An Interview with Sebastian Mathews
Owner of Touch Vinyl
by: Sariel Friedman and Tamar Jusidman
Sariel: What was your high school experience like? What were your interests?
Sebastian: Well, I went to an all-boys high school in Washington DC so my interest was primarily escaping. It was horrible and I never ever suggest that anyone put their kids into an all-boys or an all-girls school but my interest at that time was actually medicine. My parents were both physicians and that was what I was surrounded by and I loved it. I still love the basic sciences like biology, and chemistry. Biology especially.
Sariel: Did you do anything in highschool related to music?
Sebastian: No. Besides high school dances... I think that was about it. It’s weird. My parents didn’t actually have any music themselves. They have no record collection they have no CD collection, nothing. So I would just listen to what friends put me on to primarily and the radio. DC actually had really good alt rock stations at the time so Pearl Jam and Garbage and all of those things were on my drive to school and from school every morning. So that was a lot of my music listening. That and classic rock stations once in a while.
Sariel: What’s your favorite LA music venue?
Sebastian: That’s a good one. Historically, The Fonda. When I first came to LA and I was going to a bunch of shows the Fonda had the best vibe overall because it’s three levels, there is the bottom floor then there is a balcony area where they throw after parties sometimes now. It was really cool because you could choose the way you wanted to experience the show. You could either be on the floor looking up at the band. It’s a really intimate venue even though it’s large. On the second floor on the balcony, that was more if you wanted to chill out and be on your own but still be intimate with the band so you’d get to sit down on the balcony. And then outdoors they had a projector on the wall so you could still see the show but that was like checking out and having a drink or chilling with friends and you could talk as loud as you want and party and stuff like that and they had a full bar up there. So that used to be my favorite but with the management there it slowly became more and more restricted. There was one ticket for balcony and one ticket for the floor and the rooftop was closed off because it was for VIPs and it just got scene-y and a little bit weird and it may be getting better now but the Fonda is definitely the one where I have had the best memories especially with female vocalists like Blonde Redhead and Fever Ray. Seeing Karen Anderson was epic and one of the best shows I’ve ever been to.
Sariel: When did you feel like you “made it”?
Sebastian: I think if you feel like you’ve made it you’re probably kidding yourself. I’m having a lot of fun and that keeps me in a state of feeling like i've made it. I’m happier with my life now than when I was working as a manager or when I was in school trying to figure out what I wanted to be... so maybe I haven’t made it yet, but I'm happy.
Tamar: So what made you decide to open up this store?
Sebastian: After working as a manager and really disliking a lot of the experience I had in the film industry, I decided I would quit and travel and try and find myself a little bit. I went to Scandinavia for a month and I went to Iceland, Sweden and Denmark and in each of those cities to make friends and find out about concerts and to just dig into the culture of the country, I would go to the record shops. So in Reykjavik, Stockholm and Copenhagen are the best shops I’ve ever been to and I haven’t been to Tokyo yet. But they were the best and the owner was always just some interesting person that would tell me stuff I didn’t know about music or life or about something. By the time I had finished the trip I thought West LA could really use something like that. It was on my mind and I had to do it.
Tamar: When you started decorating the store and figuring out how you would put everything together in here, did you find inspiration from the stores that you found in Iceland, Sweden and Denmark?
Sebastian: To some extent, yeah. One big thing is having tea and coffee and the bean bags. That was inspired by a shop in Reykjavik called 12 Tonar. It’s an awesome shop, it feels like a home and the better records are down in the basement where you might imagine you hang out with your friends to get away from your parents which is really cool. But on the main floor there are couches and a coffee table with a turntable on it with headphone splitters so I’d see people listening to the same record at the coffee table. It was romantic in a lot of different ways so that’s a big one that influenced me. And the shops that are small influenced me too because you would see people in 400 square foot boxes with records covering every wall and they’d still be huge destinations for shoppers because they are so well-curated so I was like I don’t want to go that warehouse route, I want something really intimate that feels like a home once in a while.
Sariel: What did you do after college?
Sebastian: That was a long time ago so I have to think. I actually worked for Apple Computer. I was the a salesman so I would sell iPods and Macs and that sort of thing. Before a large piece of their popularity existed. it was still a difficult task convincing somebody to buy a Mac instead of a PC at that time. It was a cool experience. I liked selling, I liked that world of Apple and all of the cool products that were coming ou and I was just really passionate about the company at the time.
Sariel: What was your first job?
Sebastian: My first internship/job was actually in high school when I was still interested in medicine and I worked at the National Institutes of Health and I worked at the Laboratory for Central Nervous System Studies and I was studying mad cow disease with the foremost mad cow lab at the time. It was actually really cool because still, nobody understands how mad cow disease happens and why it happens and so we were just taking shots in the dark and playing with stuff and figuring out how different things got infected. It was fascinating, really fascinating.
Sariel: What band or musician has influenced you the most in your life?
Sebastian: That’s tough and it’s unfair, that’s an unfair question. [laughs] Well you know the first two albums I ever owned, and this is something I like to ask other people actually is “what were the first two albums you remember owning?” I traded a Stussy shirt for two CDs from a kid in like 5th grade or something and he gave me Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine and The Doors Greatest Hits and I listened to both of those on repeat for I don’t know how long, probably a year. Both were huge influences on me. Just the romanticism of Jim Morrison and that whole era. I remember I traveled to Italy the year after that and bonded with a jewelry sales girl in Florence because we were both big Doors fans and she gave me a bracelet. That whole idea and I think this generation feels that. We want something about that time and place to be with us still. And then Trent Reznor... that second track on Pretty Little Hate Machine is called Terrible Lie and I had a Discman and with the Discman when you put a CD in, it would take a while to get to the first track when you push play so sometimes you’d hit fast forward to skip the track and get there quicker and so I skipped the first track and I went to Terrible Lie and it was the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. Still the scariest thing I’ve ever heard. The way he put that sound on both sides of you and played with it and echoed his own voice and doing the industrial electronic thing, it was cool so, they are both still favorites.
Sariel: If you were to give advice to high school kids what would you say?
Sebastian: So many things. Too many things. [laughs] No actually I love that high schoolers come to the shop because it keeps me young and makes me feel alive and there are little things that come up all the time where I feel protective because I see mistakes i've made in the past or I just feel jealous because I want to have that much fun but I don’t think I have a specific piece of advice for high schoolers but I would say that your generation is super impressive. Maybe that’s just West LA and these schools that we are surrounded by but Spencer Cappiello, Mike Diamond, artists, you. You’ve got so much talent and your parents are so supportive of you in a way that’s not the same as all around the nation. The sky's the limit. If you wanna give up on one thing to do another, just do it. You’ve got the right instincts.
Tamar: Have you been having fun lately?
Sebastian: Yes, I have. I’ve been finding new cool house music, electronic music dance scenes in warehouses in Downtown and kind of just spread all over the place. I went to a really good club called Ronda International that’s been putting a smile on my face, weekly or monthly I guess. But what other fun do you mean?
Tamar: I don’t know. You were saying that you’re jealous of how kids our age are having so much fun. I feel like you have more opportunities to do more than we do. You know?
Sebastian: [laughs] Interesting. Yeah. It’s different types of freedom. As a young person you have freedom, like freedom for a first love, that type of thing. Just that innocence and being able to say “I’ve got a crazy crush on this person, I can do some crazy things to make him/her know that.” You know, that's fun and you can’t actually get that back. Once you have that first love and that first heartbreak there’s a weird milestone that’s set in you and so that type of fun definitely. But then you’re just cool. You’ve got style you’ve got good parties you’re going to. You get psyched about music. So that's really pure. You’ve still got good knees and good hips. That makes a difference. When you start dancing a lot and you get older, you get tired and it would be nice to have a little bit of that youth back.
Sariel: What was he most memorable concert you’ve ever been to or act that you’ve seen?
Sebastian: There’s maybe a top 5 that bounce around in my head. One is, and this is in no particular order, but one is Yeasayer at The Coco in London. Just the size and shape of that space still seems real to me. Maybe I was a little altered but it just it had this M.C. Escher-type of globe feel to it and I was at the top level looking down on them but they always throw an amazing show so that was one of the top 5. Fever Ray at the Fonda, definitely top 5. M83 with the Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall a few years ago. Explosions in the Sky with the Books in San Francisco, just epic sounds and the way they move with their music, and each instrument moves a different way because each instrument follows the beat a different way. You could really see it in them. You could be deaf and still really enjoy that show I think. James Murphy spinning or Julio Bashmore one of those two is definitely in the top 5 because I danced for 3.5 hours without thinking about anything else. Just water and dancing.
Sariel: Where do you think the music industry is going to go at this point? With all of the digitization of everything?
Sebastian: Well I think the dangerous place it is going is just based off of those same 7 white guys at the top of the ladder that want to feed us Rihanna and anything that’s playing on the radio more than twice a day. That force-feeding mentality is scary because there are so many people that either can’t or won’t put in the effort to explore and find other things. But in terms of new music and the state of music in general, I think it’s just as alive as it’s ever been. As long as there are still people seeking that other stuff, it’ll stay alive and it’ll get stronger. Vinyl is helping that. The fact that people can press tapes of their own band and it’s not just ironic, it’s actually useful and interesting means that it’s growing and I don’t know which way it’ll tip in terms of whether independent distribution models will ever be able to outdo the big companies but it just about more people in every successive generation saying “fuck you” to big business and big advertising and thinking a little bit more like Banksy once in a while.
Tamar: It’s very recent that vinyl came back. You came in just in time. Was that planned?
Sebastian: Honestly, the vinyl resurgence has been around for a little longer than you might expect. It’s a scary statistic but Urban Outfitters was a big piece of it coming back because they bought in such large quantities but then I think it picked up steam not just because of it being “hipster” but also because of the sound quality and collectability and the experience and all of that stuff so I definitely saw the gap on the westside and it’s something that I still kind of have a chip on my shoulder about is that everybody considers the music scene to be on the eastside and there are 9 record shops over there and 3 venues and if you want to be making music and be a cool kid you’ve got to be over there. But that’s silly. Talent is always spread all over the place. In LA especially like you guys are playing instruments and you’re singing and dancing and doing all those things just as well as anybody over there. So that gap is really clear to me. If there’s a record store here, then they’ll come. I’ll find those people and hopefully help them.
Sariel: Has it worked?
Sebastian: Yeah, definitely. I mean being able to do the tape label after a year of being open and have quality westside artists putting out stuff on it, being interviewed by Threads... There’s a place for people to come now and that community is huge with us so that community is a music community. It’s supposed to be musicians and listeners and collectors and all those people that are coming together and I hope there’s more spots over time. I hope there’s more record shops on the westside. I hope there’s one in Venice and I hope there’s one on Abbott Kinney and I hope they all have different vibes and different music so that I can go shopping here instead of over there. And then I hope there’s venues. I think that’s the next step. Like if we have an Echo or an Echoplex and we can get artists to stay on this side of town and enjoy the beach and our venue instead of enjoying the really good street tacos and The Echo... It’s just a different vibe and I’m sure there are a lot of artists that would love to do that. It’s just they don’t have that here yet and it’s going to be a little tough because of the rules in Santa Monica and that sort of thing. But Venice should be able to support a venue.
Sariel: If you were to give one artist that kids should look out for and start listening to who would that be?
Sebastian: King Krule. Maybe all the kids know about him though because he was sold out for two shows. I think kids around the nation need to know about him. I think he’s extremely talented. Especially having seen him live. For me, there’s an album, which is a production by definition. So it could be smoke and mirrors. So Passion Pit for instance, they have good albums. I can listen to a Passion Pit album. There was a time when it really had a nostalgic connotation for me but they suck live. And everybody knows it. And I think at that point you have to take yourself out of the picture on the live side and say I’m only creating things on album, take it or leave it. It’s a production. But don’t tour, don’t pretend that that’s there because that’s a big piece of the life of an album. So with King Krule, there was this huge question. Or even with Rhye or with Lorde, there’s this big question like “wow, we heard you and it sounds amazing but do you have it? Do you really have it?” And King Krule drew me in. To see him live and to see that energy and to sing along with him and to feel whatever he was feeling... that’s why I believe in him as an artist. He could have 2 bad releases and it wouldn’t matter, I would still believe in him as an artist. I think he’s just exploring himself.
Sariel: What’s your favorite book/movie?
Star Trek: Into Darkness is still on my mind because it’s damn good and JJ Abrams and Bad Robot always kick ass. And it gives me hope for blockbuster movies but generally I’m just looking for independent stuff. A recent independent one that I loved was a Danish film called Bullhead. It’s like Drive but better. Favorite book... I’m really into sci-fi so Snowcrash or Neromaster.