Digging Spot in Anambra State Nigeria
Frank
2,370 Posts
Even though I had brought dust masks with mold proof micro filters, I caught a sinus infection from hell at this place. I guess my bum beard prevented proper grill sealing. Well worth it though. Most treasured finds are three white label 45s that are equally mind-blowing and I have no idea what they are. Audio to follow sometime later this week.
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I often make the mistake of not using the respirator in private homes out of fear to offend people by sending the signal I'd be afraid of their unsanitary living conditions. On various occasions, I've paid for this with nasty infections that usually begin in the nostrils and sinuses then wander down to your throat and sometimes leave you with a persistent form of bronchitis. Inhaling tropical mold spores is no joke. These records for the most part were laying around in super high humidity for decades kind of like stacked, moist petri dishes. Then you're flipping through them and while doing so, you're essentially fanning 30+ year old fungus cultures right up your nose...
This specific place would have been unmanagable without the masks. On my last trip, I had brought one for my friend Damian who you can see in the other pictures. He never used it before but I forced him to put it on. For one day, we had hired three young guys to help us. Where you see me standing in the first picture is still about 3' above the floor. There was no room inside this small warehouse to put enough records just so we could expose the floor on one side and then work ourselves from this one end to the other so we hired these kids to fill records into cardoard boxes and bring them outside in front of the door for us to look through them. We didn't have masks for them and they were sneezing and coughing up a storm in there... I really felt horrible for them. Damian and me were diging through boxes after boxes of 45s, just piling up rejects in front of us. Basically the entire stock consisted to around 95% of about 20 different titles. The warehouse belongs to a studio and record label that also distributed other records as well. Once the vinyl market collapsed, they just threw everything in there. LPs, 45s, empty LP sleeves, unused dead stock straight from the pressing plant, returned stock from various stores etc.
The worst part was that there walso were several mats of fibre glass. They had used it to soundproof the studio and obviously boughgt too much of it. Damian had dug through most areas of the warehouse before and in the process mangled the fibre glass stuff into finer and finer pieces... this shit got everywhere. First on your arms then under your shirt, into your shoes, up and down your pants... serious itching and discomfort for days. Everytime I came across one of the 1-2 dozen of copies of Nigerian pressed JB "I got ants in my pants" 45s, I had to chuckle like a fool.
This was after I had finished looking through all the stuff they had brought out:
All the 45s I'm sitting on were either unusably scratched up or multiple copies of the 20+ titles (all pretty mediocre Highlife) that they still had boxes full in a big shelf in the centre of the room. We had to do this just to clean one side of the room down to the floor so we were able to methodically mine ourselves to the other end of the warehouse like this:
We made sure that at least a couple of dozen copies of each title were nicely stored away in the relatively little shelf space that was available. No rare records got destroyed by our work regardless of musical style.
FRANK,
Frank, Frank, Frank, Frank, Frank.
I dont..
wait...
i mean...
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Frank really rules that game!!!!