BLOG 16/09/2020
The Jan Diaries — Gardening, DJs and Record Collections
A garden left alone for ten years is not a garden, it is a jungle in which no individual plant can be seen. That is the image Jan Kinčl opens with, and the point of this entry in The Jan Diaries is that a record collection behaves the same way. His own had drifted for a decade, and in September 2020 he did something drastic: three days of going through roughly 1,500 records, and 600 of them listed for sale on Discogs.
What the piece covers
The collection was never disorganised in the shelving sense — house, techno, jazz, hip-hop, electro and pop simply sat mixed together, which does not bother him. The problem was mass. Records unplayed in fifteen years were gathering dust and, worse, gathering attention, and their sheer weight killed any motivation to dig deeper into what he owned. Acting on advice Matija Duić had repeated for years, Kinčl audited the lot against two questions: would he buy this record today, and does it still produce an emotional reaction. About a hundred failed both tests and stayed anyway, on sentimental grounds; the rest were let go.
The argument underneath the clear-out is a professional one. Vinyl is a physical burden as well as a mental one — curating at that scale means pulling records out, testing them and putting them back, over and over. But “kao DJ moraš znati svako svoje drvo”, he writes — a DJ has to know every one of his trees: what a record does mechanically, where it came from, in which situation it works. Overload makes that intimacy impossible, and the DJs at the top of the field are precisely the ones who have it, Theo Parrish the standing example. Sell what is dead weight, put the money into records that genuinely excite, and let the keepers breathe.
What the clear-out turned up
The payoff was four records he had owned for years without properly hearing. Keith Tucker and Max Durante’s Static Fusion on Electrixx — electro with dub chords, Kraftwerk-adjacent vocals and Detroit strings, filed as an opener. DJ Lhoie’s Jeckyl & Hyde, from the Sonic Assault EP that arrived in 2003 inside a DJ Bone white-label package and meant nothing to an eighteen-year-old. Deetron’s Dancing Manual, an E-Pa white label from 2001, cut before the In The Mix CD made his name and ageing better than most of what followed — Midnighter at five in the morning in a small dark room with a proper system. And Orlando Voorn’s Tribulations, which had passed under his nose repeatedly and turns out to be among the best things Voorn did under the Flash and Fix aliases.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Five minutes.
The Jan Diaries | Vrtlarenje, DJ-i i kolekcije ploča → redbull.com