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By

Josiah

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. 

Geoffrey Weiss

I'm not a fan of hyperbole, especially when it comes to records. The “rarest” record of the moment might be one that boxes of it are waiting to be released back into the field. Some of the best “insert-genre-here" albums might be misunderstood by entire generations, and what’s regarded as “the best record of all time” by one person might be seen as a pedigreed relic with little historical importance by another. Such terms get even more watered down when they aim to describe record collectors. Lofty phrases like “deepest,” “best-schooled” and “the Alan Lomax of…” get liberally attached to everyone from hobbyists to the life-long obsessed. The result is hyperbolic noise, which is a shame, because what is there left to say when it’s actually true? There is one person I’ve met about whom I feel compelled to say: Geoffrey Weiss is, to me and to many, the world’s best record collector.

Greg Belson – Los Angeles, CA

Before commercial radio, before the first 78s were pressed, if you wanted to hear music, your best bet might have been to find a church. From rural chapels to urban cathedrals, from hymns to spirituals to chants, church and music have always gone hand in hand, made common not by genre but by purpose.

Logan Melissa

Next to the music itself, is anything more beloved about a record than its cover art? From 45 picture sleeves to LPs, cover art plays a prominent role in a record’s reputation and legacy. Entire books and websites have been devoted to cover art, and in some cases—think Abbey Road or A Dark Side of the Moon—an album’s cover is possibly more recognizable than its music. We put records in frames and hang them on our walls, we print posters and t-shirts out of them, and most of us will admit to buying at least a record or two based entirely on its cover. Indeed, if it were not for cover art, Dust & Grooves might not exist.