Since moving back to the greater New York City area late last year, I’ve consistently been asked whether or not I would resume the mail-order & micro-label operations that have been my co-profession during most of my adulthood (see: Reckankomplex Shop, Mimaroglu Music/Sales, Broken-Music, plus Reckankreuzungsklankewerkzeuge, Entschuldigen, New England Electric Music Company, Creel Pone, no, Protracted View, Traveloglog, Industrial Abbotsford, etc.) While yes, I had been Selling Records again, my activities until now have been limited to flogging a small assortment of wares that I had brought over from Melbourne late last year.
Upon the news that a 1-3 year exclusion period had gone into effect (surprise!) moments after leaving Commonwealth soil to head to Japan for Labyrinth back in September, and the sinking realization that I could no longer legally come back into Australia to continue to live in Melbourne w/ my family, I scrambled to first get them set up again here in Brooklyn, then organize an absurdly complex, remotely-administrated move back across the equator. This took a long time both to sort out, then to wait out while the freight container circumnavigated the globe over a 6-month period. While I’m definitely not going to say this was the most stress-free or even financially sound transition in my life, I’m happy to report that everyone & everything is now finally present & accounted for & that I once again have access to all* of the inventory & infrastructure to get all of this back up & running.
To fund this whole absurdly expensive trans-hemispheric emergency-relocation endeavor, I have begun the draconian process of listing an unwieldy collection of essentially NOS archival LPs up for sale on Discogs, acquired in bulk from separate sources just prior to & then during my tenure down under. All said & done, if I keep my 200-listings-a-week stride (unlikely) I should have everything up for sale by the end of the summer, which means about 4,000 really, really great records will all be ripe for the plucking. If you’re at all interested in original pressings of (specifically) Early Electronic & Avant-Garde music, Sound Art & “Artists Records”, Modern & Contemporary Classical, regional & genre Electronic Music, and every conceivable & neighboring strand within these areas, you’ll want to check the Alpha State NYC Discogs pages on the regular.
In addition to this: after much deliberation I have decided to reactivate the Broken-Music site & have re-launched a tweaked, domestically-compatible version of it over at alphastate.nyc. For now, it’s a matter of getting the existing inventory catalogued & accessible, although this will (hopefully) sprout into another retail enterprise around new release & reissue activities. Everyone I’ve talked to has been generously enthusiastic about the idea of this (in private at least) & obviously I am regularly & consistently nostalgic for the days when this worked (and worked well). Like all things, time will tell.
* one casualty of this forced relocation was the consistent double-digit back-stock of Creel Pone titles I had slowly been amassing during my down-time in Brunswick; some of you will likely chalk this up to karma (fair enough) but of the three sizable boxes that were mailed directly from the Rathdowne PO to the Fort Greene compound containing so many meticulously hand-assembled replica-editions, only a single chaotically re-wrapped, half-filled one arrived, draped in the dreaded USPS “WE CARE” plastic. RIP to easily the most misconstrued, well-meaning project I’ve had the pleasure of being involved with haha.
