The Records Nobody Else Could Find
Vinyl collectors have always had my respect and my envy in roughly equal measure. The deck, the cleaning ritual, the obsessive hunt for a specific pressing—it’s a relationship to music that streaming has made genuinely hard to remember. Music arrives now like weather: constant, ambient, impossible to hold. You don’t seek it out. It just washes over you, and then it’s gone, replaced by the next thing the algorithm decided you needed.
Vinyl resists that. You pick a record, you search for it—in shops, at flea markets, on import sites that specialize in pressings from labels that no longer exist. You don’t drag it into a playlist. You find the best copy you can, carry it home, lower the needle. And then it’s just you and the music, with nothing else competing for attention. That’s not nostalgia. That’s a different relationship to sound, and it produces a different kind of listening.
Zag Erlat—who works between London and Istanbul under the name My Analog Journal—has built exactly that kind of collection, and his specialty is the music I keep coming back to: Japanese city pop from the seventies and eighties. I’ve spent enough time in city pop forums to know how hard some of these records are to find. Certain pressings of Taeko Onuki, Marlene, Ruriko Ohgami surface occasionally on Japanese auction sites, get bid up immediately, and disappear again. Zag has them. He plays them on camera, and the YouTube channel is one of the genuinely nicest places on the internet right now.
City pop is strange music to love if you didn’t grow up with it. It’s smooth almost to the point of frictionlessness—polished production, sophisticated chord progressions, lyrics I don’t understand about city nights and summer drives. But it hits something specific. Maybe it’s the density of feeling packed into a genre built around surface. Maybe it’s the distance. You can hear how much those musicians wanted their city to feel like a film, and for a moment in the late Showa era, it actually did. Zag’s recordings capture that—the warmth of the vinyl, the slight surface hiss, the sense that you’re hearing something that was always meant to be heard this way. His Patreon is there if you want to keep it going.