Record Filing

The world of record collecting – a once necessary component for all DJs – is often shrouded in clandestine professional nerdery. What filing system do all-wax DJs use? Genre? Year? Bpms? Vibes? Harold Heath goes behind the vinyl curtain and discovers that organising records can do funny things to people…

The very best vinyl DJs often have a secret, double identity. They may coolly swan around the world’s most glamorous venues, bringing joy and community via the medium of wax, taking their audience on transcendent musical adventures like the badass party-heroes they are, but also, they’re essentially audio librarians. In fact, the best vinyl DJs are often great big steaming hot nerds.

And this is in no way an insult. Professional nerdery and high-level geekery are important aspects of DJing. In the heat of the party, DJs wield their encyclopaedic recall of track names, remixes, edits, re-edits, bootlegs, cover versions, labels, genres and bpms, using whatever idiosyncratic cerebral cross-referencing filing system they possess to somehow arrive at the perfect selection for a particular time and place. A DJ’s nerd factor is their superpower.

For most digital DJs, organising a music collection is easy. It merely involves a handful of USB sticks, a few multiterabyte hard drives and a water-cooled 10-kilowatt server with intelligent lighting, friendly security and free ice pops. But how do vinyl DJs organise their tunes? In alphabetical or label order? Do they sort their Lo-Fi Boho Beats To Relax To by artist name or song title? And what happens if they develop Slamnesia and can’t remember where their Scottish DJ/producer duo 12-inches are? Much like the professional stamp collector or rare crisp packet aficionado, some kind of filing system is essential for a pro vinyl DJ.

Enter the dusty world of the record collector, a world of paper inner sleeves, cardboard outer sleeves and, if you’re some kind of Marie Antoinette of DJing, an additional polyurethane outer sleeve: ooh get you, la-di-da, let them eat Japanese imports etc. Vinyl collecting is all about the numbers: 7-inch, 12-inch, 180 grammes, zero friends, only joking, you’ve got loads of friends, they’ve just been really busy lately. And more numbers: 45rpm, 33rpm, three new back injuries every time you move house and 1,000 times your partner points out that there’s not enough time left in your life to listen to all your records.

Founder of the album listening event Classic Album Sundays, DJ, producer, radio host, audiophile and worldleading vinyl nerd Colleen Murphy currently has around 10,000 records in her collection. Colleen employs an organisation system that is essentially alphabetical by artist, but with several genre sub-divisions as well as a current record bag of around 500 tunes.

“It makes sense, but only to me!” she confides. “It’s filed alphabetically, with rock, pop and jazz albums mainly lumped together, but then there’s certain things I will separate out like soundtracks and classical. I have a little Asian section, then I have an African section and a Latin/ Brazilian section, because that’s stuff I might need to access together.” Colleen abandoned trying to create a Balearic section as organising a genre defined by its very genre-lessness is a task nearly as difficult as not mentioning you own a rotary mixer when you own a rotary mixer. 156_DISCO_POGO

Photo: Adam Dewhurst

A genuine sense of both awe and envy enters Colleen’s voice as she recounts the first time she entered John Peel’s legendary record room and realised that he had a reference card system where every piece of vinyl on his shelves – organised chronologically in the order that he got them – had a personal ID number and corresponding reference card.

There then follows a brief conversational diversion as Colleen and Disco Pogo discuss a potential new TV game show where vinyl collectors have to guess the weight of a record just by holding it. She reckons she’d probably do pretty well, but is keen to point out that “just because a record is 180 grammes doesn’t mean it’s audiophile – maybe it affects it a bit, but it’s really down to how it’s mixed and mastered.”

Finally, Disco Pogo wonders if Colleen has ever worn surgical gloves to handle vinyl and is relieved to find out that she hasn’t – she’s a DJ nerd, not a DJ weirdo – but Colleen Murphy does not touch the surface of the vinyl and neither should you.

DJ/producer Matthew ‘Bushwacka!’ Benjamin has the kind of healthy, well-adjusted attitude towards his vinyl collection that befits someone who has recently retrained as a therapist. Due to regular pruning, gifting his son 25 boxes when he moved back to the UK, and recently selling several thousand, his collection currently stands at a streamlined 3,000, down from its 90s peak of around 12,000. Throughout lockdown Bushwacka! did his Vinyl Love Affair live DJ streams from his home, going through his entire collection, a process that along with his recent house move has thoroughly shuffled his collection up. While this might sound like a minor inconvenience, DJs with disorganised collections can become overtired and irritable. You can support them with a reassuring ‘big shout out going out’ or by offering to sort out their picture discs, and you may find it helpful to have an emotional support MC on standby.

Back in the 90s, label manager Lewis Copeland helped keep Bushwacka!’s vinyl organised, cataloguing it alphabetically by label. “I would know where the Strictly Rhythm, Nervous or Nu Groove was,” he tells us “and that way worked quite well at the time because there weren’t a million labels. Now I find it very difficult to catalogue my newest stuff. Even by genre, it’s almost impossible. I’ll buy a record and it’s got an electro track, a deep house track and a techno track and I’m like: ‘What do I do with it?’”

The answer was to develop an idiosyncratic but practical filing system: “Now I’ve got a breakbeat section, an electro section, an old hip hop section, then I’ve got album sections and my 1988 to 1990 sections too,” he continues. “I’ve got shelves which are just my own productions, there’s quite a lot of them and then I’ve got a 1996 to 2002 tech house shelf, and I’ve got a shelf of stuff that I’ve bought in the last year or two.” OK, so essentially it’s an idiosyncratic but practical filing system that mainly consists of putting his tunes on shelves, but it works for him. Kind of.

Disco Pogo wonders if Bushwacka! could lay his hands on a particular record with ease. There’s a long pause as he considers, before giving us a resounding: “No!” But he’s also got a couple of very handy vinyl filing tricks up his DJ sleeves: “I used to get sent lots of white labels so I bought smiley face stickers with different expressions and would choose the expression that was most similar to the face that I was likely to pull when I was listening to that record.” He pauses to perform a perfect stank-face, that expression you make when a tune is just sick. “I also used to draw something on the white label that represented what was going on in this record and that really helped me to know what it was too.” Nice. So when you’re out crate digging,

keep your eyes peeled for second-hand white labels with neatly drawn stank-faces on them, they might have been played at the last night of The End.

DJ, promoter and vinyl collector Poly-Ritmo, who also runs the Basket of Light festival, has a streamlined vinyl collection made up of a potent blend of Brazilian, Latin, SA House, French Caribbean music, soul, disco and more, with a filing system based on genre and geography. “I have a broken beat section, a house section and sections for garage, drum’n’bass, jazz, disco, soul and funk,” she explains. “My Caribbean section is split into French Caribbean, soca and reggae, then there’s my Brazilian records and I’ve got my 7-inches separate too.” She’s also a fan of the popular but uncelebrated filing technique, the ‘current-faves-piledup-on-the-floor’ method, and exhibits a maverick streak when opening records in cellophane, opting for the effective but risky finger-rip approach. “It’s quite easy to get a paper cut – but then, I live life on the edge,” she laughs. How someone organises their records can be reflected in their DJing style. Colleen’s filing system is set up to trigger inspiration. “It’s organised so that I can find things,” she says, “but also so that if I’m flicking through I remember things that I haven’t played in a while,” which tallies with her DJ approach which she describes as “a combination of turning people onto stuff they may not know, but also playing loved favourites.”

Poly-Ritmo’s carefully selected collection is set up for easy access to lesser-known corners of the musical world, her DJ sets providing listeners with a sonic map to unfamiliar musical places. Bushwacka! would always return from a vinyl DJ gig with “paper cuts, with promos that are just in inner sleeves that get ripped that then don’t end up back in the box in the right place - yeah, it was messy. I was using three decks, and I was quite, you know [mimes manically flicking through a record box mid-gig], full on.”

His vinyl organisation methods – slightly random overlapping sections and sub-sections, sorted variously by label, genre, era or whim, augmented by emoji stickers and stanktoons – all make sense in the context of his full-pelt, high-energy, headband-hedonist brand of DJing.

Selector, radio host and DJ Coco Maria estimates that her collection of Brazilian, Caribbean, Central and South American vinyl comes in at “more than 100 and less than 10,000”. There’s no alphabetical or chronological order for her wax because she subscribes to perhaps the most classic of all DJ filing systems: “I’ve tried by genre, I’ve tried by countries,” she tells us, “but the organisation system that works best for me is by vibes.” The vibes system has its strengths and weaknesses. On the downside, as Coco observes, “sometimes I realise that maybe I put a record in the wrong vibe because I was feeling different that day and then I can’t find it.” But this is easily balanced out on the plus side by, well, vibes.

In contrast, some vinyl collectors are truly committed to exacting standards of filing and extremely high levels of geekery. In the 90s and early-2000s, Neil Macey ran a vinyl distribution company which at its peak had around a quarter of a million records in its warehouse, obviously requiring an effective filing system. Neil tells us his filing game was so tight that he could have taken us to within one inch of any particular record, which no doubt qualified him for the job of organising Pete Tong’s 20,000-strong vinyl collection. So our first question for Neil was simple: did it all go a bit Pete Tong ha, ha, no, not really. We wanted to know how he did it.

“I used the [London record shop] Music and Video Exchange system and Discogs,” he told us. “You sticker this pile of a hundred records 1 to 100 and they go on the shelf 160_DISCO_POGO

Photo: Tuca Milan

Photo: Theo Ammann

numbered 1 to 100. And on Discogs you can enter the item number in one of their fields and that’s your personal reference number. So I entered all of Pete’s collection into the Discogs database.”

With this system, each record has a sticker with its own personal number (the sticker goes on an additional outer plastic sleeve, not on the actual record sleeve, we’re not barbarians). Then when you look for a record in your Discogs collection, it gives you the number and boom, you can go find it. So if, for example, you wanted to find every record you own where DJ Khaled makes a guest appearance shouting his own name, you don’t need to remember the name of each hapless artist who enlisted his talents, you can just search your collection using Discogs’ filters and then instantly find what you’re looking for. It’s like a digital version of John Peel’s reference cards.

This system also means that aside from keeping your vinyl in numerical-sticker order, there’s literally no other organisation needed. So a 90s New York garage record that you only kept because of your weird flute mix fixation might be next to some early-2000s minimal that you remain inexplicably attached to, next to a DJ Khaled rarity. I know right, utterly bonkers. But it works.

And how would Neil fair as a contestant on our imaginary TV game show? “I’ve got a really good feel for how heavy 20 kilos is, as that’s about how much 100 records weighs,” he tells us, instantly inspiring a Guess-how-many-recordsare-in-this-box-from-its-weight round. Coco is extremely confident in her vinyl-weight-identifying skills, telling us: ”Yes, actually I’m very proud of this – I can carry it, hold it and I’m like: ‘Hmm, this is 180 grammes!’ – and it is.”

Bushwacka! carefully considers if he’d be able to identify how much a record weighs by holding it before acknowledging that he may have had issues with the weight of substances in the past but those days are long gone. It feels like this game show (working titles include ‘The Weakest Sync’, ‘Strictly Rhythm Come Dancing’ or ‘House Under the Hammer’) pitch is really starting to shape up.

Vinyl collectors are split into two groups, those who double lock and those who don’t. Double locking is when you ensure the open end of the inner sleeve is at the top so that the record doesn’t fall out of the outer sleeve. Colleen, Neil and Poly-Ritmo are all staunch adherents, but when asked if he double locks his vinyl Bushwacka! admits: “No, the opposite. I put it in the way that I will be able to then access the vinyl.” And, sounding more like the Bart Simpson of record filing every minute, Bushwacka! doesn’t use extra polythene outer sleeves either: “No, I’m more likely to throw those away actually!”

What about shelves? Neil and Poly-Ritmo reckon that the DJ’s choice, the Ikea KALLAX is pretty good (‘KALLAX’ is the ancient Scandinavian word for ‘B2B all-vinyl set’). Colleen prefers a custom setup, Coco opts for the wonderfully rustic old-fruit-boxes-as-shelves option while Bushwacka! also goes for the KALLAX, not only for their practicality but more importantly because you can fit a cup of tea on them too.

So what have we learnt from all this? That how a DJ organises their vinyl can reflect their DJing approach? That there are unsurprisingly few jokes about how to file a vinyl collection? That Bushwacka! thoroughly deserves that exclamation mark at the end of his name? That Ikea should probably buy some ad-space in the next Disco Pogo as a thank-you for this piece? And that I’m pitching a DJ game show to Netflix and am currently looking for financial backers and brand influencers? Perhaps. Perhaps we’ve learnt all that and more – but maybe the real treasure is all the records we bought along the way.