Ashley Anderson, better known as Sydney-based producer and DJ Katalyst, has been collecting records since he was a teenager. Here he shares his collection and discusses the advantages of vinyl with Andrew Davies and Jordie Kilby.

When Ashley Anderson was a child, his step dad, who sold top end hi-fi sound systems, told him to forget about CDs and buy vinyl. It has proven to be solid advice and Anderson, or Katalyst as he’s known professionally, has put his collection to good use in making his own successful music.

As a regular visitor to Sydney’s Pitt St record shops, he was able to build up a wide-ranging collection of vinyl at a time when many were getting rid of their old LPs and the pickings were good.

Collecting anything brings a certain type of eclectic person into the mix and obviously when people that share the same sort of eccentric passion as something like collecting records then it becomes a small world kind of quickly. Ashley Anderson, music producer and DJ

Anderson began seriously collecting Australian vinyl in the mid ‘90s, figuring that if he was sampling local material then there would be a greater chance of finding fresh sounds that hadn’t yet been used elsewhere in the hip-hop world.

‘I guess in my early twenties I first saw a sampler being used and realised that this vinyl that I was collecting was also being used to make hip-hop. I was already buying a bit of jazz, probably more fusion-y stuff at the time,’ says Anderson.

‘I’m really about all sorts of records. The weirder and the quirkier the better sometimes. I think there’s only so many jazz records or soul records or funk records or rock records you can collect. We’re all sort of basing everything off the blues in a sense.’

‘I think some of the Moog records and Christian records, anything that’s a bit left-field probably gets my attention more these days than maybe the better recorded, more classic albums, not that they’re not great to pick up as well. There’s still a bunch of those on my wants list. Anything that looks cheap has an extra special appeal to me,’ he says.

It’s not just the sound of vinyl that appeals to Anderson. As a serious collector, he’s also passionate about the physicality of vinyl and the small, but often, significant details found on record sleeves.

‘I like to sit down and listen to the records that I pick up and learn a bit about the artists that are involved,’ he says. ‘I think that’s one of the beauties of vinyl that we’re really missing out on today, being able to sit down with a record sleeve and read the blurb on the back, maybe someone else has written about the band or it could just be information about the band, where it was recorded, who played on the record and that sort of thing. It’s nice to absorb that sort of stuff and get a bit of history behind the music that you’re listening to.’

Listen: Vinyl frontier

For Anderson, vinyl’s other big advantage is being able to visualise the sound of the music contained in the grooves of the many and varied records he picks up.

‘If I’m in a shop with a pile of records or something, I’ll just flick through to generally get a vibe for the record and the type of production recording that went down and the vibes of the players and the session that’s on that bit of wax,’ he says.

‘Often I’ll just flick quickly across the start of a bunch of the tunes, or any gaps I see. The beauty of vinyl is that you can kind of see breakdowns and things like that on the actual bit of wax, so you can kind of preview those moments and see if there’s any drum breaks.’

‘It might be that I pick up a record because it’s only got a good two bars or four bars on it and the rest of it is utter rubbish. So that record probably won’t see much time on the turntable. Often I’ll put it in a pile to move on once I’ve kind of sampled that little bit that I’m after. It’s just a matter of actually making the time to move those records on.’

Collectors: Ashley Anderson (Katalyst) Sunday 27 July 2014 Find out more by listening to this episode of Rare Collections. More This [series episode segment] has image,

Anderson’s love of vinyl may have started with his interest in weird and quirky sounds, but like many collectors, a big part of the experience is sharing his passion with other dedicated fans.

‘Collecting anything brings a certain type of eclectic person into the mix and obviously when people that share the same sort of eccentric passion as something like collecting records then it becomes a small world kind of quickly,’ he says.

‘There’s definitely some great characters that I’ve met through collecting records and I think people that collect music are usually passionate individuals and passionate about what they’re collecting. So that’s exciting, to meet people that have interesting stories and a passion for something outside the norm of consumer culture.’

RareCollections is for crate diggers and aficionados, showcasing untold stories from Australian music history, driven by a passion for vinyl recordings.



