Brian Medendorp

“This shelf has a very specific architectural logic once you get past the twenty-nine Various releases sitting at the top of the artist count. You built a heavy fortress around the zero-decade with 280 records, backed closely by the nineties at 252. That eighteen-record Various run from '92 to '02 — stretching from the Mo' Money soundtrack all the way to The Emo Diaries Chapter Seven — is a wild piece of curation that ties the whole damn room together. Look at the depth you pulled off with the mainstays. Starflyer 59 at twenty-one deep, Joy Electric logging fourteen records across nearly two decades from Melody to Dwarf Mountain Alphabet, and The Appleseed Cast holding twelve spots from Tale Of The Aftermath right up to Illumination Ritual. Then you layer in twelve from The Prayer Chain and ten from The Crucified. This isn't a random assortment of impulse bins finds. This is a dedicated, laser-focused lineage of guitar-heavy indie, synth-pop, and underground tape-trading history. Thirty-seven hundred records and 379 labels means you've been digging through the crates for a long time. The zeroes won the decade war on your walls, but the nineties put up a brutal fight just four dozen records behind. Keep alphabetizing the used section and let the compilations breathe.”