If not for the loping graffiti-art snarling across the door frame and the small sign of printed-paper, lacquer and wood you'd probably miss it - the tiny record store half hidden down a Newtown side-street.
Death Ray Records.
Posters hang in the windows: psyched-out B-movie homage and gig posters, just starting to yellow at the edges. The store must have opened only recently. Their hours seem pretty casual. There is a lot of '-ish' printed on their handwritten sign. They were closed when I first arrived at the door - despite it being just after 2pm. The guy who mans the counter (and probably owns the joint) had presumably popped out for a bite to eat or to run some errand. They'd never need more than one staff member on...probably.
I stood over the road to get out of the screaming brilliance of the mid-afternoon sunshine - uncharacteristically bright for a day that was choked with mist at both dawn and dusk.
The wall opposite the shop was painted over and over with the message: 'Before I die I want to...' with spaces left for members of the public to fill in with their hopes, aspirations, and curios from their own personal bucket lists. But this is Newtown, most of the spaces were filled in with chalk-scrawled tags, obscenities and unintelligible scribbles that probably were never intended to be words. Oddly, no one had drawn a great big picture of a cock. Maybe that'll come later. There were a couple of folks taking it seriously - and a bit of anti-government ranting (to my relief).
I'm not sure what I want to do before I die. That's a whole other blog post waiting to happen.
Newtown.
If you've ever lived in Wellington, New Zealand you'll have heard of it. It's a large suburb lying not far from the heart of the city. The population is mostly made up of students (although fewer than in Te Aro as the rent is much more expensive), recent immigrants and the psychologically vulnerable (due to the proximity to Wellington hospital). It has probably the finest range of restaurants and eateries in any of Wellington's suburbs. It is sprawling, grimy and wonderful - clustered in along one side by thinly forested hills and adorned with rickety wooden houses; it is boisterous and exuberant and frequently a little awful. For a while you could buy a T-shirt bearing the message "Newtown, it's a bit shit".
There is a slight gang presence and a lot of visible mental illness.
In Newtown, I have been threatened and had obscenities snarled at me by a dude almost too drunk to stand on one occasion. He seemed to want my groceries. He had very ugly teeth. On another occasion a gentleman informed me that I had a very fine jacket and that I could either sell it to him or he and his friend would take it off me, presumably by force. The jacket in question used to belong to my father - it's an old corduroy number in a rusted, autumnal shade and I am very fond of it. I declined. He grinned and told me "fair enough". Then he assured me that it was a cool jacket and left me to it.
Newtown streets frequently smell of the raw saltiness of fish; the rich scents of cumin and coriander; and hash smoke. The odd empty shop window has been converted into a mini-gallery for artistic installations. I've worked in the area for a long time now. It's a great suburb.
But I live somewhere else.
Anyway, what the hell was I talking about?
Oh, yeah. A few minutes later the guy re-opened Death Ray and I poured in, ducking around the streamers of garbage bag that hang in the doorway. The store is one of those very NZ joints. Disheveled chic. Furniture sourced from junk sales, op-shops and hell, possibly even skips. Every piece mismatched and worn. A glass case along one wall looks to be filled with old slides or some such bric-a-brac. Every purchase must be written carefully in an exercise book - for record keeping. Posters crawl up the walls. The small room is crowded with wooden racks full of vinyl - divided into humorous genre classifications; some of the jackets scuffed and dog-eared, others brand-new and plastic-sealed. Canvases painted with bright scrawls of graffiti-art hang along one wall. Music plays loud, a rough beat.
It is a goddamn cool place; like the living room of every flat you secretly wished you lived in when you were a teenager. Or perhaps that's just me.
The scrambled student aesthetic makes me think of Java - a café that existed a frigging millennia ago in Christchurch - it was gone, I think, even before the earthquake turned the whole block into a churned heap of shattered masonry.
Man, I loved that place. Lots of memories, I guess. We used to hang there - my Christchurch friends and I - I'd buy whatever I could afford (which usually amounted to maybe one beverage). The whole place was decked out in unmatching and unmatchable furniture; a papier mache fish with a human face swung from one of the light fittings; a re-used and re-shaped bicycle had been turned into the staff-only gate. The drinks came in the kind of heavy, old glass jars that everybody's grandparents used for stewing fruit. Java also had the goddamn rickety-est stairs of any place I've ever encountered - every step would have them trembling and shuddering under your feet.
They basically pioneered the classic look that most folks associate with cafes in NZ today - though it has to be said, for most joints it's probably more a budgetary decision than an aesthetic one.
Anyway, standing in Death Ray surrounded by all that old vinyl and student loucheness, well, it brought it all back. That warm golden buzz of recollection - all those memories (good, bad, indifferent; it doesn't matter when it's all sepia-toned and autumn-hazed; bathed in the golden, magic light of a thirty-something guy's nostalgia). I dug through one of the vinyl racks, not sure why. It's a pointless act for me - I don't own a record player.
One of the categories was labeled 'Bogan Rock'. Nice.
In it I found a vinyl press of Ozzy Osbourne's 'The Ultimate Sin'. That was either the second or third album I ever bought (on cassette, no less). That cover, man - Ozzy's face on a looming demonic body rising from a pool of magma, wreathed in flames. A mushroom cloud scorches the sky. Before him stands a woman; her hair writhing blackly, her eyes red and huge. I bought my copy from a little shop in Golden Bay (where I lived at the time).
I think it was a video store - though they'd extended their ambitions to a small rack of audio stuff. Back then, if you wanted to sample something before you bought it you had to ask at the counter real nice. Maybe then they'd look into your child eyes and figure that you'd probably saved up a lot of lawn-mowing money to be able to afford this but you needed a taste first, so they'd slap it onto the cassette deck they had set up behind the counter and anyone who was in the store at the time would be treated to a few minutes of whatever the hell it was (and in my slightly later, harder metal years that might mean Sepultura's 'Arise' or Obituary - real ugly, death metal shit, man). I remember being phased at first by 'The Ultimate Sin' tape. Ozzy's voice sounded freaking odd - that strained, fractured tenor - but all the more compelling for its oddness. 'The Ultimate Sin' is primarily about the horror of nuclear war, I think. I should see if that bad boy is still in print.
Incidentally, the very first album I ever bought was Twisted Sister's 'Stay Hungry'; it was eight bucks from the World Record Music Club (or whatever it was called). With them, the deal was every couple of months they'd post out an updated catalogue. You'd go through and look at the artists and album titles, weigh up the prices. Then you'd carefully fill out the little order form in the back and beg, emotionally-blackmail or otherwise negotiate with your parents to write you a cheque. You'd post all that paperwork away and in about a month or so your cassette would arrive in a cardboard mailer sleeve. And this would make you very happy.
Kids, this is the way the world worked before there was the internet.
The possibly-second album I ever bought was Alice Cooper 'Raise Your Fist and Yell' - ten bucks from an appliance store in Motueka.
Man, I was such a junior bogan.
There's very few CD stores left in Wellington now. Actually there's none since the independently-run, niche-market stores emphasize the vinyl aspect of their trade (Rough Peel Music...and another one whose name I forget). There used to be plenty: Marbecks, The CD & DVD Store, ECM, Sounds, Real Groovy. Independent and chain alike. Now only Slow Boat remains - that long-hallowed bastion of independent music sales in Wellington, with it's faded cutouts and record sleeves in the window display. Its interior heavy with the smell of dust and rotting paper.
The market shifted, internet sales soared (and by 'internet sales' I guess I mostly mean downloads). Brick-and-mortar enterprises no longer held quite the same allure for the majority of the populace - the vinyl obsessives, of course, remained faithful. Then JB HiFi opened a branch here and devoured what remained of the market. Now you probably expect me to rend my clothes and smear my face with ashes - wailing and gnashing about the whole raw deal.
But...
But...
See, I effing love JB HiFI.
And, with that same passion inverted: I loathed all the stores it supplanted.
All of them.
They were over-priced: thirty-five bucks for a wide-release Australian-press CD - I don't frigging think so; we're not talking limited-release, special edition, bonus disc territory here. Their selections frankly sucked. And if you tried to import anything through them it would take weeks to arrive and then stood a good chance of setting you back fifty bucks or so.
Then there's the small matter of disc storage and security in NZ. Instead of installing a security sensor on the door and tagging all the CDs in stock, the majority of these stores would remove the discs from their cases (y'know, the ones whose sole purpose is to protect the disc in the first place), slip said disc into a paper wallet and file it away with all the others in a big metal filing cabinet behind the counter. This meant your brand-new CD would most likely be badly scratched, fingerprinted, grimy and covered in surface dust before you bought it. There was also the possibility that the person at the counter might be unable to locate the disc as someone else had filed it incorrectly. And that was just how things were. The longer the store had the disc in stock, the worse its condition would be. Some wound up just goddamn filthy.
If you've read my 'Anxiety Always' post, you'll know this is kind of a deal-breaker for me.
There was also something relentlessly depressing about those stores: the digipaks would be battered and worn, the jewel cases so scratched that the plastic appeared milky; opaque as a cataract-blinded eye. Witnessing the slow death of Real Groovy was unpleasant and perhaps inevitable: its shelves hollowing out, sale after sale announced (and they were still mostly overpriced).
And then JB HiFi came along, with its wonderfully soulless efficiency, its security guards and sensors, its plastic-sealed everything. Mint condition CDs: a vaster selection than any other store had ever offered and at a significantly lower cost per item. Oh sure, there's no sense of community; no random aficionado at the counter to recommend some new indie band that they really think you might dig. Everything is polite, perfect and slightly impersonal - bathed in fluorescent light.
Everything is exactly how I like it.
But, I'm still thrilled to find Death Ray Records - a little store that mostly sells something I'm not going to buy (second-hand records; useless to me on two levels).There is one other thing though...
Death Ray Records stock a small assortment of brand-new CDs. Independent NZ releases - the kind of stuff that JB HiFi doesn't carry. Death Ray also leave the CDs in their original packaging where they belong. And they charge $20-$25 per title. They had a title I was particularly keen on finding:
'Mechatronics', the latest release from Wellington-based experimental trio The All-Seeing Hand.
The All-Seeing Hand are an outfit I simply had to investigate. With a line-up comprised of a drummer; a keyboardist/turntablist; and a vocalist trained in the technique of Mongolian throat-singing, you know they're going to be something special, profound and utterly different. Their style could perhaps be described as electro-doom metal/avant jazz...erm, experimental. It is intense, densely rhythmic and driving - a swirling mist of samples, electronic effects and seemingly-impossible vocalizations, propelled forward by percussion - both from the drums and the altered vocals themselves. It is also oddly, perversely catchy. And it is a challenge to the norm - a gauntlet thrown in the face of mediocrity and blandness.
But this isn't going to be a review (that is something I'll have to come back to later); although if you're keen: Simon Sweetman's review on his Off the Tracks blog is worth reading (I've no love for Sweetman - see my post on Lorde's album 'Pure Heroine' - but in his review of 'Mechatronics' he speaks the truth, and speaks it well). Needless to say, The All-Seeing Hand are another worthy entry into the pantheon of surprisingly challenging, engaging and compelling bands based in Wellington, alongside such names as Beastwars, Porcelaintoy, the Nudge and Orchestra of Spheres. Also, the artwork on 'Mechatronics' is superb; it really captures the mesmeric and synapse-scorching landscape within which the trio operate.
So thank you Death Ray Records, mostly just for existing at all.
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