Exploring Berlin record shops

Exploring Berlin record shops and unearthing musical value

by Mia Mancini

So it begins …

While the Berlin Wall was still dividing the city, ethnomusicologists found a hole in the Wall through which they could transport phonogram recordings from East to West. Once the Wall fell, youths took over many abandoned buildings along the former wall as well as power plants and radio stations that were used for the war. At present, a former American espionage centre in the Grunewald is used as an outdoor recreational space for enjoying music and learning about the history of the place. These examples nicely situate the context in which music developed as a medium for unification and liberation in society. The desire to give birth to ethnomusicology in Berlin was coupled with a broader social impetus for bridging cultures and tearing down prejudices. At present however, with increasing digitalization and gentrification, what remains of this musical heritage? How does Berlin music culture live on and how is musical value produced? In order to investigate the actuality of this historic connection between music and Berlin, I started by visiting a range of record shops.

Records are an analogue, older form of music consumption which require a physical medium to be heard. Despite increasing digitalization and gentrification, a subgroup of society continues to use and exchange vinyl. You might be thinking that a record is no more than a means through which you can acquire music. While it is true that for some, going to a record shop results in a purchase, this transactional moment does not say anything about why people value music records and what this can teach us about their culture. Musical value has the potential to last beyond the actual listening experience, that is beyond the consuming process. It is this ephemeral quality of music which confirms the insufficiency of a self-contained, transactional analysis.

While the fact remains that record shops must sell each musical piece for monetary value, I found that vinyl culture in Berlin lives on not because of its economic feasibility, but because vinyl users have an intention of preserving the particular musical value they derive from this mode of listening. In fact, most of the Berlin record shops I visited did not look like economically profitable projects. On the contrary, they were relatively small spaces, rarely busy, cash only, located in old houses or buildings cluttered with graffiti and some were even facing threats of eviction due to gentrification. Additionally, the majority of people’s interactions in record shops were made up of things-other-than shopping. From these observations emerged an apparent contradiction: how can cheap digital music be at the behest of commercialization by giants like Spotify while relatively costly music records are enjoyed in non-commercial ways and settings? I found that record listeners are not merely choosing to listen to vinyl to purchase and own them outright. They are seeking a wider experience and it is this active quest which protects the non-commercial nature of vinyl culture, and music culture more broadly. But how did I figure this out? Let’s back-track.

Shop by shop ...

As I entered the record store Audio-in, one of the members of staff walked closer towards the till to greet me, and I noticed he was barefoot, tapping one of his feet on every beat. While I was browsing through records I noticed him jostling around until he found a mechanical artifact which he placed on the table. He gently put on his glasses and a pair of tight black gloves, and then he started cleaning the records with the artifact and a liquid solution, one by one. I asked for a recommendation and commented on the cozy atmosphere of their shop, to which he responded by saying, “it is most important that we provide a gemütlich experience for people”. This unique German word is used to convey a feeling of warmth, belonging, and friendliness. I began to see a system of musical and cultural exchange commanded by human care.

Then, I cycled to Galactic, a record store with no name on the entrance yet expertly organized in the inside. The panoply of ethnic subgenres ranging across progressive Oriental rock, Italian psychedelic art-rock, Jugoslav beat folk and Gabba Hardcore, gave me a feeling that I was walking amid the world’s archive of multicultural music. When I asked the manager why he showcases music of many different cultures, he said: “I find diversity a great thing, we sell everything except the Nazi sh*t which some people sell. My nationality is not so important to me, but the cover and the record being original and clean is so important, that in this sense I am really German”. This was an important moment for me; by learning about music sourcing and vinyl quality I learned about the sociocultural significance of music.

At Latitude, by comparison, a record store in a desolate house, I asked a staff member what he was playing as the track sounded familiar. “It’s because it is a classic from 87!” he exclaimed. When I asked how much it was selling for, he smirked and told me it was actually his own. He started flicking through his box of rusty old records and showed me two other records he had bought the last months. While we talked about the richness of vinyl audio quality, he said, “nothing surpasses vinyl quality, but it needs to be second hand vinyl”. He complained that a lot of counterfeit is being sold in town, which he found sad because it diminished the integrity of music and significantly reduced the audio quality of original music pieces. Buying second hand was a practice which every person I encountered in a record shop mentioned or encouraged. I learned that not only was it was a way of ensuring that the product has high quality audio, but it was also a mechanism for staff to exclude from their inventory any imitations being sold to them for purely commercial purposes.

My interactions with staff prompted conversations which unveiled the physical and cultural value they attach to music records as record listeners. I got to learn about records through their own values, which in turn provided me with an understanding of why record shops in Berlin harbor a particular musical experience for its users that is so intentionally detached from mass scale commercialization. Importantly, I never got to know staff as traditional sales persons. Instead, I got to know them as vinyl experts who openly shared important features of record culture in Berlin. I began to see how this record culture was continually shaped to respond to varying encroaching forces while preserving the integrity of music and society.

For my third visit at Latitude, I brought one of my interlocutors with me; she was by no means a frequent record shop visitor yet by all means a music lover. We browsed through the aisles of different genres and selected our records. Then, she decided to buy a record despite the fact she didn’t own a record player. This endearing ethnographic moment merits mention of Deleuze, who understands time as duration, such that even if the musical material lasts for a defined amount time, it is durable enough “to give sensation the power to exist and be preserved in itself”. For my friend, her appreciation towards the musical material outlived the actual length of the record; she was left with a sensation powerful enough to warrant her buying it – without even being able to listen to it at home.

Reflection and findings

This was a window into my summer ethnographic project in Berlin. In order to understand different forms of musical value, I visited both music venues and record shops as a means of unearthing the lived realities behind the threats posed by commercialization and gentrification that are seeping into the music industry.

Particularly after my excursion into record shops, I realized that the right question to ask was not about the ways people produce musical value in Berlin, but about the ways in which people preserve the authenticity and integrity of music spaces, which they deem indispensable for a good musical experience. Staff and listeners alike were drawn to records because they value them as a safe medium for bringing cultures together and as an impermanent mode of listening. This in turn explained why digital forms have not replaced analogue altogether. Importantly, this is not because vinyl are an economic success but rather because a subcultural group of people value vinyl as an inclusive, omnipresent musical medium.

This is all but conclusive, and perhaps it reads a little optimistic. As a first step my attempt was to trace what people value in analogue vinyl and what this told me about the wider corpus of music culture in Berlin. Therefore, this analysis reflects value, something we think of as inherently good. However, the cultural value people attach to music has arguably been left behind in recent economic developments. In the last month, for example, the record store Latitude was closed down because of investors wanting to quickly resell and redevelop the property. Several music shops and venues continue to have to seek relocation. This means that to some extent, people who continue to value records are performing an act of preservation against intruding economic actors. So, the story continues – will people manage to preserve their music culture or will the pressure of economic giants begin to phase it out? ◆