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Austin Record Convention

For those who do not yet know......  the next Austin Record Convention starts Friday September 29th and lasts though Sunday October 1st. As I have been for about the last 30 years I will be there trying to match up music to mostly total strangers. Am spending about 6 weeks looking through my 100000 LPs to see what may capture someones fancy. Part of this process is checking interesting items for condition, at the moment I am listening to an odd disc by Rob Meurer called Synth for Christmas. For those in the area with the desire, a relatively recent feature at the show is a search by text option. Rather than wander for hours, if you are not a fan of wandering, you can go to Convention central and send out info on the specific items you are searching for and then that text will be relayed to the dealers that have signed up to receive it and hopefully someone has it and will get in touch. It is one of the worlds oldest and biggest record shows and for those that still purchase music in a physical medium, it will not disappoint.
trytone
tostadosunidos's avatar
tostadosunidos
1,197 posts
 
Just saw this--less than an hour left so I guess I'll skip this one--damn, I was hoping to go but I know so many vendors have already packed up.  I hope it went well for you.
jafant
18,801 posts
 
Guys-

how did the show work out? I attended a few back in the 1990's.
whart's avatar
whart
2,967 posts
 
I missed Trytone, though I was apparently next to his booth. So, take anything I say with a grain....
Rockodrome from San Antonio had some serious hard/prog/avant grade stuff, Flied Egg original, Cressida s/t from Australia on Fontana (rare) at reasonable prices- I pulled both, but gave them to the guy next to me (already have a UK Cressida and Flied Egg at 150, a good price, isn’t serious enough for me- it is a wacky record). The dude from So Cal who has the uber collectible stuff was there. Most interesting, a young long haired guy was there on behalf of the organizers of Coachella- his mission, buy 30,000 records to redistribute at cost or a loss at the next festival- he knew his stuff on the obscuro rock stuff. He had a camera crew following him for a documentary.
Big show. I only went the first (early admission) day, and it was pretty lightly attended, i figured they’d get the heavy traffic over the w/e.
One dealer did have several Strata East pressings which I’ve been chasing, but if you figure he marked them up to 5x market value, there was no room to negotiate (and they weren’t the rare ones).
I bought a couple records. I think you do ok at shows if you are willing to get down and dirty, you’ll find stuff- maybe not what you are looking for, but bargains nonetheless. I’m buying more selectively these days, and the stuff I’m after is a known quantity, so very little likelihood of a bargain. Same at WFMU, which had a bigger spread of UK and European pressings from the ’60s and early ’70s- pre prog, post psych proto-metal and psych folk, but pretty serious prices. No free lunch.
It is an easy show for me to attend- I now live in Travis Heights, so I can walk to the Long Center here in Austin.
Tomorrow, Crimson plays Bass Hall up at UT. Looking forward to that.

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