Looking for Music That Hasn’t Been Ruined Yet
At some point I heard enough music to ruin music for myself. Twenty years of consciously tracking everything—following scenes, reading press, building playlists with the dedication of someone whose identity depended on it—and somewhere along the way my own tastes calcified into something immovable. Now I’m stranded between two equally miserable positions: modern music, which feels like variations on things that already happened and were better the first time, and the music of my adolescence, which I’ve played to death and now actively resent. If I have to hear Nirvana one more time I will become a danger to myself and others.
The only escape I’ve found is music so far outside the pop conversation that it feels like a different frequency entirely. Haruomi Hosono. Alessandro Alessandroni. Sonny Rollins in his modal period. Records that carry no nostalgia because they were never part of my cultural air—never on the radio, never in a film trailer, never deployed ironically in an ad for something. Finding them requires real effort, and the effort is part of the point. You can’t stumble onto a Hosono record the way you stumble onto an Ed Sheeran single. You have to go looking.
Which is why Tokyo record stores have taken on an almost mythological quality in my imagination. The city has a well-documented relationship with vinyl—serious, curatorial, mildly obsessive—and the shops that have grown around that culture are the right kind of overwhelming. Walk 3000 have been documenting the best of them in their Tokyo Vinyl series: Waltz, LocoSoul, Dessinee, HMV—each one a different flavour of the same basic promise, which is that somewhere in here is something you’ve never heard that will make everything else feel less exhausting.
I’m aware this is a form of avoidance. The correct response to being tired of music is to find something new you love in the present tense; instead I’m retreating further into obscurity, building a private archive of sounds nobody around me is playing. But there’s real pleasure in it—the record store as the last context in which discovery requires your physical presence, your hands, your willingness to put the needle down on something completely unknown. You can’t algorithm your way to Hosono. You have to be standing in a Tokyo basement at the right moment, a little tired and a little lost, pulling things off shelves on instinct.