Records

280 records , synced May 2026

If you were to ask any Cal student for record store recommendations in Berkeley, they'll probably mention Amoeba and Rasputin. Amoeba was founded in 1990 and Rasputin in 1971. They are among the largest independent record stores and a stone's throw from each other on Telegraph Ave. In college I walked past these stores on a daily basis, but it wasn't until I graduated that I ventured into the world of record collecting.

Since 2008, Amoeba has been running a YouTube series called What's In My Bag? where all sorts of creators go crate digging in the store and talk about their selection. They would tell wild show stories and obscure facts. On the best episodes, they would talk about the ways in which various records trace back to and build from each other. This is the allure of digging for me.

My discovery of buried musical lineages in liner notes and party conversations was enriched by books like Energy Flash, Dilla Time, Our Band Could Be Your Life, and Such Great Heights. This page is less a list of records, and more an attempt to surface how music links to one another across continents and generations.

To date I've populated about a third of the collection with commentary and related titles. A rich entry looks like this. This site will be a living document as I explore and uncover new music and connections. I hope you enjoy the virtual crate dig and discover something new along the way.

Detroit — Berlin

Reel By Real

Tic Tac EP

Drexciya

Harnessed The Storm

cv313 & Mike Huckaby

Our Life With The Wave

Harnessed The Storm was Drexciya's last album before James Stinson died in 2002, age 32 — Berlin's Tresor releasing one of Detroit's strangest concept records about an underwater civilization built from the unborn children of slave-ship victims. The Reel by Real Tic Tac EP gathers 1990–91 material by Marty Bonds, who dropped out of college to apprentice inside Juan Atkins's Metroplex Studios, ran the boards at Saunderson's KMS down the hall as Marty Hardy, and was barely known to anyone outside that building. The Mike Huckaby record was finished posthumously in 2025, fifteen years after he and Echospace's Stephen Hitchell first started it. Three artists, three decades, none of them on the same release. What holds them together is one Detroit ecosystem — UR, Metroplex, Submerge — and the Berlin labels (Tresor, Mojuba, Pole's mastering room) that kept it alive after Detroit's own infrastructure thinned out. The Reel by Real cover art is by Abdul Haqq, the same Detroit illustrator who drew Drexciya's Neptune's Lair. That's the part I love. A scene refusing to disappear, with the same hand drawing across thirty-five years of it.

The Dilla triptych

Steve Spacek

Space Shift

J Dilla

Donuts

Q-Tip

The Renaissance

Three records around J Dilla's last year. Space Shift is the one I almost missed — a UK soul record by Steve Spacek that's actually largely Dilla-produced, with the lead single "Dollar" flipping Billy Paul's "Let the Dollar Circulate." Spacek has talked about walking into the LA apartment Dilla shared with Common and finding him already chopping the vocal in real time. Donuts is the document itself — 31 tracks finished in and out of Cedars-Sinai, released on his 32nd birthday, three days before he died. The Renaissance is Q-Tip's first solo album in nine years, the Tribe MC who'd pulled Dilla onto a tour bus at Lollapalooza '94 finally working through what it meant to lose him. One producer, three relationships — outward into UK soul, inward into the work itself, backward into the friendship that started it. A year measured in records.