Wax on!
New Jersey radio station WFMU brought its famed annual record fair to Brooklyn for the first time last weekend, drawing thousands of music fans from around the globe to Greenpoint’s Brooklyn Expo Center. Attendees said the long-running bazaar is a great place to uncover hidden gems.
“The record station is the number one source for me finding good music, and the record fair is the same way,” said volunteer Sasha Jones. “I go there and I play roulette by buying a bunch of $1 and $2 records that I never heard of before.”
More than 200 vendors hawked their wares to 3,500 record geeks between Friday and Sunday.
The fair, like the radio station, is known for championing obscure musical genres, such as psychedelic, no wave, experimental, and old rockabilly. WFMU held the first fair at a Hoboken Elks Lodge in 1993, and in the intervening 22 years, it has become one of the most popular record fairs in the country, serving as a gathering place for vinyl fetishists from near and far, Jones said.
“So many people show up to congregate in the same place who only get to see each other once or twice a year,” she said.
This year’s fair hosted musical performances by Olivia Neutron John, Danny Kroha, and Conspiracy Of Beards, which is an a cappella Leonard Cohen cover band. Fair organizers also screened a handful of bizarre films, including Francis Ford Coppola’s low-budget horror film “Dementia 13” and creepy 1962 cult classic “Carnival Of Souls.”
And the Expo Center was a big hit in its first spin as a venue, said an organizer.
“This is the best place that we have done it,” said station manager Ken Freedman. “It has great acoustics and natural lighting, good bathrooms and ventilation. Load-in is always hard because records are heavy, and the problems that we have had in the past were nonexistent.”
