Inside Rhythm House: Records of the past

Aritry Das
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read

By Aritry Das

The hustling-bustling Moore Market seems to be an extension of the similarly noisy Chennai Central Station situated right beside it. But as you go up to the first floor of the market, through corridors full of small antique shops, thrift stores, pet shops with chattering exotic birds in cages, you will reach the end where Rhythm House awaits you.

There are racks full of second-hand turntables and man-high stacks of old vinyl records inside the cozy shop called Rhythm House. Three gramophones sit on a desk outside the shop, dreaming of some 60’s jazz song. A grandfather clock stands — frozen in time — beside the shop’s door.

It’s an old and cozy record store where the noise of the market has died down. Through an open balcony the afternoon sun flows into the shop to play with dusts and slowly brushes across the aged corners of silent gramophones.

The place smells like an ancient house and scent of old books. Customers can browse through the records stacked in boxes or listen to them in one of the players. With a collection of over one lakh records, this seems to be the perfect place for music lovers and people who relish all things old.

Their record collection, acquired over four decades, consists of old film music in Tamil, Telegu, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, and other regional languages along with a vast Western and Indian music collection.

L. Mahesh, a 35 years old man in a red polo shirt, sits at the table just outside the shop. He is carefully mending a tattered record sleeve. “Either it lasts few months or 50–60 years — all depending on the care you are giving”, he says as he wipes the vinyl record gently and puts it inside the sleeve. He has been working in Rhythm House for last twenty years.

“This is our family business. My uncle Mr. Sree Ram owns this store,” Mahesh said. Theirs was a Telegu family who came to Chennai four generations back. Sree Ramulu, Mahesh’s maternal uncle, started the store in 1975.

Sree Ramulu, an old man in his early 70s, came to the store for a little while to meet him. “We have been in Moore market only for last 13 years. Before that we had a shop in Nungambakkam,” he said, lowering his eyes in a sudden gush of sadness. “The shop was bigger in size then. But the lease ended and the new landlord wanted us out,” He added.

One of the exciting things about such a store is the kind of unpredictability it offers; you never know what you may find amidst the stacks of these records. If you want something specific, your only refuge is Mahesh who has thorough knowledge of the record store’s collection as well as of music.

“We have a lot of plain old filmy music, but also a vast array of English rock, pop, jazz, blues. These are really popular among the young and middle-aged customers. We also have a good amount of Carnatic and Hindusthani classical albums,” Mahesh said with a subtle hint of pride. “From the Beatles, Pink Floyd, to Iliya Raja, A.R. Rahman, to the great Bismillah Khan Saheb, Ravi Shankar, Anand Shankar — we have all of them.”

The small record shop has been made into a treasure cave through the rigorous connoisseurship of shop owner and music enthusiast Mr. Ramulu. He has made sure that any music fan is able to find at least a few records they would love. “We have only a fraction of our record collection in the shop. The main storage in the basement has the rest of the records.” said Mahesh.

Since records are now rare and very few western musicians come up with new vinyl LPs, the old ones have become antiques, and hence a bit costly. A popular Pink Floyd record would cost around Rs 1000 with little room for bargaining. Price varies depending on the artist and the quality of records as well.

The shop primarily stocks secondhand LPs, bootleg versions, and 45 and 75rpm records; there are also rare old cinema soundtracks, gramophones, record players, antique radios, and clocks that may be of interest to niche group of antique collectors.

Rhythm House ships records abroad with help of agents. They have customers in Netherlands, Germany, Malaysia, and Singapore. The former king of Thiruvananthapuram had been their old customer.

They have built such a huge collection by creating personal web of contacts through customers, collectors, auctioneers, and their agents. Back in Nungambakkam, they acted as record dealers for HMV, Inreco, Echo and other big music companies even 20 years ago. “With records going out of market, we turned the shop into an antique store.” says Mr. Ramulu.

Mahesh, talking about their time in Moore Market, mentions a customer named Suraj. “He was a young chap who used to come to the shop and buy records often. It was three years back. Suraj was mainly interested in English rock music. But a few times he broke records because he did not like that particular music,” he says. Astonishingly, Mahesh was not even partly angry while saying this.

A music enthusiast in his 20s, Vignesh Iyer, who has come to find a record he had ordered earlier, said, “Digital music is threatening the album art that created history through epic record sleeves. I try to collect them from many places and Rhythm House has been a lucky spot for that.” He comes here often and saves up from pocket-money to buy the records on his must-have list.

In this time of digital music, business is not that good for Rhythm House. But they get by with their love for the shop and music. Mahesh, cleaning one of the gramophones on the desk beside him, said, “Digital music can never replace the warmth of sound produced by vinyls. It is the original sound. It resembles quite closely the way we organically hear music.”

Those records in Rhythm House are physically standing there like a mountain of music where one arrives at a different tune with each step. But in this fast-changing world, this shop is now a relic of the glorious days gone by.

There is no more a music store to visit in most cities and discover an artist who will become your favourite for life. Only people like Mahesh, who are struck in nostalgia, would know that music, no matter how abstract, can still be physically felt through vinyl records.

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Aritry Das

Writer. Photographer. Journalist. Ferociously political.

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