Vinilici

The first Italian docu-film dedicated to vinyl's revival, made possible through crowdfunding, born from an idea by Nicola Iupparello (who co-wrote the story with Vincenzo Russo) and produced by Napoli Film Industry, directed by Fulvio Iannucci, has been available since December 3, 2020 on Amazon Prime Video, and offers plenty of food for thought on the history and potential of the physical format par excellence. It arrives at a moment in history when buying a record (or a CD) has become a niche pursuit, even though the latest figures from Discogs are rather encouraging, pointing to a rise in purchases of vinyl, CDs and even cassette tapes (we're certainly not talking huge numbers, but if artists like Hurts and Kylie Minogue are releasing their latest work on tape too, and Dolly Parton has even put out her latest Christmas album on Stereo 8, then beyond the inevitable fetishism, something may really be happening).

Yet we were told vinyl would never come back

In the early Nineties I was a middle-school student. Like many of my peers, back then most of my collection was made up of cassette tapes: before the arrival of CD burners, we'd pass CDs around and tape them, often with daring pairings between side A and side B of a C-90. Some of us even specialized in crafting proper artwork for our cassettes, thanks to the first rudimentary software suited to home 486s and Pentiums, and the shift from dot-matrix printers to inkjet ones, even in color. CDs were expensive, between 30 and 35 thousand lire, but for a brief spell you could rent them (for 3,000 lire you'd keep one for a day; other stores, which shut down in 1994, let you keep it three days longer for a slightly higher fee — just enough time to keep the tape deck of the living-room stereo working hard so you could show off in front of your classmates).

The LP was already vanishing from shops. When I arrived in Padua in 1992, there was this magical place, the historic Il Ventitré Dischi near the Duomo, which sold the notorious cut-out LPs (mostly of American origin, destined for the scrapheap as overproduction, marked by a little notch or a hole in the sleeve) for 3,000-4,000 lire. People said vinyl was dying and would never come back. Obsolete like a typewriter. 1996 was the last year I saw new titles in a "general" record shop with a dedicated vinyl section (later on we would find them again, but in more specialized stores) — specifically the double LP "Wild Mood Swings" by the Cure (at 45rpm) and a Bryan Adams album, "18 Til I Die".

And not only that: when I'd look at midi Hi-Fi systems in an appliance store, I'd be told the turntable was optional because "it's really only useful for listening to old records if you happen to have any at home. And you, so young, there's no way you'll ever buy any". Before long the phono input disappeared from many amplifiers, hi-fi-only shops closed down because apartments, ever shrinking, no longer had room for a stereo deck. And even CDs started to vanish once we were convinced that a reasonably powerful dockstation would be all we needed to listen to all the music we wanted on our smartphone, whether mp3s of dubious origin or YouTube streams.

The CD reached its peak success in the early 2000s, following a decade that had been fortunate nonetheless — not only because it was rich in movements, from grunge to Britpop all the way to the Bristol scene, but because quite a few people were re-buying on compact disc albums they already owned on vinyl. Finally, no more hiss, no need to wipe dust off the surface, no annoying clicks, no disruptive pops, you could skip from one track to another and even listen to an album's songs in random order thanks to the "random" function, ancestor of the mp3 player's shuffle (a few artists protested quietly, like Terence Trent d'Arby, who in "Neither Fish Nor Flesh" simply asked in the booklet notes that the album be listened to from start to finish; Prince, decidedly more devious than his colleague, had the first compact disc pressing of "Lovesexy" issued as a single track running over forty minutes).

On top of that, there was a whole back catalogue to reissue, with the first remasterings, a frenzied use of no-noise filters that thankfully fell out of fashion in the 2000s, when the best sound engineers (from Bob Ludwig to Bill Inglot) worked to restore "the warmth of the vinyl listening experience" even on digital formats.

In the end, the physical record survived everything. Not without running out of breath, not without contradictions that were never fully resolved, not without being locked away for a long time in some dusty warehouse, stored the wrong way (stacked one on top of another), and with the modest satisfaction of having made a dignified comeback, with sales certainly not comparable to those of the Sixties and Seventies (we're talking about 6% of the entire music market) in a completely changed landscape. While the vast majority of listeners today are content with a streaming subscription, a "super-niche" is at the same time taking shape, made up not only of nostalgics but also of young people discovering something that, to their eyes, is entirely new. Namely the ritual of taking an LP off the shelf, placing the record on a turntable's platter, letting the first side play out, getting up from the sofa and flipping it over after twenty-odd minutes. What's more, you can see the record, you can touch it, you examine its sleeve, sometimes there are lyrics printed, the list of musicians who played on it. Sure, nowadays there's Discogs for all that, but people are going back to considering the artwork for what it is, a part of the work itself. It's no longer just the tiny little square barely visible on our iPod fifteen years ago, but a 30x30 picture you can get lost in.

Why vinyl loves music: the moving journey of "Vinilici"

Music you can touch, music that lives, that grabs your attention and isn't just background noise like at a bar while sipping a cocktail, is the protagonist of "Vinilici. Perché la musica ama il vinile". A story woven from feelings, testimonies, the voices of experts and collectors, and anecdotes about an old-fashioned — and today innovative — way of approaching the listening of a recorded work, after the binge of torrents and, when we were lucky, paid downloads.

"Vinilici" is a choral, layered docu-film that offers plenty of insight without claiming to be encyclopedic, or worse still "the last word on vinyl": there's the perspective of experts, including Renato Marengo and Fernando Fratarcangeli, each of whom recounts their own relationship with vinyl records and with collecting.

Some — like Elio e le Storie Tese — describe their amazement at how the LP revival has narrowed generational gaps, helped perhaps by the fact that nowadays it's rare to come across a concept album with a coherent thread running from start to finish (these are no longer the days of rock works like "Tommy", but nor are they the days of "Questo piccolo grande amore"). And so the shuffle function, however handy while running on the treadmill at the gym or riding the bus to work, loses its meaning and its charm when the order in which the songs are arranged makes you feel "as if you were watching a film".

The definition of “super-niche” comes from Gianni Sibilla, music critic and university lecturer, and it’s a fitting one: today more than ever, collecting vinyl records requires a certain financial commitment (buying an original pressing of “Sticky Fingers” or “The Velvet Underground and Nico” with the zipper and banana still intact is a treat few can afford), meticulous care (which should also have applied to the compact disc, decidedly more mistreated on account of the “indestructibility” we were told about in the Eighties, and because it was more convenient to carry in the car or store in binders that, after years, can spring some very nasty surprises), and a return to a high-fidelity system to fully enjoy the sound of vinyl. Even a CD, if well recorded, can be enormously satisfying on a hi-fi system; the trouble is that for years its being “practical and handy” often relegated it to being played on cheaply made boomboxes, with unambitious built-in speakers, and the final blow came with the spread of mp3s. Tracks had to be “rippable,” playable at a uniform volume (that is, flat, with a compressed dynamic range) and aggressive (you’ve surely heard of the “loudness war”). Even though it’s still the most durable format today – aside from a batch of compact discs mentioned by Marengo, made between the late Eighties and early Nineties and released by labels like Ricordi, Fonit Cetra, BMG and Deutsche Grammophon, which were subject to a deterioration known as “CD-bronzing” (or “CD-rotting”) that changed their colour and made the discs unreadable – and the most faithful (we run no risk of hearing it with speed or pitch errors, there’s no background noise to distract us, and we can listen to a live album running over seventy minutes without interrupting it three times to flip the side or change the disc), the record industry has done everything it could to strip all appeal from that little silver disc it once banked so heavily on, often loading it with exclusive bonus tracks.

As mentioned, there are many voices recounting a love for vinyl. Some anecdotes are laugh-out-loud funny, like those of Carlo Verdone – whose love of music is well known – who talks about a French pressing of “Led Zeppelin III” that vanished from his collection, and of the time, on the advice of an eccentric uncle, he stopped keeping the sleeves of his 45s (something he bitterly regretted in later years). There are generations of record dealers, from a stall at Porta Portese to a business catering to enthusiasts and collectors hunting for rare pressings. There’s the story of an old Neapolitan label, Società Fonografica Napoletana, later renamed Phonotype, for which a historic name like Bruno Venturini cut 78s before moving on to the Milanese labels Saar (which released his “Antologia della Canzone Napoletana”), Durium and Ariston. There are songwriters like Mogol, who needs no introduction, but also artists like Lino Vairetti, who talks about how his music is still in demand in Japan, how he’s always made a vinyl edition of his work, and about the influence he claims Osanna had on Peter Gabriel (who, to be fair, actually took his cue from Arthur Brown, as did fellow artist Alice Cooper).

Renzo Arbore proudly recalls the rarest pieces in his collection, while Claudio Coccoluto speaks as a DJ who turned vinyl mixing into an inimitable working tool. On the subject of sound quality, there’s a contribution from Giulio Cesare Ricci (founder of Fonè, our homegrown audiophile label, whose catalogue includes several Salvatore Accardo recordings); Red Ronnie highlights an aspect that has been part of the life of all of us who have bought, and still buy, music in physical form. In short, when we spend money to bring a record home, we listen to it more attentively, we attribute value to it, we “make ourselves like it” because buying it meant giving up something else.

Over the course of the film it also emerges that buying a record is a bit like “owning the artist,” having them in our home (and not only if the copy is signed). There are also some useful tips for anyone venturing into the world of collecting. Namely: watch out for fakes, sometimes very hard for an untrained eye to spot (we’re talking bootlegs, but also piracy and slapdash reissues of entire records from dubious masters). You’ll also see a rare cover of Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” released only in Japan, alongside covers that made history (like those of “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band” and “Stand Up“). There’s plenty on the table, in short.

“Vinilici” was made in 2018, exactly seventy years after the birth of the 33 rpm record (introduced in 1948 by Columbia Records). It’s a work that highlights the importance of the physical format par excellence, which is entertainment but also art and culture. It celebrates the return of vinyl without waging a war of the poor against its digital sibling, treating it neither as a relic nor as the solution to revive today’s ailing music market (and rightly so, we’d add: not all that glitters is gold – just read the many complaints on Amazon and Discogs about certain modern pressings made from digital transfers, and LP prices today are often unjustifiable).

It also does something more: it tells us that what we used to do in the past can offer a new experience today. Nothing stops us from listening to “Quadrophenia” start to finish on CD or via a streaming platform (there’s not just Spotify, services have emerged that cater even to more demanding audiophiles), and nothing stops us from listening to a record with our friends and discussing it, even in front of an audience.

In Italy alone, over the past ten years, various opportunities for guided, communal listening have sprung up, ranging from the audioforums Gold Soundz and Music Is My Radar, to the refined sessions on Italian songwriters curated by Fabrizio Bartelloni and Marco Masoni in Tuscany, to the specials by Piedmontese musicteller Federico Sacchi, which range from the history of Talk Talk and Stevie Wonder to retrospectives like the one on songs dedicated to Martin Luther King. Not to mention Antonio Puglia’s “33 Giri di Parole,” Carlo Massarini recounting the Beatles, and Ernesto Assante and Gino Castaldo telling the story of Prince by screening his videos and discussing his life and career. All of this is the result of a renewed interest not only in the record as an object (which may look great on Instagram, but which also takes up needless space if not bought to be listened to) but, first and foremost, in its content.

All of this comes through without judgement, without demonising, without telling us what we should or shouldn’t do; save for a few contributions, it’s not all “things were so much better in the old days, whereas today…” And that is where the strength of a valuable work like “Vinilici” lies. Let’s hope it’s only the first in a series.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google