Featured Essay: Heavy is the Head That Crate Digs 

by Ilana Michelle Carmi 

I was probably overstaying my welcome when the DJ whose apartment I slept over the night prior asked if I wanted to go to the record store. “Maybe this’ll get her closer to going home,” the council of demons in my head mutters at me. At the time, I was a nascent deejay myself, extremely excited to make my first DJ friend. We met when he approached me during one of my DJ sets. At that time it was still difficult to not assume anyone with overlapping music taste was some sort of soulmate but also, who am I to say they aren’t. A theory for another time, I suppose. 

I’m sure to someone, somewhere embarking on a DJ career feels like fulfilling a divine calling. Following that path in my late 20’s only to have it coincide with a “Global Pandemic,” felt more like you are a pawn in The Spirits sick game of something. 

After the social desert Covid caused, this burgeoning friendship offered the promise of new community, something I felt starved of for a long time. The possibility of taking a trip to the record store provided a wealth of positives. One, I’d get a chance to demonstrate my credibility as a DJ and Knower Of Music. Second, I’d get to showcase my infallible taste. Lastly, I’d open this very experienced DJ’s eye’s to my liberated ways of record shopping that would no doubt leave an indelible mark. 

Every trip to a record store is intentionless for me. I walk in with absolutely zero goal. I feel about record shopping the way a lot of people talk about weekends. You never know what a trip to the store will bring. It’s a way to embrace the unknown and adventure in new music discovery, always low risk, high reward, a challenge for anyone identified as Anxious. 

I love to scurry around the place collecting random records kind of like a Neopet collecting balloons in Meerca Chase. With almost no standard or requirement, but most often from a place of shallowness, I accumulate records with no abandon. From there, depending on how financially irresponsible I’m feeling that day (usually very) I’ll filter down to my final purchases. Listen, I’ll never claim to be a perfect person except for when I do, but a lot of this “process” is judging albums by their covers. It’s not a perfect strategy but it does work most of the time. Take or leave that piece of guidance. It’s not infrequent that I leave a record store with a bouquet of random vinyls spending an amount I’d be too embarrassed to admit on paper. 

We each traversed the space inspecting different bins, tracing infinity symbols around the store. As one does in a record shop, I happened upon a bin with “HOUSE” scrawled on its side in black Sharpie. I plucked through the selections, stopping at one in which a figure, who I came to learn as Byron, The Aquarius is frozen, in what seems mid-stride, at the center of overlapping circles, not unlike a bullseye. On his shirt is the EP title, “Gone Today, Here Tomorrow.”

Something about the artwork was striking to me. I felt as though I had been caught dead in the center of someone’s target. The choice was mine, flee and leave the record or submit myself to it and allow it to have its way with me. I obviously went with the latter. 

When you go record shopping (or crate digging for the purists) with the experts, they have an idea of what they’re looking for. Especially if their expertise lies within a certain genre, they likely have context for the records they’re plucking from the worn cubbies. Me? While I am confident in what I do know, there is a lot that I don’t know. In fact, I would go so far as to say I mostly don’t know things but my therapist probably wouldn’t like that. Because of this flawed assessment, I’m more open than an expert to let the unknown guide me. 

I would love to say to you, reader, that I couldn’t wait to get home. I ended my date right then and there to experience the vinyl that had held my emotions hostage. Alas, that is not the case. I ran out the clock on quality time with my new friend, letting my anxious attachment brew fear and paranoia that this would be the last time I saw him. In all the chaos and adrenaline of my hormones, I ended up forgetting the records at his apartment. 

But like the protagonist of a romcom chasing after his true love, I returned the next day to retrieve the record. I dispelled any insecurity that this person thought it was an excuse to see him (it’s not like it was a deterrent) I had to rescue my newfound prized possession. 

Back home I dropped the needle on the vinyl, and as the static on the record crackled I allowed my thoughts to dissolve into the unrelenting drum pattern. Ironically, the aptly named first track “Cosmic Shit,” warns the user not to fall in love with music but there I was, sitting on my area rug in my Queens apartment, overwhelmingly besotted. Upon hearing the first notes of the album, I couldn’t remember a time where I found something I had been yearning for so badly. The type of house music that spoke to me was exactly this: sonic drums, meditative synths, seductive lyrical soundbites. 

The song that connected with me the most was the second song, Moments in Life. God, I love a clapping drumline. Of all the snare variants, it feels the most organic; a sound that can just easily be borne out of a studio participant, so moved by a demo they start clapping in rhythm, as it can from a DAW with pre-programmed loops. 

I was new to House music and intimidated by all the nuance the genre innately offered. I had also found the lack of lyrics in a lot of House music to be intimidating. Words used to be the first thing I connected with in music but my perspective was beginning to shift. In that moment, listening to GTHT, it was the instruments that had lassoed me in. 

What this record pushed me to love about electronic house music was the meditative nature of the production where the lyrics are often embellishments or the last paint strokes on top of a nearly finished masterpiece.

But if this little essay were to have a moral I guess that it is of course, there is no right way to perform a behavior that feels natural to your personality and how you feel you best go about it. And just like my vinyl searching process, I have become more open to the destinies of my relationships of whatever nature they may be. 

Not everyone is meant to be a mainstay in your life but with the spontaneity of my crate digging process, I’m given keepsakes that keep memories alive for better or worse. It’s almost like what you cannot control can be gone today, but what you choose to remain is here tomorrow.

Ilana Michelle Carmi is a DJ, writer, and comedian based in Brooklyn, New York. She writes for the music blog Staged Haze and performs both as a DJ and comedian all over the city. When she’s not doing all of that, she’s on the couch cuddling her pit terrier, Couscous probably melting her brain, binging a reality TV show.