Todd Terry’s Vinyl Renaissance

Published April 6, 2013 | By skrufff

US acid house legend Todd Terry has re-launched his label Freeze Records as a vinyl only imprint, selling limited runs of hand picked tracks. House of Gypsies Samba and Todd Terry Presents: Sax are Freeze’s first two releases.

Details of Todd’s new label emerged just days after the Sun identified a new wave of vinyl only younger New York DJs, spear-headed by Levon Vincent Jus Ed, Fred P AKA Black Jazz Consortiumn and DJ Spider.

Chatting to the suddenly (and bizarrely) underground house friendly tabloid, Spider said that like Todd, they’re not aiming for mass market audiences.

“All of us have record labels which have this open minded approach to releasing music,” he explained, “ Instead of worrying about selling thousands of records, but rather put out fresh new sounds for the sake of the art of quality dance music”.

In less positive news for vinyl enthusiasts, Todd Terry’s namesake (and similarly acclaimed US house pioneer) Todd Edwards put his entire vinyl collection up for sale on ebay in November, after moving to LA from New Jersey.

“Before I left Jersey, my manager asked me what I was going to do with all of my old records and I said I didn’t know, and he asked me to pack them as he’d love to have them,” the garage star wrote on his ebay seller page.

“A week later, when I finally made it to California and pulled up to my manager’s house, he was drinking a mai tai and said “I changed my mind.” Typical!…I don’t have space in my apartment or in my studio for them, so I’ve decided to put my entire record collection up for sale”.

In yet more vinyl news (which ironically will benefit digital DJs the most) Amazon announced this week that they’re offering a new retrospective service to buyers of vinyl records which allows them to digitize all of their record purchases since 1998.

“Many of our music customers are vinyl fans and it’s traditionally been very difficult to make digital versions of vinyl records,” Amazon exec Steve Boom declared, “now customers can enjoy the albums they buy wherever they are, not just when they have access to a record player”. (Wired )