A clean, welcoming alternative to musty secondhand stores and snob havens, Dodo Beach provides smooth sailing for record buyers.
As the vinyl revival spins onward, Berlin’s usual record-buying crowd – DJs, David Bowie obsessives and tourists wondering where all the Kraftwerk is – has expanded to include another type of customer, the Pitchfork-reading newbie who’d rather be told exactly which Ty Segall EP or Numero Group release to get than spend hours digging through crates. If you’re one of them, or you need to buy one of them a holiday present, consider Dodo Beach, the vinyl-only shop opened by concert mega-promoters Trinity in April of this year.
Just metres from Bowie’s old Schöneberg apartment, Dodo Beach is bright with nary a hint of mustiness and carries a rock-oriented, user-friendly selection of Platten. New records, the majority of which are sorted alphabetically with smaller sections for indie boutique labels and multi-hyphen genres, dominate the front room, with secondhand relegated to the back.
Down a staircase lined with pin-up posters, the black-lit, black-carpeted “Metal Dungeon” uses a very loose definition of the term, spanning everything from Rush to the Ramones. Once you’ve found something to your liking (which shouldn’t take long), you can preview it on the turntables or take it to be rung up by the straight-out-of-High Fidelity staff, which often includes long-haired Trinity CEO Tomas Spindler.
They also sell tickets to Trinity shows, though that euro or two you’ll save by buying direct won’t amount to much when record prices start at €8-10 for most used LPs and only go up from there. But what you might lose in cash, you’ll gain in finally having that Iraqi folk-pop compilation from Sublime Frequencies at your fingertips.
Dodo Beach, Vorbergstr. 8, Schöneberg, U-Bhf Eisenacher Str., Mon-Fri 10-20, Sat 11-20
Originally published in issue #122, December 2013.
