Altered Zones

By Ric Leichtung

Over the past 40 years, San Francisco's Aquarius Records has established itself as the go-to destination for painfully obscure music. Originally a new wave speciality shop, Aquarius expanded its inventory under the wing of veteran employees and current owners Andee Connors and Alan Horrocks, whose mass consumption of metal, noise, and exotica would guide legions of local and international listeners on the prowl for something different. I sat down with Andee on the stoop next to the store to talk about the current cassette boom, the future of Aquarius, and the role of the record store in the digital age.

AZ: How long have you been working at Aquarius?

Andee: I've been working here since 1994. It's been around since the '70s. It was originally on Market Street, and then in the Castro, next to Harvey Milk's camera shop. Now it's in the Mission.

AZ: How has the feel of the store changed over 40 years?

Andee: I don't know if it's changed so much as the music has changed. In its old location, it was sort of where all the touring bands would come and hang out and buy new wave 7-inches. It was the place to go in San Francisco for underground stuff, 7-inches, imports. Its role in the music scene is similar in some respects but the store has changed with the music. It was definitely a new wave hub. One of the old owners sent us all these pictures of Madness, Elvis Costello, Blondie, hanging out in the store. Apparently the Dead Kennedys found each other on our bulletin board.

AZ: Crazy. How many people work there?

Andee: Right now I think 7 people. Is that a lot or not a lot?

AZ: Not a lot! You guys do reviews for almost every new album you stock.

Andee: Like 100 every two weeks. It's very labor-intensive. None of us are business guys. Everyone here busts their ass and we write tons of reviews every week. Everyone here does a lot. Reviews are a big part; we write a ton. It's what makes our store special. We spend a lot of time searching out cool weird shit that other people don't have. People work here for a reason. They're really into cool stuff and weird stuff. They have ferocious appetites for new music, but not just because it’s weird. It’s because the music is hard to find, or it's some kid in his bedroom, or it’s from a label that never emails or does PR. We spend a lot of time looking for good stuff that people have maybe overlooked. When we started, there were not a whole lot of internet mail-orders. Nowadays, in five minutes you or I could have a mail-order and a PayPal shopping cart set up. We carved out this niche where we write these big reviews in a style that's very Aquarius, where we're not music reviewers or music critics, we're just people who like music. We write up these big things so people can read about them and say, "Oh, that sounds cool!" Even though it's a recording of ice melting, or something they wouldn't think to buy.

AZ: How do you go about digging for obscure music?

Andee: It’s just a natural thing. I go to tons of record stores and shows. We have a lot of really informed customers and get great recommendations; a huge chunk of those customers are regulars. They give the store this sort of co-op feel. Half the time, we'll find a record that we'll sell a ton of because a customer of ours will say, "You have to check this out, you'll love it!" And we do. I encourage that because I think that's what the record store is these days. We have a lot of cool regulars that just come to hang out for 2 hours and talk. Which is why I think record stores are cool and irreplaceable. A record store acts as a community center for music. You go there to listen to new music and talk to people who are into music. It's fun. It's a network of music nerds.

[Aquarius Records on Record Store Day, San Francisco, CA; April, 2010; via Spinning Indie]

AZ: I saw something on your site a while back that said something like, "It's hilarious that we stopped selling tapes and now we're selling tapes again." Do you know what I'm talking about?

Andee: I sort of… feel that way [laughs]. I think that's a natural thing. Everybody wants to put out tapes now. People are like, "I love cassettes, I've always loved cassettes. I'm going to buy exclusively tapes." Same thing happened with LPs, and it's eventually going to happen with CDs. CDs seem logical because people are going to be like, "A CD is so small and easy to carry around." It's an easy thing to gravitate to an obsolete medium because it seems cool. One thing that I haven’t seen too much of is micro-cassette, or 16-inch vinyl.

AZ: A lot of independent record stores are going digital, but you guys haven't gotten on that boat yet.

Andee: We haven't, but we are going to start a download store exclusively for rare and out-of-print stuff. We might still have other stuff. Everyone keeps telling us that "People are just going to download anyway, so they might as well do it from you." I sort of believe that, and theoretically, that would subsidize selling actual records, but also no one here likes MP3s, so that's kind of why it hasn't happened yet. It's hard to get excited about something you don't care about. It just seems weird to pay all this money for this thing that's not really a thing. We had this idea of re-distributing great CD-R labels who do stupidly limited runs of 50 copies or 75 copies. It's almost a crime that not many people get to hear it. There are hundreds of labels that put out CD-Rs but limit them to 50 copies. In that respect, I think downloading is really cool. The odds of them being reissued are really slim, so that way people can still hear this music at least. It’s like, this album is so good and only 50 people get to hear it? That's not really doing anyone any good. It's in the early stages.

AZ: When a customer buys something at Aquarius, what are they ultimately paying for?

Andee: At this point, you can download anything in the world for free. I feel like the only thing that makes people pay for it is a sense of right or wrong, or a sense of guilt [laughs]. It's hard for me to imagine paying $12 to download something when I could download it for free. But, for $12 dollars, you can also get this object that is cool and has art and liner notes; you're getting this physical thing. Maybe that's generational. Maybe kids who've only experienced buying music via iTunes don't appreciate something like that. I think there will always be punks or an underground scene with an appreciation for 7-inches and LPs, for the art as a whole instead of just the music. How the music relates to the artwork, how the artwork relates to the packaging. It's a lot more than just music. There's a similar thing happening with bookstores and Kindles. You can’t replicate going to a bookstore and leafing through books, and I think that's the same with record stores. Me looking through Amazon is not the same as me showing up and finding a record store and going through a bin. It doesn't compare at all.