that the vinyl trade is not dead in New Haven.
Anaya (pictured) found them in a record bin at the Atticus bookstore. The bookstore/cafe is now a bookstore/cafe/record store.
The Chapel Street store has begun stocking a steadily increasing inventory of LPs. The record bin has gone from about 40 titles to some 200, according to Jill LaBrack, Atticus’ music buyer.
Atticus’ choice to sell vinyl is part of a nationwide trend. Even as music becomes increasingly digitized and songs are less often purchased as part of physical albums, people are increasingly turning to old-fashioned analog LPs as their medium of choice. More and more people are buying records, and record labels are releasing new or re-issuing old music on vinyl.
Meanwhile, amid the boom in records, New Haven no longer has a record store. Cutler’s, the last neighborhood music shop standing, closed its doors on Broadway in the summer of 2012.
For New Haven’s vinyl enthusiasts, the options in town are few. Urban Outfitters offers a selection of new and classic albums on record, along with frames to hang them on your wall. And thrift shops sometimes offer the remains of vinyl collections from years gone by.
LaBrack said Atticus now aims to help fill the gap.
LaBrack, who’s 44, worked at Cutler’s very briefly 10 years ago. She managed a Barnes & Noble music department in Westport for seven years. Four years ago, she started working at Atticus.
She wanted the bookstore to have a music section, but “we didn’t really want to do it when Cutler’s was in business.” Atticus is a locally-owned small business; so was Cutler’s. Atticus didn’t want to cut into Cutler’s market, LaBrack said.
With Cutler’s gone, LaBrack started stocking albums this spring. So far, Atticus is selling new albums only — current releases and re-issues. LaBrack said the store might start stocking used albums, if sales take off.
LaBrack said she stocks “every genre except classical” because there are “zero new classical releases on vinyl.” A recent visit to the bin found albums by artists including Duke Ellington, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Sonic Youth, and Fleet Foxes, along with more obscure selections like Mahmoud Awad and Harry Robinson’s soundtrack for the 1971 horror film Twins of Evil.
A number of the albums feature clever labels (pictured) written by LaBrack, offering insight and encouragement for tentative buyers. One on Awad’s record helpfully identifies him as Ethiopia’s greatest jazz vocalist. On Sonic Youth’s The Destroyed Room, the sticker laments the break-up of band founders Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore, who once had a fairy-tale indie-rock romance.
“We’re trying to get the shopper in who really cares about music,” LaBrack said by phone from a vacation in Georgia. “If you’re buying vinyl, you really care about music.”
Buying a record is a commitment to an experience, she said. “You’re buying a vinyl record, it means you have to go home and listen to it.” You have to have a turntable and a hi-fi; you can’t play it on your phone or from your computer’s speakers. You can’t skip tracks with the push of a button. You can’t shuffle songs. You have to flip the record over at the end of the side.
LaBrack’s list might once have been a catalog of the medium’s drawbacks. But not to vinyl connoisseurs. They have grown weary of the modern world’s all-consuming quest for digitized convenience, which has reduced music to a “virtual” experience of aural fragments, promulgated through tinny speakers and tiny earbuds.
“It’s really a shame that a place like New Haven doesn’t have its own record store,” LaBrack said. Seeing records at Atticus “stops people in their tracks,” she said.” They’re like, ‘Holy cow, I can’t believe this is here.’”
Part of the response is due to the physicality of records, LaBrack said. “Personally, I know for me, you’re looking at art.” Vinyl LPs each come with a piece of one-foot-by-one-foot visual art: the album cover. You don’t get that in the iTunes store, LaBrack said.
“There’s something to actually holding items,” LaBrack said. “I feel the same way about books.”
Then, of course, there’s the audio quality. “There is something to that,” LaBrack said. “It sounds a little warmer. If you have a high-end stereo, it’s very obvious that vinyl is better.”
LaBrack said that even Steve Jobs, creator of the device that did away with music recordings as physical objects, listened to vinyl at home, according to Neil Young.
Having a record collection is a way to express yourself, to show people who you are and what’s important to you, LaBrack said. “I don’t think that people’s lives should be filled with stuff, but it’s important that when family and friends come over they can see my personality.”
Building a collection, however, isn’t cheap. At least, not if you’re buying new. The records at Atticus are priced between $15.98 and $27.98, LaBrack said. Anything over about $22 comes on thicker vinyl, which is higher quality, she added.
On Friday afternoon, Anaya, a 21-year-old Yale junior, thumbed through the bin and examined an Art Blakey album. “I was just in here yesterday” he said. “I bought a Herbie Hancock album.”
“They’ve got a great selection,” Anaya said of Atticus. “Things that people should have.”
Anaya said he only got into vinyl a few months ago, after he heard the difference in quality from friends with turntables. Records sound “warmer,” he said. “They sound — ” he made motions with his hands “ — clearer. It sounds more like a band.”
A lot of electronic music from the ‘70s sounds “more organic” on vinyl, Anaya said. “I bought some Kraftwerk the other day. It sounded great.”
“I love the idea of having a collection,” he said. “A physical collection.”
LaBrack said she hopes Atticus’ record stock keeps expanding, to become a full-fledged music department. “That would be my dream.”