Albatross

• DOWNLOAD | CHRIS COCO “Albatross” (King Britt Water For An Angel Mix) Albatross, 2002

My last post had me thinking about the analog versus digital debate at an interesting junction. For the past week, I’ve been transferring my vinyl record collection to MP3 — a time-consuming process that’s given me equal parts excitement and nostalgic woe. I am burning my records to ostensibly sell them: As you can imagine, lugging around twenty boxes of 12-inch singles every time I move is an unacceptable contradiction to practicality and space-planning in such a compact city like New York. I have the space to house these records now; in the future, I may not. So it’s a preemptive strike.

I was born in the 1970s, which means that vinyl and music are, to me, inseparable concepts. My first records were 45-singles; my first album, in 1979, was a revelation. When I first discovered house and techno music in the mid-’90s, vinyl seemed like a tailored medium for the genre: a tactile object, a visual representation of music in the grooves, a big, significant platter. Digging in the record store crates was a sport, a day-long activity that gave me messed-up knees and dusty hands, but also a laundry list of rare and well-worn records that I’ve been revisiting all week. It occurred to me to start another blog dedicated to some of these tracks, but I decided I’d post some of my favorites here instead. If you love it, and I hope you do, find these artists elsewhere: GEMM and Discogs are invaluable resources for the music collector.

This first track is not particularly old or rare as much as just criminally forgotten. U.K. house legend Chris Coco gets remixed by Philadelphia’s King Britt in 2002, and hearing this one again instantly took me back to my time at Primal Records — back when we sold records, before it went all-digital. On nice days, we propped open the plate glass doors and let the music spill out onto Parker Street in Berkeley. Tracks like these lend themselves to be heard outdoors. Amazingly, the neighbors never complained.

Photo: Marcellina