‘If you’re doing a piece on vinyl, you have to chat to Jacques (Vosloo), from Mabu Vinyl,’ said my friend Josh, whose main prerogative on a holiday to Berlin a few years ago was to scour the city for hard-pressed PVC. So on a sweaty afternoon in March, I rocked up to the top of Long Street to meet Jacques and his boxes of weird and wonderful records.
Vinyl records are flat, analogue discs with spiral grooves that hold audio recordings. When played on a turntable, a needle (or stylus) traces the variations in the grooves, converting them into sound. They are made from polyvinyl chloride (PVC), and the production process involves melting PVC pellets into ‘biscuits,’ applying heat and pressure with stampers to create grooves, and then trimming the edges. Before these flat records, the first commercial audio recordings were stored on wax cylinders. Wax as a medium went away, but the term persevered.
Mabu Vinyl is packed to the brim inside with a little bit of everything, local and international. The records spill out onto the balcony, bathing in the late afternoon sun. One of South Africa’s most iconic record stores hugs you on arrival.
Is there a vinyl revival underway? That’s the question driving me to seek out, for the first time, a shop that has been in Cape Town for 25 years.
‘Well, the revival has been happening for about 10 years, man.’ Jacques laughs when I ask him. ‘Yeah, the vinyl scene’s pretty good at the moment, and it seems to be growing. It started pretty small in the 2000s after it went through a massive dip in the early 90s. Vinyl started heading out when the mainstream media kind of convinced the user and the collector to move to the new format, CDs (compact discs). In 1991, CDs accounted for about 75% of all music sales globally. By 1995, vinyl made up less than 2% of total album sales in the United Kingdom.
‘Manufacturing of vinyl started to decrease towards like the mid-90s, there were just so few records being pressed,’ Jacques continues. ‘So the 90s period of vinyl is quite a pricey era to collect. A lot of the big artists had small runs of vinyl, loads and loads of CDs. By the end of the 90s, the only people who were playing vinyl were DJs, pushing dance music. They never stopped. They didn’t switch the format of CDs on the whole, as your average user did. So the DJs kept the scene going in the mid to late 90s. And then slowly but surely, the digital era outphased CDs, with streaming platforms and the copying of MP3s killing the CD world. That’s when the appreciation for wax started building and building, from the early 2000s.’
Paul Waxon is a local DJ who has been spinning wax since the late 90s, hosting his own vinyl events for years. With the arrival of CDs came CDJs (Compact Disc Jockeys) – standalone DJ hardware devices that allow the DJ to play music independently of a computer. Nowadays, CDJs take USBs, streamlining and simplifying the process of playing even more.
Paul sticks to wax.
‘There are certain records, not all of them, where you feel like you’re at a live show. I’ve got this one record, man, a Sade album…When I put it on, I feel like she’s in the room with me,’ Paul says, smiling.
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For people who grew up on albums, there is a certain holiness to listening to the way the artist intended you to hear. Jacques says, ‘Listening to albums from start to finish, one almost gets the feeling from records that the track listing was quite important for the artist, and the album as a whole is what the artist wanted the listener to feel.’
Vinyl sounds different. Paul and Jacques share that view. Not better, necessarily, but different. ‘Warmer,’ by Jacques’s description. But it’s not the sound that has collectors sitting on 30,000-strong record libraries, listening bars popping up around the city or kids as young as 12 checking into Mabu to flick through the boxes.
‘I remember back in the day, before gigs, we would go and hang out and chat and listen to different records. And that’s when I would sort of decide what to play that night. Finding and playing music was much more social,’ says Paul.
Why Vinyl?
On top of the social aspect, there is also, according to Jacques, a physicality to records that isn’t available to the average listener these days. “Vinyl’s an engaging format. It’s kind of hands-on: Stop, listen. Stop, play, listen. Turn around, play. You’ve got to do a lot while you’re listening to the music, you know?”
Collecting and playing vinyl music are both intrinsically social and deeply personal. Paul and Jacques’ narratives reflected common themes of engagement with people, with music and with oneself in the process of discovering and playing a record. Chatting to Jacques and Paul, I can’t help but reflect on my own limited interaction with vinyl records. The associative effect of the analogue format is powerful, and epic memories and moments crystallise.
My friend Khanya spends a lot of his week DJing in, digital format. On Sundays, he says he’ll chuck on a Quincy Jones record in his living room and unwind. “I love listening to records on a Sunday, particularly jazz records.” He explains. ‘There’s a certain slow, nostalgic feel that fits a Sunday. I also end up listening to the whole thing without skipping, unlike when I’m on streaming sites.’
On my first day in Berlin three years ago, I met up with Josh, my cousin and a few friends at the store HHV: ‘Vinyl, Streetwear, & Sneakers’. I didn’t know the first thing about vinyl music, and nobody even bought a record, but we were there for an hour drinking beer, listening, catching up.
When I was in school, I discovered a spoken word poet turned rapper, Kojey Radical and shared his music with the same cousin. Years later, I got this picture. OLIVER. Here in spirit G!! Thank you so much. Kojey R. signed onto the cover of his vinyl pressing, Reasons to Smile. My cousin had made sure to meet him and tell him, after scoring tickets to a private show.
There is an Affect Tag embedded in analogue storage and a story to vinyl music that can’t quite be replicated in any other format. In Cape Town, many places help tell these stories. As far as scratching for records goes, there’s plenty on offer in the city. While Mabu does source and stock the occasional piece of new wax, Jacques’s focus remains on vintage, with a strong emphasis on affordable. He makes sure to have a little bit of everything for everyone. ‘But the expensive stuff, it’s tucked away here in the corner, ‘ he says. ‘I don’t want the first price tag people see to put them off; music should be accessible to everyone.’
Jacques’ recommendations for shops that sell vinyl, both vintage and new, include Kandi Records, Revolution Records, VoomVoom Records, For The Record and Roasting Records. Other stores that have previously featured on Cape Etc are M-PIRE Music and The Listening Room. There’s also no shortage of vintage and thrift stores in Cape Town, where you’re bound to find at least one corner with a dusty box of records. From the City Bowl to Woodstock and Mowbray, Cape Town has a steady source of stock for collectors, and the wide availability of second-hand vinyl helps keep the scene healthy by making pressings available to local budgets.
People have been turning back to wax since the early 2000s and sifting through various record shops, but more recently, listening bars are popping up around the world. These audio-focused bars find their roots in 1950s Japan. Known as jazz kissa or kissaten (jazz coffee houses), they offered atmospheric spaces for people to listen to vinyl records.
‘The sound actually came first, then the bar, ‘ Paul explains to me. ‘People would get speakers, and then they would curate a space around that.’
With an emphasis on sound quality and eclectic music selection, listening bars have risen to popularity globally, and Cape Town has, of course, paid attention. Again, the interest extends beyond sound, pointing towards the social element of vinyl music that seems to be a golden thread. One Park, just off Kloof Street (1 Park Road), hosts a variety of evenings that range from ambient to hip-hop, left-field electronic to reggae and everything else in between. Guided by ‘a spirit of collaboration and community,’ the restored heritage building houses a space styled on the kissaten of mid-1900s Japan, and focuses on high-quality, diverse sounds. A beautifully crafted desk holds the turntable and mixers, poised to kickstart the Hi-Fi experience. Out back on the long, narrow stairs, where I’ve found myself speaking through smoke and white noise, that’s all part of the experience, too.
Hidden off Bree Street is Babbi, a vibrant bar and deli. The intimate architecture creates a unique, warm buzz, and their courtyard has grown popular through word of mouth. Babbi relies on barely, if any, self-promotion, ‘Down the alley, around the corner. No bookings.’ That’s as much as you’ll get from a quiet social media page. What you’ll get if you do venture around the corner is a steady curation of awesome local talent, vinyl-focused selections and a mean cheese toastie with atchaar.
Down in Woodstock, 196 Victoria Road houses pop-up parties, deep listening sessions and live concerts, with vinyl at the heart of many events. The Commons in Muizenberg also hosts vinyl evenings, with ‘practices of community building’ being at the heart of their establishment. Pierre Estienne is a name that deserves mention in any conversation about Cape Town and vinyl culture, and the legendary local DJ runs the event Vinyl Digz, which has found its home at Texas, 11 Albertus Street in Zonnebloem. One pop-up at Blondie on Kloof Street encouraged people to ‘bring your vinyl, they might spin it.’
While listening bars and similar spaces are still in their infancy in Cape Town, the quality is high. Various vinyl-focused events are growing in popularity, and independent record stores throughout the city continue to act as custodians of a certain culture of music. What is that culture? To me, it seems that embedded in wax pressings and analogue storage is a story of community, collective memory and conscious consumption. It is a story that shows no signs of ending any time soon, having endured the digital dawn to form a significant part of the zeitgeist.
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