Featured Essay: A Beautiful Now: The free record that started my vinyl collection

by Austin Gerth

Daniela Amavia’s 2015 film A Beautiful Now is the reason I own a record player. I haven’t seen the movie and don’t know anything about its plot, but in 2017 I acquired its soundtrack album, produced by cinematic synth-pop auteur and Italians Do It Better label figurehead Johnny Jewel, for free.

For a little while in 2017, Italians Do It Better offloaded records with minor cosmetic defects every week on Facebook. They’d send them, first come first served, to anyone who emailed their name and shipping details under goofy subject lines drawn from their artists’ lyrics. You wouldn’t know if you were getting a record, or which record it would be, till it showed up at your door.

I responded to the label’s call every time I saw it, even though I didn’t own a turntable. I was a year out of college, with exactly the attitude you would expect toward free stuff. The emails still sit in my never-cleaned Sent folder. Subject lines include “THE BURNING FLAME IS FLICKERING NOW… I SAY WALK WITH FIRE” (from Chromatics’ “Running from the Sun”) and “I’M CRAZY LIKE A MONKEY EEE EEE OOO OOO” (from Glass Candy’s “Warm in the Winter.”) (All caps seemed to be a requirement of the deal.)

I received two albums this way: A Beautiful Now and the label comp After Dark 2. I never identified what cosmetic flaws prevented them from being sold.

In 2017, even independent music was pretty big business. IDIB’s whimsical doling out of free product to fans felt like an updated, social media-era echo of a mostly bygone, freewheeling and anarchic approach to underground music economics. Simply receiving free records would have been good enough, but each record I got came with generous, unexpected extras. A Beautiful Now came with a CD copy of Symmetry’s Themes for an Imaginary Film, a two-hour double album. The After Dark 2 vinyl, which is a 3-LP set, came with a large newsprint poster and an additional record—a Symmetry EP in a sleeve of plain gloss black. (Ok, maybe they needed to unload Symmetry product.)

I owned A Beautiful Now for several months before I listened to it. I wasn’t new to vinyl—my parents’ record collections always lived in our basement while I was growing up, and there was usually a functional turntable to play them on. But I was new to owning vinyl myself, and I’d just moved out, joining my then-girlfriend (now wife) and her roommate in a St. Paul apartment. For Christmas that year, I asked for and received one of those little retro Crosley suitcase record players. They aren’t necessarily known for sound quality, but I wanted something cheap and portable, since I’d just moved into a small space two other people already occupied. The Crosley made sense. I’ve since upgraded to a turntable with external speakers, but there was a certain specific joy in setting the little suitcase on a table, putting on a record, and letting it try to fill the room with its trebly sound. There’s something communal about it, like a little campfire enticing people to gather. I think I remember our roommate one night digging out a couple old records I didn’t know she owned and shouting along to Cher’s somewhat problematic banger “Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves” in the main room of our little apartment.

Alongside the Crosley, I got a couple essential records to start my humble vinyl collection (Rubber Soul and Superfly.) But I was most excited to listen to the soundtrack of a movie I’d never heard of. A Beautiful Now combines deep cuts and alternate versions from Jewel’s various projects as well as more conventionally film score-flavored instrumentals. It ends up being something of a miniature label compilation. Where IDIB’s After Dark series of comps is expansive, A Beautiful Now focuses on the label’s three biggest acts, Chromatics, Glass Candy, and Desire, giving a keyhole view of IDIB’s sound. It is a short, small, successful record. Synth strings tie the album together and give it a distinctive identity; they characterize Johnny Jewel’s instrumental tracks, and they’re emphasized on the album’s alternate mix of Desire’s “Don’t Call.”

Along with the Desire and Glass Candy songs, the highlights are alternate versions of major Chromatics songs. On 2012’s Kill for Love, “At Your Door” is the album’s last gleaming dose of synth pop perfection, a flash of light between stretches of nocturnal, near-ambient instrumentals. On A Beautiful Now, the same song is stripped back, missing its bold synth melody and instead defined by lonesome electric piano and a ticking drum machine. It’s demo-like, with an almost ‘70s singer-songwriter quality; Ruth Radelet’s vocals feel vulnerable in a way they do not on the original. The Kill for Love version might be my favorite Chromatics song, but I love this alternate arrangement too. It takes the road not taken by the album version.

The A Beautiful Now version of “Kill for Love” drops percussion and the original version’s guitar and distinctive dopplering synth line, leaving Radelet to intone her lyrics through a billowing cloud of synthesizers that at times remind of a Twin Peaks musical cue. The alternate “Shadow” is the only variation that doesn’t compete with the original—a short edit that subs out Radelet for Adam Miller singing through a vocoder.

With its pile of worthy alternate versions and stray instrumental bits patched into a satisfying listen, the A Beautiful Now soundtrack seems like a positive byproduct of the same obsessive studio tinkering that ultimately stalled Italians Do It Better’s momentum.

A shadow hangs over the label: They famously announced Dear Tommy, the intended follow-up to Chromatics’ Kill for Love, would be out “in time for Valentine’s Day” in 2015. A series of excellent pre-release singles followed, but the album still hadn’t come by the time I was emailing IDIB for free records two years later. Chromatics performed “Shadow” on an episode of Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017 and continued to tweak the intended tracklist and release schedule. They put out a completely different, possibly stopgap album, Closer to Grey, then split up in 2021 in what seemed to be tight-lipped acrimony, with the three non-Jewel members of the band announcing their departure in a statement that didn’t mention Jewel by name.

As years passed, Italians Do It Better fandom began to feel more frustrating than fun. Johnny Jewel’s still making music, and the label still exists, but only Desire remains active from its three major acts. I prefer to hold on to the (perhaps inaccurate) impression I got from the version of the label that sent out a lot of free records to anyone who took the time to send them a silly email. It was beautiful then.

Austin Gerth is a drummer and writer in Hastings, Minnesota.You can read him occasionally at racketmn.com and hear him at stormcoffee.bandcamp.com and racecarcoffin.bandcamp.com.