Home Grown: Japanese pressings and silky whisky in Saitama

Share

0000

Share

0000

Because every record collection has a story.

Home Grown is our series profiling you lot and your excellent record collections. Taking our cue from the brilliant submissions to the #VFRecordCollections thread on Instagram, we want to share a little of your hard-earned love for vinyl with the world.

Each week, we’ll be profiling a different collector from around the world and finding out what makes them tick. Want in? Send us a pic of your collection and a few words about your collection to [email protected].


Name: Tomohiro Yanagisawa

Location: Saitama, Japan

Size of collection: Around 2,000 records. In the summer of this year, I found this beautiful rack at the rural old furniture store and I bought it immediately. But it was too big to put into my record room, so I replaced the bedroom with my record room, though my family complained about it. However it is troubling because it does not have enough space to store my collection at all. I always worry about the 7-inch storage. I owned over 3,000 vinyl records before when I was DJing every week but now it has decreased considerably.

How long have you been collecting? It’s about 30 years since I bought a vinyl for the first time, at around 12 years old. I have two older brothers and the second brother who was crazy about the overseas indie-rock and new wave. Our hometown is in the country, Nagano, so he needed to buy vinyl from Tokyo’s record shops via mail order.

He forced me to buy a record: ‘St. Christopher – All Of A Tremble’ 7-inch from Sarah Records. I listened to it hundreds of times. Since I was in high school, I’ve been influenced by Tokyo’s club scene like Yellow or Maniac Love and then have been digging 12″s, mainly techno or house. And then I moved up to Tokyo and started DJing with my brother.

What part of your set-up are you most proud of?I love Warp’s AI series, ’90s Basic Channel releases, Mike Ink’s Studio 1 series or GAS moniker and cLOUDDEAD, Anticon related releases. Until six years ago, I worked in the music industry for more than ten years. I was a buyer of overseas vinyl and had been wholesaling into Japanese record shops. However, I decided to quit my job due to the sales depression and left Tokyo. I began to dig the vinyl at the local second shop and collecting old vinyl shifting from overseas new releases.

Since then, I’m proud of my records made in Japan with OBI and liner notes. Especially I’m highly proud of JVC’s Music Interior series like Seigen Ono, Ichiko Hashimoto, Kenwood’s Trio records (my former president worked there) that was licensed ECM label, CAN’s Holger Czukay records in Japan, also running a subdivision great label PASS releasing like Friction and Phew.

What does your record collection mean to you? All the records are like my memories. It’s a supreme time to read liner notes while drinking Suntory whisky KAKU with listening vinyl in the room. Old dusty vinyl or vintage things like furniture, clothes, books, bicycle parts and rusty tools always make me fresh. This is my universal lifetime collection.

Photos: Instagram