My New York state of mind, June 2015. I don’t like taxidermied animals. Already in childhood days the made me think of death. I never befriended with taxidermists. Encounter a stuffed hyena, or taxidermic pigeons, and you immediately feel like entering a strange twilight zone, something disturbingly unreal. For example Black Gold Records on 461 Court Street in Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn. Which at least made me smile, and like the weirdos working there.
How this small storefront manages to sell coffee, antiques and records without being a cluttered, cramped mess we’ll never know.
This is a sampling space! All music is vinyl: garage-rock comps, Hawaiian exotica, free jazz treasures from Albert Ayler, imaginary or real soundtracks by Gordon Jenkins, some avant horizontal ambient music, and noisy stuff of every lost decade.
Even if the music’s not to your taste, the store’s oddball Victorian atmosphere is enough to keep you browsing, plus you can purchase coffee and bites from the likes of „Scratchbread“, and other local food purveyors after flipping through the goods.
There’s an ancient record player in the corner that seems to have survived its expiry date for a long time. If you put a record on, you’re running the soundtrack of the moment. Everybody is listening to your choices, cause there are no headphones: in my case the whole room was filled with Hollywood strings from the 50s of the last century, and a self-assured voice starts to tell a story: Once upon a time there was a woman with three cats and golden hair.