'I Have Time to Make Some Noise Now—A.P.C.'s Jean Touitou Just Dropped 30 Years of His Own Music
It was around that time, maybe a few years later, that I bought a Columbia GP-3 portable record player from A.P.C.'s Mercer Street store in SoHo. At $150 or so, it fit the budget of a young fashion writer who spent most of her money on clothes she couldn't afford. 'A lot of DJs bought that tool for when they go to record stores to play the records to check them out,' Touitou recalls. 'We had that store Magasin General next to the headquarters, where we used to sell random things like that.' The little plastic record player, he points out, is a good example of his absurdist streak.
Here's another: Around about 1997 he was hanging out with Marc Jacobs, Sofia Coppola, and Anna Sui. 'I had an instrumental song that was ready and I decided to have all those people read a story from Women's Wear Daily in parallel with a poem by William Blake. It's on the record called Unreleasable Tape.'
Dropping all these records is a full-circle moment for Touitou. Long before he launched A.P.C., he had a 'mail order punk psychedelic business' selling cut-outs. Cut-outs are 'records that are cut at the top with a saw. It means they're not for sale, or shouldn't be sold for more than 25 cents. And we were like gold diggers going to American record shops, basically trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.' He credits Lenny Kaye's compilation album, Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, for setting him off on this path, searching for 'collector pieces that nobody knew about.'
The Velvet Underground were influenced by Nuggets, and Touitou in turn became a lifelong fan of the band. 'They seem simple to copy, but they're one of the toughest. You have to be so sincere, and you've got to know a few things about sound.' Touitou learned those things from one of his best friends, Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers. 'He's the guy who saw the Velvets 100 times, that's his reputation, and he gave me some tips, you know, about how to set up the amps and how to use a wah-wah pedal without doing the wah-wah effect.' Kraftwerk is another longtime favorite, hence the 'Das Model' cover. Touitou says his taste has expanded as he's gotten older. 'I'm not a teenager anymore. I used to spraypaint on the walls of Paris in the mid-'70s something totally silly, like 'Death to Disco.' Now, I can find the treasures in disco, not only the energy and the dancing, but the music itself.'
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