The Resurrection of VINYL
A Visceral – Audio – Love – Connection
On a Tuesday evening in July, people trickled in from the sticky summer heat to the cool, moodily-lit Suite E Studios in St. Petersburg’s Warehouse Arts District.
The eclectic crew of music enthusiasts came to share tunes of every and any genre. The distinction is that they are all sharing the sounds on vinyl records.
The night entitled Hear Me Out is a communal event where folks can sit on comfy couches and chairs and settle in for an optimal listening experience and richness in tone that only comes from vinyl. It’s been going on for the past year.
While other spots around Tampa Bay offer open turntable nights that would allow DJs to flex tricks and mixing skills on multiple decks, at Hear Me Out single records (one song at a time) are played on the studio’s sound system.
The format is indicative of the resurgence in popularity of vinyl records, spawning a new generation of audiophilic record collectors.
“There’s a kind of counterculture going on, where everything is over digitalized and over processed and some people just want the simple thing,” said Rob Morey, Suite E Studio’s technical director. “The sound, of course, is going to be rich and warm versus the ultra mastered digital stuff that’s just trying to get louder than the other digital stuff.”
A vinyl enthusiast named jro hodge brought a selection of records to Hear Me Out that included Cocteau Twins, Frank Zappa and Elliot Smith. hodge, who uses they/them pronouns, found their penchant for vinyl while working at In Between Days, a “Tokyo-style craft sake bar/izakaya and vinyl house,” which encourages playing records from its collection on its sound system.
“I realized how much I love sharing, like, physical media with people,” they said. “Being able to hold it in your hands and having something tangible when someone asks, ‘what song are you playing?’ and you’re like, it’s this!”
Speaking of, Tangible Record Shop is Suite E founder Austen Van Der Bleek’s small curated collection of vinyl available at the studio. Van Der Bleek gets multiple wholesale copies of the same record – mainly dance music, but also local and regional artists – and sells the ones he doesn’t use in his sets or as a store copy.
“I was already spending time looking for records, and it’s cost effective, kind of like an addiction or like a hack,” he said, because selling extras pays for his one.
“I’m only interested in selling things that I like and believe in and and play, and only a few copies to not oversaturate the area,” he said.”
Van Der Bleek started playing vinyl when he began DJing in college. He found mentors who had always played vinyl, even with the invention of digital format DJ platforms like CDJs or laptops.
“I don’t fetishize or romanticize vinyl like a lot of people do,” he said. But he adopted his mentors’ school of thought and always has both turntables and digital at his events at the studio.
“It’s a really expensive habit,” he said. “It’s very time consuming. It takes up a lot of space, but it’s good for your health. Getting away from the screens and the digital stuff, can be more of a flow state, both in the performance because it’s a little more unforgiving, and then also when you go to pull records for a gig, it’s physically digging around using your spatial memory to try to figure out where something was.
“It’s a lot different than sitting at a computer and going through a bunch of ones and zeros and text. It’s just more visceral.”
While Hear Me Out is a listening lounge, Van Der Bleek said he doesn’t discourage the conversations that naturally occur with the exchange of music.
A chill listening experience in which people could still hear each other talk was what Matt Kaye was aiming for when he opened Easy Tiger Hi-Fi Lounge in St. Pete in April. The swanky lounge with a creative, potent cocktail menu was designed with a state of the art soundsystem and DJ setup for vinyl records.
Music director DJ Casper said Kaye consulted him when he was building the space, with everything geared to “give you the perfect listening experience” where the theme is “good music” and runs the gamut of musical genres.
Casper programs the lineup for Easy Tiger, with DJ “all vinyl sets” are often included on promos to entice people to engage with the music. It’s common to see other DJs show up to check out the headliner, making it a clubhouse of sorts.
While Casper is also versed on digital technology and gear, “nothing is going to sound better than the needle on the record.”
No matter what he’s playing on, or what genre, he wants to “give people a really good sonic experience.”
And with that, especially when it’s hip hop or dance music on the decks, the small area near the DJ booth often becomes a dance floor full of people.
“Good music and a good soundsystem make you move,” Casper said. •
