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DUST & GROOVES IN VICE MAGAZINE

Dust & Grooves in VICE magazine

VICE’s music blog Noisey shows Dust & Grooves some love! Off the heels of the release of his new book Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting, photographer Eilon Paz speaks with VICE’s writer Brett Koshkin about his project.

Below is an excerpt from the interview feature, and you can read the full article here:

Behind the Black Crack:
An Interview with Eilon Paz, the Man Who Photographed Record Collections All Over the World
By Brett Koshkin

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When photographer Eilon Paz moved to New York in 2008 from his native Israel, he didn’t anticipate that year’s crippling recession or that it would leave him and millions of other Americans out of work. New in town, unemployed and with nothing better to do, he started hanging around local record stores and blowing what little cash he did have on the black crack.

Paz fell into a world of documenting acerbic and eccentric collectors and DJs that spend their free time going through hurricane-wrecked disaster zones in search of records that could wake the dead or move grown men to tears. Soon, he realized the photos he’d been snapping of people and their collections felt appealingly voyeuristic, peering into the peculiar private lives and passions of these collectors. He took this inspiration, packed a suitcase, and ventured around the world to document the lives of music lovers—hopefully illustrating how music moves throughout humanity.

He photographed record dealers in West Africa to various hip-hop producers’ collection in Japan. Seriously. Dude went everywhere. Everyone from Gilles Peterson to the Gaslamp Killer to Joe Bussard and what is likely the world’s greatest 78RPM collection in Maryland. The end result of his conquest is Dust & Grooves – Adventures in Record Collecting, a 416-page hardcover behemoth the size of a phonebook. Noisey sat down with Paz in a Brooklyn coffee shop to talk about the book, retired Tuskegee Airmen turned record dealers, and just how you much you can learn about a person through their record collection.

Noisey: How did this whole thing start for you?

Eilon Paz: I was unemployed and wanted to do something productive and came up with this personal project to kill my time. Then I read the story in The Village Voice about African record collector and DJ, Frank Gossner and that just blew my mind. We met up and I told him I had this idea to photograph record collectors and stores. He took me around to meet people.

I then visited the now-defunct Tropicalia in Furs store where I met the owner Joel who immediately opened up his back room and started pulling stuff. That was my first post that I did on my blog. It was an instant response from people saying wow this is great.

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Why do you think people reacted so strongly to seeing other people’s record collections?

Usually these collections are hidden. These are their prized possessions—their trophies. I wasn’t even aware of that when I started out. I was just interested in nice photos for a project. But immediately, I realized this was beyond that. Also the fact that I wasn’t dealing with big names. Just people like you and me who are doing amazing work by collecting and archiving music. They’re saving our heritage in a way. Some of these collectors look for really rare records that you probably won’t see again or put together reissues like Frank. They have an important roll in preserving a culture but they’re behind the scenes.

Why do you think it’s records that resonate so much with people as opposed to CDs?

Beyond the nostalgic element, the size of the artwork, it’s more tangible and tactile. It’s a cliché to say but it also has that warm feeling and crackle. It doesn’t sound that perfect. I think that in a way it makes people connect to it on a different level and more so than CDs. We lost touch without any physical contact with music. It shrank with CDs and then disappeared all together with MP3s.

There’s something about making it a little harder on yourself to get music, then you appreciate it more—to go hunt for it and pay money instead of downloading or streaming it. You remember much better and you appreciate it more.

So it’s a more rewarding listening experience?

Definitely, you ask people what was the first record they bought and they’ll know. But ask them if they remember their first download, nobody knows.

…read more

Brett Koshkin’s first record was Falco 3 and he is somehow not ashamed. He’s on Twitter — @bkoshkin

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