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Vinyl For Climate with Lauren + Oberon Carter
820 Plays5 months ago
Did you know that women represent less than one third of artists in the music industry? And just 12.6% of songwriters? I’m quoting my guests here, Lauren and Oberon Carter of Spiral Garden and, lately, Suffragette Records in Hobart, Lutruwita.
Suffragette Records stocks music made by women only, not for the sake of exclusion but to rebalance the scales. Because who and what we listen to patterns our thinking, beliefs, communities and civilization. When women aren’t part of our cultural soundscape, we miss out on stories and messages and melodic teachings from a whole portion of the population.
I was delighted to unpack Lauren + Oberon’s new-ish adventures in vinyl, how the’ve embedded permaculture ethics into their business, the day to day experience of running a record shop as a family of five, and the heartfelt chats they’re having with old dudes about music, climate change, the matriarchy and everything in between.
- Lauren + Oberon’s home on the web ~ Spiral Garden
- Lauren + Oberon’s record store ~ Suffragette Records
- Spiral Garden’s Substack
- Suffragette Records on the gram
Julia Jacklin ~ Don’t Let The Kids Win - Joni Mitchell ~ Court + Spark
- Vandana Shiva
- ***Support Reskillience on Patreon***
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Riskilience Podcast
00:00:03
Speaker
Hey, this is Katie and you're tuned in to Riskilience, a podcast about the hard, soft and surprising skills that'll help us stay afloat if our modern systems don't. I'm gratefully broadcasting from Jara country, central Victoria,
00:00:24
Speaker
where the season sounds like the crunch of morning frost and the swoosh of fallen leaves. It sounds like wind in the dry dead stalks of summer corn and the peeping of spotted partelotes.
00:00:39
Speaker
Every season has its own soundtrack, with different birds, different creatures, different breezes, different patterns of behavior.
Connecting with Nature through Sound
00:00:48
Speaker
About a year ago, I stopped playing music or podcasts while I was out walking or digging around in the garden so I could listen to the land. It felt kind of rude not to. Plus, my headphones broke.
00:01:03
Speaker
Our listening habits have changed since the rise of digital music and streaming services. Playlists have eclipsed albums. Algorithms have replaced mixtapes. Putting on a pair of bulky headphones is the universal signal to rack off.
00:01:21
Speaker
Music has always been a portable and roaming thing, but now it can be private and solitary, just you and your eardrums rocking out in a vacuum.
Gender Disparity in Music Industry
00:01:31
Speaker
And I know this spiel is sounding old-fashioned and crotchety, but I'm surprised that for all of our musical modernizing, for the great lengths we go to to curate perfect listening experiences, we're still not listening to mother country, and we're sure as hell not listening to women.
00:01:50
Speaker
Did you know that women represent less than one third of artists in the music industry, and only 12.6% of songwriters, and just 3% of producers? I'm quoting my guests here, Lauren and Oberon Carter of Spiral Garden, and lately Suffragette Records in Hobart, Lutruwita. Suffragette Records stocks music made by women only, not for the sake of exclusion, but to rebalance the scales.
00:02:19
Speaker
Because who and what we listen to patterns our thinking, beliefs, communities and civilisation. When women aren't part of our soundscape, we're poorer in stories and messages and melodic teachings from a whole portion of the population. When we close our ears to the more than human world, we start to think that us people folk are the only ones with valid opinions and worthwhile things to say.
Introducing Lauren and Oberon Carter
00:02:46
Speaker
There's a massive connection between the dearth of women in music and the desecration of our living world, but I'll let my wonderful guests, Lauren and Oberon, elucidate. You might know them from their Zero Waste Adventures that began in 2015, and the book they wrote called A Family Guide to Waste-Free Living, which has become a household classic.
00:03:07
Speaker
I was delighted to unpack their new-ish venture, Selling Vinyl, how they've embedded permaculture ethics into their business, the day-to-day experience of running a record shop as a family of five, and the heartfelt chats they're having with old dudes about music, climate change, the matriarchy, and everything in between.
00:03:28
Speaker
This is such a fun episode to kick off Resculience's new fortnightly rhythm, a much healthier beat for me and myself, who comprise the team here at Resculience HQ. New episodes will now land every second Monday, but there's always something happening over on Patreon, which I'll chat to you about at the end of the ep, with a whole bunch of shoutouts and behind the scenes shenanigans to boot.
Sustainability and Music Business
00:03:51
Speaker
Stick around for that, and for now, please enjoy the excellent Lauren and Oberon Carter.
00:03:59
Speaker
everyone's still at home. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Cosy lives. No one's going, you know. I'm just saying the cosy lives. Cosy lives. Wait a second. Here I was thinking it was the cost of living crisis, but you're telling me it's the cosy cosy lives. Cosy lives. Cosy lives.
00:04:18
Speaker
It makes it sound a little bit warm and fuzzy when really it's an absolute nightmare. Yeah, exactly. It's a way, it's a way of just, I guess it's like an Australianism, isn't it? Where you kind of humourise something that's really shit, you know, because it is like really horrible, but so much of the things that are challenging in our lives are because of increasing costs of living. So we just call it Cosy Lives and I feel like it's become part of our vernacular now to say that.
00:04:48
Speaker
You know, it's just that sort of like, yep, that's just another thing that makes it harder, but yeah. I mean, maybe this is too deep, too soon, but what are you seeing, if any, as the opportunities that are arising from the cosy lives? I think it's more ability to adapt is something that we're all going to have to learn or we have to learn.
00:05:14
Speaker
Yeah, and that's definitely something that we're passing on to our kids.
00:05:18
Speaker
But asking someone to suddenly spend more on all of their bills and stuff is not an immediate opportunity. But like you say, it's making people work out ways to be more frugal and conscious with their spending. You'd think it would reduce consumption, but wealthy people keep on spending. So I don't know if the opportunities
00:05:47
Speaker
community connections. Yeah, theoretically, if we're seeing a bit more of that. Yeah, no, opportunities probably isn't the right word. Perhaps it's if we have that capacity to rise to the challenge. And maybe it is coming through this personal filter of I really work well with limitations that are placed on me. And I think that there is a problem solving piece that gives me a lot of joy.
00:06:12
Speaker
and pleasure, even though it can feel really sticky and uncomfortable. But this is all held by a net of security that I know I have that not everyone does. But yeah, I wondered if there was anything in there being proponents of a really frugal, a frugally abundant lifestyle that you might be seeing. Not hugely. Let's talk about something more fun. Maybe normally, but because of the record store,
00:06:41
Speaker
and the nature of that business being in the system. That we're at this point strangely where we want people to buy the things that we're selling.
00:06:51
Speaker
even though we're kind of anti-capitalist. We've got ideas around why- There's a sort of purpose reasoning behind it. Yeah, that's right. We've got purpose there. And so it sort of goes against opportunities. It just makes it harder for us to deliver on a business. I think also as parents of young people who are trying to make their way in the world too,
00:07:19
Speaker
It's pretty full on for them. Their opportunities are definitely limited. They're a lot different to the opportunities that we had growing up. So we kind of have to buffer for that differently and provide for them for a longer period of time than we were provided for and just consider ourselves as a little
00:07:49
Speaker
you know, the family unit becomes like an extended community because they have friends and partners and people are involved in that too. And so we feed them and yeah, it's kind of, yeah, it's a tough one, isn't it? Yeah. I'd love to talk about how
00:08:16
Speaker
like you just alluded to, how you're making that connection between your values and this new endeavor. Yeah, I guess it probably seems a little left field, how we arrived at that, from where we were when it was like two years ago where we said, well, we didn't, we were lying in bed one, late one morning and we were talking about music and the music industry and
00:08:47
Speaker
Also feminism and all of these things that we often talk about. My family have a background in the music industry. My dad, my sister, they're still working in it. So I guess I sort of had this sort of knowledge my whole life about that and how it operates. But we were talking about the statistics and how female artists are still
00:09:16
Speaker
Um, they're only representing like 20% represented in 20% of popular music. Um, that you're seeing in the charts and pretty much anywhere you look, if you listen to the radio, it's like one, every four or five songs will be a female artist. Um, if you watch rage, it's often the same. If you're in a supermarket, it will be every fourth or fifth will be a female artist.
00:09:45
Speaker
Um, if you go to a record store, you'll look and they, there's a heat that I'm missing. And, um, that was kind of frustrating. And I, I think I just said to you, we should, we should just run a record store that just celebrates women and you're like, yeah, let's do it. Like just from the outset super into that idea. But it's, it's, um, in court, it's sort of.
00:10:12
Speaker
worked with all of our skills and all of our knowledge. So Oberon's really great at collecting and knowing how to do that and also taking care of records. I'm sort of all about the stories behind them. And then our kids have this amazing knowledge of how to use social media.
00:10:34
Speaker
in a way that's reaching the TikTok generation.
AI and Human Creativity in Music
00:10:37
Speaker
And so we've been able to tap into that and just work together with all of the things that we do, which has been really good as a whole family project. It's been super fun and just joyous. And remembering what it was that we were about as a couple with our very first conversation was about what music do you like? And it was very much about
00:11:04
Speaker
going and seeing live music and listening to music and collecting CDs. So it's been really nice to bring it back full circle and then share that with the kids. Yeah, I mean, when I read your website, the connection makes so much sense and all of the things that you're weaving into your business, all of your ethics and values.
00:11:28
Speaker
I had experienced multiple mind melts and especially those statistics around the male skew in the music industry. If you can paint a little bit more of a picture of that really confronting modern phenomenon of women's voices not being centered in the music industry, I'd love that. And then connecting that to the bigger issues that we're facing because there is such a strong connection there.
00:11:57
Speaker
I can speak not as a woman but I can speak to this. I think that part of the link between music and the waste free stuff and the permaculture stuff and our desire to enact positive change around climate change issues and things like that was the realization that a lot of the problems in the world are steeped in or bedded in
00:12:23
Speaker
the problems with living within a patriarchal society. And the popular music over the last hundred years or so has been male-dominated, and music is a vehicle by which stories are told to societies, to communities and societies about things that matter, things that matter to the individual, to the heart, or things that matter to social causes, or it could be
00:12:51
Speaker
the war in Vietnam and you link that to music in the 60s and how powerful that was and that still happens today but if the voices are mostly male
00:13:03
Speaker
then you're missing out on 50% of the population when you're thinking about the stories that we tell and the messages that we want to convey intergenerationally. And if we want the trajectory of us as a species to kind of evolve into something that is like a altruistic, empathetic, caring, nurturing, sharing kind of society, then
00:13:31
Speaker
I think that tilting the balance there so that it's
00:13:37
Speaker
we're hearing more women's voices is one pathway to doing that. And so by having this shop that celebrates music by women, we're doing our little small part in just elevating that issue and doing it in a way that's not just talking about the doom and gloom statistics of the industry, because they're not very cheery and you get pretty bored of them pretty quickly, but actually just talking about how awesome
00:14:03
Speaker
The music is by so many women and just continuing to talk about that and sharing those stories and supporting the artists that are making that music. And that's our little way of tackling that issue that's really important to us. But it is linked back to climate change ultimately and issues that are facing the planet, even though this is in the creative arts space and it's in a small business setting. It's all linked back.
00:14:30
Speaker
to our ultimate intentions, which is to keep nature flourishing and care for the earth and care for people. We're big believers in the power of the creative arts, whether it's literature, art, music.
00:14:47
Speaker
film, TV, whatever, to communicate stuff. We need leaders, we need people out there who can share solutions and they have a platform. Musicians often have a platform. Sometimes, you know, you've got musicians out there singing misogynistic lyrics and talking about terrible things, but there's some really deep, important stories to be told.
00:15:09
Speaker
And so we're just a little avenue for trying to prop up some of that good stuff. Fantastic. And there's also a big parallel between how we can chew music.
00:15:21
Speaker
the rate at which we consume music and the streaming services. And I was just saying to someone the other day, why do artists make albums anymore when they're purely being, it's almost like it's a playlist era rather than an album era, because we lose that sense of a discrete parcel of creative intention when you're just looking at Spotify. And I was reminiscing about a share house that I was part of and we had a record player and this thing was so central to our
00:15:49
Speaker
our social life and our cultural, the atmosphere in that house. And we bought Julia Jacqueline's blue, don't let the kids win. And I just love her so much. She's brilliant artist and
00:16:03
Speaker
The richness and the slowness and the appreciation I had for that record and that experience of listening to it is so different to what I mostly do now, which is press play on some kind of curated Spotify playlist. So I wonder if you're able to tell us a little bit more about the realities of streaming and also the energy that's involved in streaming music as opposed to having something beautiful that you can hold in your hands.
00:16:29
Speaker
The impacts, the environmental impacts of streaming at the moment are greater than the environmental impacts of
00:16:40
Speaker
the vinyl record industry when it was at its peak in the 1970s. And I think because so much of the impacts are invisible to people who are streaming music, kind of like people using petrol-fueled cars that aren't really seeing the emissions so much. If you're streaming music, you're not thinking about the massive warehouses that are hosting or keeping all of the tech.
00:17:06
Speaker
at the server farms where all of these the music is stored and streamed from that consume huge amounts of fossil fuels. We recognise that records are made of plastic and can include kind of polluting chemicals in them but they can last for 100 years if you look after them and if you buy the records that you love they can be kind of intergenerational kind of
00:17:35
Speaker
and sentimental and intergenerational objects for your family and friends. So like Lauren and I both have our mom, our respective mothers, a copy of Joni Mitchell's Court and Spark. And then we've got that now and then we'll hand it to our kids.
00:17:53
Speaker
And then they can pass it on. And so it'll be like a century of Joni, you know, looking at how important her music has been and her lyrics and, you know, that resonance. And I just think that's sort of like, in the absence of us as kind of Anglo people,
00:18:12
Speaker
sort of being a bit removed from a strong sense of like culture. I feel like music is where we kind of can like tap in and feel like, I don't know, it's something akin to culture, but it's like resonating with things that matter. And yeah, records can do that if you look after them. They're not, it's not a single use item.
Mission and Impact of Suffragette Records
00:18:31
Speaker
And some people, the problem is that some people are buying records. And the statistic is that 50% of
00:18:39
Speaker
50% of all records that are bought, or just 50% of Taylor Swift? 50% of all records that are bought, which is almost 50% of Taylor Swift records, by people who don't own a record player. Oh, that's interesting. Are they playing Taylor Swift Frisbee?
00:18:56
Speaker
They're just displaying it and owning it because they want to have a tangible piece of that artist and demonstrate their support for it. On one level, you can appreciate that, but it's not really a good use of all of the energy that goes into producing that item. The records are really meant to be played and enjoyed and cared for if you want.
00:19:15
Speaker
something to show your love admiration for an artist just buy like a t-shirt or a poster or something or go to their gig or support their Patreon but maybe maybe records are not right for you or get a turntable and spin those discs and enjoy them you know. Yeah you had a stat on your site that really brought it home around how many listens to an album
00:19:39
Speaker
made it more environmentally friendly as an option. Was it like 23? Yeah, 23 hours of streaming. Yeah. Yeah. If you're going to listen to your favorite album about 20 times, you should really buy it. And then you've got it to listen to forever. And you're also supporting the artist who made it, which is not happening with streaming. It's really impossible for musicians to make a living.
00:20:10
Speaker
off streaming. And if that's the only way that you're accessing music, then you're not helping them to to make a living and to be able to keep doing it. There are there are like huge bands that we're reading about that are giving up on touring and that are giving up on making music because they just can't make a viable. When you think about like smaller artists and you know, there are even artists that we consider
00:20:40
Speaker
are quite big artists. They're not making anywhere near minimum wage, just of their spending. That's just heartbreaking. Like, yeah. So if you buy an artist's record, then a greater proportion, there's more money going to them. Yeah. Than if you just stream. Yeah, like a huge, a huge amount more going to them, but also the, you know, in terms of emissions and stuff like that.
00:21:09
Speaker
If you're just going to stream it like into end all day long, you might as well abort it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And is there a bit of a resurgence around vinyl? You even sell cassettes, I believe. Over the last like five or 10 years, there's been an increase. And I think it was maybe 2022 where
00:21:33
Speaker
vinyl overtook CDs for the first time in like 20 years or something. So there's an uptick with vinyl collecting and interest in vinyl. But that was a COVID thing too. That was a bit of a COVID thing. Because people couldn't go and see their favourite artists live. They stayed home and started collecting records. But also interestingly,
00:21:56
Speaker
The majority, the biggest leap in record collectors was by young women. So they were for the first time kind of getting out there and saying, well, I want to, I want to own these records. I want to build my own collection.
00:22:11
Speaker
And so, yeah, there's been a huge shift with younger generations to, you know, we noticed our kids were getting into the idea of vinyl and physical formats. They love, like they're collecting CDs and we've been buying and sharing some of our old CDs with them and finding things at the tip shop to enjoy.
00:22:39
Speaker
It's that secondhand culture that would be going through the end. They're actually really rejecting TikTok and the notion of, you know, the 15 second hook. And there's a lot of artists whose labels are encouraging them to make songs that have these 15 second hooks so that they can become viral on TikTok and Instagram. And that's really affecting the way that we consume music and our attention spans and
00:23:06
Speaker
often the kids will hear a snippet of a song that will play for them and they're like, oh, I know that that's a TikTok song. And we're like, no, it's really not. It's a whole song. We should listen to it together. But they love the ritual of putting on a record and slowing down and paying attention to it and really actively listening to it.
00:23:30
Speaker
and thinking about why the artist chose those songs where they chose them and then when you flip the record over and and what's the song on the other side and looking at the the sleeve and the artwork and consuming it the way the artist wanted us to consume it because there's a lot of thought that goes into that and you don't get that off a 15 second hook on TikTok and I think there is a real movement against that and towards
00:24:00
Speaker
just slowing down and consuming it slowly and enjoying it and sharing it with your family. In so many businesses that have an intentionality and a consciousness to them.
00:24:13
Speaker
the tension arises when you know that there are people out there you wanna reach and they're on certain platforms. And so you might choose to engage in that space and you've got daughters who are engaging in that space on your behalf for the business. Like what is the boundary that you put around that or what is the framing that you have so that you can retain and you can help them really retain that depth that is the antithesis of everything we're trained to be and do online.
00:24:44
Speaker
Did you want to talk about how we kind of moved away from Instagram? Yeah, we sort of stepped back from talking about stuff on social media in that waste climate space for a bit because it kind of felt like it was a bit personal and people were sort of looking into our lives and how we were doing things and we were sharing a lot of stuff that was deeply personal.
00:25:14
Speaker
and getting a lot of scrutiny for it. I would get all sorts of really awful messages and just sort of sit with them and realize that they weren't.
00:25:27
Speaker
based on really any sort of broad knowledge of who we were or what we were doing. These are people picking at what you just seem to be doing correctly or incorrectly. I remember bringing our kids up and yeah, it was pretty intense for a bit there. And I got pretty anxious around that stuff. So I wanted to protect our kids from it and myself from it. So it's been really nice with these two
00:25:55
Speaker
make it about someone else so our focus is on the artists and their music and their art which has been really lovely to just celebrate and highlight that but in terms of you know we do use social media to really as one of our main platforms aside from having the the bricks and mortar shop where people can come in and we can relate to them
00:26:21
Speaker
our local community and also people that are traveling to see us because we do have people from all over the world that come to our shop to have chats and look at the collection and just be in the space. We're engaging with people on social media and utilizing TikTok and it's been pretty great because one of our kids does a lot of the social media and she's really great at it.
00:26:50
Speaker
The two of us pair up and I write them and then she acts them out and performs them. But we're using it to educate people away from the algorithm that streaming services and social media provide.
00:27:11
Speaker
where it might be hard for them to discover some musicians or some new music. So we're recommending stuff or we're creating connection, intergenerational connections. So if you like this
00:27:26
Speaker
this new artist, you might really like this one that your parents might have listened to. And people are discovering music because we're making connections that are a little bit different to AI generators. Can I please get you started on AI generators?
00:27:52
Speaker
such a moral opposition to the idea of AI just like co-opting original art in whatever form it is whether it's music or illustration or graphic design or digital art and even writing and just acting out pretending like that's cool and it's now being like plugged into all the social media platforms too like you've got like
00:28:19
Speaker
AI, little AI like search bars, instead of just searching for something, it's now all AI based. And I just feel like that is not moving us in the right direction. I feel like that's sending us in a direction that is not good. It's not the singularity for humanity. This is just like
00:28:40
Speaker
It's like regurgitation and also taking away from the creative expression that we need to maintain as humans to move forward and problem solve. If we keep just co-opting old ideas and then just like spitting them out through some like warped AI generator that has black box rules about how to do that, then they don't get anywhere. So that's my pedestal and my rant. I like that.
00:29:06
Speaker
You can tell that I'm, I just think that this, that it's not needed. I can see there's values in AI for like medicine and scientific discovery and things like that. But I just think it's got to stay out of like music streaming and it's got to say out of art. I just don't think there's a real place for it in, in,
00:29:28
Speaker
We're at disadvantage as artists. It doesn't make sense to me either in that space because it's one thing to say that we're being relieved of some onerous task, but quite another to say, hey, we're actually going to seize this opportunity for creativity and curation and discovery and all the things that make it wonderful to be alive. Why would we want to outsource that?
00:29:52
Speaker
But I love what you're saying, Lauren, about being that curator because that's why we, that's why we engage with humans in a, in a shop. The expertise people have in a certain field, in a certain niche, and we can bask in their curation of something and feel delighted by that. And I hadn't actually thought about this idea of that discovery piece and curation being kind of taken away by AI too, because I'm actually starting to rely really heavily on that.
00:30:20
Speaker
And am I just in a great simplification of my own taste on Spotify? So I would love to, is that on TikTok that you're doing that? On Insta? Okay. And then for you, how are you discovering music that you want to stock or that you want to listen to?
00:30:44
Speaker
Lots of different ways. We're swamped, actually. We're spoiled for the amount of music that's coming out, new music. There's mountains of new music coming out this year and we follow a lot of
00:30:59
Speaker
artists and I think we follow a critical massive artist so that they're often talking about the artists that are supporting them and then you're like oh go and check them out and so you learn just through the links but then we have customers come in and recommend that's always great you know I had a customer come in and
00:31:16
Speaker
just tell me all about the California punk scene from the 70s or whatever it is. And someone will come in with some sort of obscure Bolivian harp music that I'd never heard about. And like, which is great. We can't always find all their records or buy them all, but we just, it's almost a more organic way of discovering music than just like your streaming service algorithm. We also get distributors lists of what's coming out, what's new, but we,
00:31:47
Speaker
on top of that have artists who are approaching us directly with their albums and people will walk into the shop and say, I made this last year. Are you interested in stocking it? And we're always like, yes, we'd love it. And then we can talk about it. We've had some people sent just, they arrive in the mail and they'll say, have these two records. We'd love it if you'd talk about it on social media.
00:32:12
Speaker
let people know we exist, let people know who our influences are and who we sound like and so we can just connect with more people and we're always happy to do that. So it feels like just sort of community building in that way and connecting people with what they like and what they're interested in because we're not necessarily across every single genre and
00:32:36
Speaker
style of music but we're learning and it's great and then we have people come in with their old second-hand records as well and we also have a supplier who brings us
00:32:50
Speaker
or who sends us really great secondhand stuff and so we're learning through them as well. It's just been a huge learning curve in the last few years really. And sometimes if you look up an artist and you look, you find out, you know, you just do your own research about who they are influenced by or who they sound like and you find Reddit threads or whatever and you find your own little rabbit holes.
00:33:15
Speaker
for artists that are similar to someone that you like. But also I had a pretty crazy knowledge of like 70s and 80s music that I got sitting on Dad's knee watching Countdown. I never had really any use for it until now so that's been cool. And our kids are into very different music as well so we kind of all
00:33:41
Speaker
share our interests and talk about things. We're into different stuff and that is definitely a good thing. There's five of you, agents of music and cultural discovery, working for Suffragette Records. And I imagine, are you still in Battery Point?
00:33:59
Speaker
Yeah, that's where the shop is. Yeah. Yeah. Such a cool neck of the woods. And do you feel like that position and that, I mean, Hobart has, when I was there, like this undercurrent of hip older folks who I imagine are just sitting on incredible record collections. Yeah. I guess the thing these days is that people know what records are worth. You know, 20 years ago, I reckon record stores were buying, buying up collections for nothing.
00:34:26
Speaker
But people know that their records have more value these days because of the internet and looking up what things are worth. So for us as a small business, we buy records and we just try to offer a fair price. If some of those locals come in with a pile of records for us, we just pick the eyes out of it or potentially take them all and offer something that's fair. But then some of them are our regulars and they'll come in and
00:34:52
Speaker
have chats. We've got a couple that, that love the recommendations that we give them because they often take them out of, you know, what they'd considered was their music. And we're like, Oh, have you had this one? And so they love that. Yeah. Spinning a record. Great. We'll just stand there and listen with them and have chats. Yeah. That's such a great experience being in the shop, spinning records with customers and just like,
00:35:18
Speaker
Sometimes you're listening to the record together for the first time and sharing that experience of music and talking about it and learning from each other. And we kind of don't gate keep music and we don't do the whole ego thing. It's just like, you know, everyone likes what they like and we're happy to support that. We don't often share a lot about like personal music tastes in, even in the business. That's sort of, you know, we kind of present it.
00:35:46
Speaker
But we don't, we don't get super like, yeah, you must like this and not like this. It's just like, all music's great. It is. I've had a couple of women walk in at various times and say, I'm having a particularly patriarchal day. Do you mind putting something on for me that will just sort of be an antidote for that? So I'll find them, you know, the record that's got the song that's going to speak to them on that day. And they'll sit on the couch and
00:36:15
Speaker
just chill out for a little bit. So it's been nice to create that sort of space too. You really do walk into the shop and it's like just seeing all of that music in one space together. It really
Community Building through Music
00:36:30
Speaker
tells a different picture, a different story to what you see when you walk into a regular record store or JB High School or whatever.
00:36:41
Speaker
very different and people generally understand that when they walk in they're like oh wow okay this is cool. It is so brilliant and that idea of a corner that you can go to to get your matriarchal therapy just let that music wash over you and get the patriarchy out of the nooks and crannies.
00:37:03
Speaker
So I want to float a bit of a half baked idea is that we may not have the same access to music that we do now. And we might actually be really grateful for our physical record collections and tangible sources of music because he was just throwing it out there, but that more and more, there's more and more like centralized ownership of music. I don't know if you have any thoughts or ideas or perspectives on that.
00:37:31
Speaker
Yeah I've heard similar things that some of the larger record labels and services may try to seek exclusivity of certain music on their own platform and so just like when we're watching streaming services on TV and you have to decide if you want to get Netflix or Stan or Binge or whatever, it could go the same way with music so you might
00:37:58
Speaker
some of the artists that you like you might have to pay over here on one service and then for another service you might have to pay over here and so people might end up being siloed in the music that they're exposed to because of that you know separating of where the music is on the internet so and there's always the prospect that any streaming service could just
00:38:20
Speaker
go into administration or whatever and you just lose it. You don't own any of the music that you're paying your monthly subscription to. If you have a local download or if you have CDs or cassettes or records, physically own that forever. If it's the music that you love and if music is important to you, then we recommend owning it in some way so that
00:38:44
Speaker
you know if that happens that that's one one thing that'll be a benefit to those people who have who actually own their favorite music because they'll have it. I mean I can also see with um the way that music has gone it's it will just be not feasible for a lot of musicians to keep making music so we're going to be missing out on a lot that way and it's going to just reduce the diversity of the music that we're listening to
00:39:14
Speaker
And, you know, it's usually the people that are at the bottom of that chain who are going to fall off first. So that's more likely to be, you know, women and Indigenous musicians and people of colour. And it's going to change the narrative.
00:39:33
Speaker
of the music that we're accessing and hearing. Yeah, I just, I really, sort of our approach to a lot of media is to try and have a physical format of it. And that's changed for us over the years. We went through a phase of getting rid of all of our CDs and because we have digital now and how great
00:40:02
Speaker
We bought it all back. But we're working on getting it all back. And same with things like books, you know, we have a really great collection of books about sustainable living because we know that eventually we may not have access to all of that information if something happens to the internet and it's not accessible.
00:40:26
Speaker
We want to be able to know how to do everything, so we've got it there in the hallway on the shelf. And it's like that for music, I think. You need to, if you really want to have control over what you can hear, then you're better off owning it. Yeah, I wonder if a lot of us have been on that journey through minimalism and shocking of all the material possessions to then realizing that there is great resilience in being a bit of a hoarder.
00:40:55
Speaker
Yeah, we're certainly not minimalists by any stretch of the imagination because I have collector tendencies. Fortunately, my collecting, I get that from my dad because he's a collector, a serial collector. My dad would collect stuff and then he would get rid of the collection and start a new collection.
00:41:12
Speaker
And so that was, that's a weird thing, but I collect books. Fortunately, they're almost all secondhand vintage, vintage paperbacks. And, you know, they're the sorts of things you get at op shops and stuff, but I have literally have thousands of books and I love them. I love them for the artifacts that they are. They're not all about reading. It's just like, I just enjoy these objects. And so I appreciate materialism. And if you, I think materialism is okay. If you're going to care for your item and you're intending for it to
00:41:42
Speaker
go to a different owner when you're done with it, hoarding things and letting the things decay and lose their function is where the problems arise if you start having stuff that's just being wasted as a result of that hoarding. But it's nice to have a stuff that's filled with cozy memories and things that you like.
00:42:04
Speaker
He is. I can see some cozy things on the wall behind you there. Yeah, we're all about it. Family artwork. Yeah. But we don't actually, I feel like we don't actually buy a lot of stuff. Most things are secondhand. We always start with secondhand if we can. All our furniture and most of our belongings and most of our clothes. We normally start at half our house with our parents' downsides. And like when we get tech, like we got
00:42:34
Speaker
We put a call out on our local community, Good Karma Network, and we got a DVD player, we got a telly, because we live in a suburb where people have like three or four of these things. And they're upgrading. And they're upgrading it. So they just give away. And that whole thing of like sharing things like a lawnmower for your street rather than every house, that sort of idea. I feel like there's so much already in existence of most of the things that we need.
00:43:03
Speaker
So either share it what you have or see if someone can donate before you go thinking about buying it new.
00:43:11
Speaker
It's just, you know, there's not a lot of need for us to get new stuff unless there's no other choice. That probably deviated from the original question. I can't remember what it was. No, no, no. You answered that beautifully and it didn't make me feel like such a conspiracy theorist sketching out that idea that maybe we'll want to have some of our favorite music to hand. I suppose we're talking about the what's and the why's of your business, but I'm actually curious about how
00:43:38
Speaker
how you work too, because the ways that we run our businesses or the ways that we schedule our lives or the ways we earn money, make a living, make a livelihood, have such a great power, either fueling and feeding the machine or disrupting it. And you did mention at the top of the conversation that you are more in the system with this business selling material things. I wonder if there's anything that you can share about
00:44:05
Speaker
your approach to work, making peace with being in the system, ways that you're kicking the system in the shins. Yeah, well, even if we just talked about the business, we're not running a record store like other record stores necessarily. Everything is underpinned by this ethic that we carry in our waste free living lives and our permy lives. So we don't have bags other than our
00:44:32
Speaker
reusable tote bags in the shop. We don't have a rubbish bin in the shop. We've never put any rubbish in the bin that's outside the shop. We re-home slightly used record sleeves. I've learned like a heart surgeon how to repair scratches on record whether they're playable again over the last two years. I've gotten really into that and
00:44:56
Speaker
cleaning up and caring for the records and it's so there's we're carrying all of this into the business that's a little bit a little bit different but in terms of like disrupting I think you know we've gone through lots of phases over the last 20 years whether it's home birth home education zero waste and
00:45:18
Speaker
I mean, a lot of the Permi stuff kind of disrupts, but definitely the ways for reliving and the home ed stuff, the unschooling is pretty radical notions to a lot of people. But I think doing this repeatedly is not necessarily doing the norm. It's almost like a developed skill now that we kind of feel like we look at a challenge or a problem and the way that
00:45:46
Speaker
that is sort of like, I don't know, the main or the popular way of tackling it. But then we tend to look at alternatives and feel like they're doable and we act on them. Or if we see a problem that's bothering us, we'll do something about it. And that's what the record store is. That's us taking that action rather than we could have easily had that conversation in bed that just resolved itself by saying, wouldn't it be cool if someone opened a record store selling it?
00:46:14
Speaker
women, you know, oh, wouldn't that be? Somehow it had to be us. Even though I work full time, I still work full time as well. And so I don't know that I'm the pinnacle of work life balance, because I work almost every day and I haven't, when you start a new enterprise, you have to put a lot more into it. And so it's not, it's not the balance isn't there.
00:46:37
Speaker
But the benefit is that, I mean, you love both of those jobs, essentially. Yeah. You really believe in what you're doing. And so like your days in the record shop are awesome. Yeah. Oh, it feels like days off. Yeah. But yeah, it's it's more time away from home, which is probably one of the harder compromises we've had to make. So the garden is like the thing that's fallen off.
00:47:06
Speaker
But we're fortunate that we're at this point where all the fruit trees are mature now. And so we're getting good food from it. The birds are also really benefiting from it. But we're able to provide, you know, things that we need from it, but nowhere near as much as we'd like. So there's a compromise there.
00:47:28
Speaker
What do you tell yourselves about that? Is that very wise Sanguin kind of, this is a season and this is what we're focusing on right now? We know that this is a phase in where we're at and at some point we'll be able to recalibrate and find more ways to be
00:47:51
Speaker
Um, what was our slogan? Home Bods for Climate, you know, just, just like a way that we can, you know, cause we love the things that we love are like food, playing records and listening to music and hanging out with the fam and with the pets and playing in the garden and going for bushwalks. And everything beyond that is just like ways to get back to doing those immediate things that you love anyway. So, you know, we're, the kids are getting older. We've got two.
00:48:21
Speaker
one's an adult, all of them are at home, but one's an adult, one's nearly an adult, and we've only got a couple of years left of home education with our youngest. And so it's sort of moving into a different phase of life. And particularly for me, because I'm sort of, you know, what am I going to do next? After all of these years of home educating, because that has been my major job, despite everything else we've been up to, that's been my focus. So it's kind of like, well, what do we want to do?
00:48:52
Speaker
you know, in the future. I don't know how long we'll, whether the record store is something that we'll do forever. It might just be a project that we're doing for now because all of our energy is kind of focused on that and all of, you know, the kids are able to spare time for it and they're into it and we're into it. Whether we'll let it go,
00:49:14
Speaker
down the track but it is it was sort of a well I've got to have some things that I'm doing you know. You've got to do something with your days when you stop home educating after 20 years of that. Yeah and you know the older kids get with home education the less time you need focused on them so um yeah. We've got books to write and stuff though. Yeah we've got so much more to say and do. Yeah
00:49:41
Speaker
Yeah I mean that's that's a question I have you know you said that you had that idea for a record store in bed one night and it wasn't somebody's idea it was your idea and your immediate gut response was that this felt good and alive and you wanted to do it but how how do you make decisions as a family? Well even that decision even though my um I was initially completely supportive it's still we still spent the next
00:50:08
Speaker
weeks like writing out a schedule of...
00:50:12
Speaker
of like Monday to Sunday working out how we would actually make this work as a family. Like, is it possible for us to physically have a bricks and mortar shop? Starting with zero, we had no records. We had no records and no money. And so it's stupid for by most measures, but that doesn't stop people from implementing fun ideas. You do it and then you deal with the practicality later a little bit, but we're pretty organized and we're like, okay, we worked out that it was possible.
00:50:41
Speaker
And so that was enough for us to continue and move forward. And now we're in, we're here. Two years later, still doing it. Yeah. Yeah, we chatted with the kids and said, well, we want to do this.
Family and Future Plans of the Carters
00:50:54
Speaker
Sorry. Dinner time, they said. Yeah, we tried it with the kids and said, are you interested in joining in with us and doing this thing? And they were like, yeah, this is great. Yeah. We like that with the ZeroA stuff as well. We wanted them to be, you know, we wanted it to be a family deal.
00:51:16
Speaker
And they were like, yet we're on board too. And so our decision making is really consultative with all of us because we all are affected by these decisions. And that's the same whether it's our kids deciding what they want to do next in their lives. Oh my God, the number of conversations that have to go to working out what the right thing is. You deeply research things especially. And it's been such a huge,
00:51:45
Speaker
period of transition for the older two particularly in the last few years. I feel like you have all these years of parenting and then you get to like you know when they're like 14 and then it speeds up and it's like think of an eye. So they're all kind of in that little space now where it's just sped up and I don't know what's going to happen at the other side of it.
00:52:10
Speaker
yeah we're just kind of riding it together and enjoying it a bit of an adventure so we're trying to remember to put our head up from time to time and we went we went for a bush walk the other day on Mother's Day and we hadn't really been for ages and it just felt so great to reconnect you know getting out in the bush and for the kids as well and all five of us being together because we're all so disparate with our own things on and
00:52:35
Speaker
Audrey was making art and taking photos and taking our time. It was really lovely. More of that. But I do think it's that stage of life thing and I don't know what the next stage looks like. It's a bit of a mystery. It's been really nice to do this as a project though. My dad sort of tapping into his knowledge and
00:53:05
Speaker
experience too and so it's reinvigorated our chats each week you know her call up and say what how's it going in the shop today he's like 78 but still actively involved in the music industry and I've sort of been this black sheep for a really long time because I did design and then home educating and just all of these other things were very much unrelated so it's been nice to
00:53:34
Speaker
to have that connection reinvigorated too and talking about that stuff with him. Yeah, it's kind of, yeah, nice on multiple levels. We have lots of ideas of other things we'd like to do, even relating to the record store. And mostly we just need like a really rich philanthropic person to just chuck a load of cash at us to implement.
00:54:00
Speaker
If there's anyone listening who'd like to throw one tonight. I'd love to make it possible for more artists to make more music and present it to people who want to see it. We had this amazing artist in the shop on Records Door Day which was end of April and she performed in our shop and
00:54:29
Speaker
just she doesn't normally perform in a very acoustic, small, intimate way. And she was really looking forward to that opportunity. But when she played, we were all just like, whoa, she is the real deal. And so many people need to know about her music. She has something like 9000 listens per month on Spotify, which means that she's making what like
00:54:56
Speaker
I don't know, $2.50 a month. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost nothing from streaming. And they're like, what can we do? How can we help this to, you know, you to do this? Yeah. And she's like, I know. And she has a, she has a young child and she's doing everything that she can. She has a lot of music recorded. She just needs.
00:55:19
Speaker
the support and the financial support to get it out there and release it. And I just feel like that's kind of where the industry's at. So any way that we can help that would be great. And she's singing songs that are about, you know, climate change and the landscape and living in Lutrui to Tasmania and mothering and all of these things that are really just so beautiful and important. And
00:55:49
Speaker
Yeah, we're like, we want to help you. That's the collaboration between the wealthy, the well-to-do, well-heeled folks and their patronage of artists and that kind of philanthropic circle of recognizing the place of art and these vectors of culture and soul that
00:56:12
Speaker
We can't commodify in the same way as other things and who desperately deserve that kind of special patronage from people who have the ability and the means. Yeah, I mean most people love music.
00:56:28
Speaker
And some people don't appreciate how much they love it until it's not there. You know, like the internet goes down and suddenly you realize you've lost all the things that you want to look at and enjoy or listen to. It's written on the coattails of people with money being able to support musicians, but it shouldn't necessarily be that way. I mean, musicians have a right.
00:56:48
Speaker
they've had to spend years honing their craft to be able to do this and yet they still get paid pittance and like the balances are not right so absolutely yeah what we value needs a bit of a check yeah yeah yeah totally yeah and i suppose this brings me to somewhat of a summary question or a distillation where i'm feeling that
00:57:16
Speaker
you know, that that pure joy of listening to music and what that means for us in our hearts and, and then the unquestionable connection between how we how we participate in that kind of culture in the world that we create. So I'm wondering how you've over the years shifted and changed and iterated from, you know, the very, very serious business of reducing your waste as a family to
00:57:43
Speaker
practically nothing, and this traditional activism that is extremely pointy and pointed and
00:57:51
Speaker
and very serious in its intent. And then bringing in this beautiful, joyful, delightful musical thread as well. Like does that parallel with how you are at the moment in the activism space? I think maybe. And I don't know if this answers your question directly, but I think part of it is recognizing that we're all multifaceted humans.
00:58:20
Speaker
And so when you, social media doesn't want us to be. Social media wants us to be one dimensional. This is the thing that this page is known for. So you see these, you see zero waste pages where every photo is a pale brown beigey kind of look of a photo of a reusable cup on a bench and it's all clean and beautiful. And that's like a very curated profile on it. And it doesn't really paint a full picture of the human that's behind it.
00:58:49
Speaker
But so I think by having the record store, we've kind of tried to intentionally add these extra dimensions of who we are as humans. We're not just like, I don't even really think of myself as a zero waste person. I go about my life. We do it subconsciously now because we've been doing this zero waste gig for nine years of just like living this way. So we don't think about it, but we're into music and we're into books and we're into art and we're into nature and we're, we're trying to find ways to like integrate it all. So it's like, you know, the lifestyle we're kind of,
00:59:19
Speaker
As a lot of Permies, a lot of people are trying to just live that lifestyle where you get to spend more of your days doing the things that you love and hopefully making a positive difference in the process. And I feel like that's kind of, you know, after being burnt out from trying to educate around zero waste for years and sort of banging our head against a brick wall, trying every different angle and repeating ourselves, I feel like this is like, all right, let's see if we can embed zero waste and permaculture into like,
00:59:46
Speaker
something else that we love like music and we'll put it into a revenue store. And it's sort of, it's sort of working. It's a way that we can still do it in a sustainable way, still to make a positive difference. And, and yeah, it's, I kind of feel like, um, talking about waste stuff, it, it's quite limited in that we ended up sort of only speaking to people who are interested in that particular thing. Whereas shifting and broadening to,
01:00:16
Speaker
Music means that we can talk about that, but we can also talk about these other things and have that as the ethic that underpins everything that we do. So we're reaching more people and we're having conversations outside of that tiny bubble and able to just expand how we look at things and how other people look at things. And we now have this face to face connection with a community of people
01:00:42
Speaker
who are wanting to talk to us about all sorts of different stuff. You know, I have really great conversations with older men about the patriarchy and talking about waste and you know, it's just so broad. The ways that we're engaging with people now, which I'm really enjoying. Just that shift in focus. We still do the other stuff when I still write about
01:01:10
Speaker
waste stuff and give people, you know, use where we're at and we're still sharing climate solutions and things like that. But having that sort of broadened, focused and sharing a bit more of the other stuff that we're into, but that other people are making and doing and talking about too is really
01:01:30
Speaker
really cool fun. So yeah. A podcast idea I had was like a dating and relationship podcast, but with people like Permies or people just in completely different fields, very, very serious individuals. Like what would Vandana Shiva tell me about like my new boyfriend kind of thing? Yeah. Yeah. We're more than just that one. Yeah. Yeah. Do you want to think about that?
01:02:01
Speaker
That might be our next interview. Red flags with Lauren and Oberyn coming. I don't have the cool street slang to pull it off, whereas I think you guys, you're down with the kids. No, we are not. We're not cool. And I think that's, you know, that's also another thing. It's like, hey, do not be cool and be into music.
01:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, you're very explicit about the non-gatekeeping and the non-snobbiness of the record store. Because it is intimidating going into places like that sometimes. Totally. And we try to create a space that's not intimidating, even though we've got a small shop, which makes it difficult in a way because you kind of physically in close proximity to the customers. But we want it just to smell nice and have nice vibes so that people can come in and just feel warm and comfy and
01:03:00
Speaker
look at records and do their thing. I remember record shopping as a young woman and feeling very threatened in certain spaces and not welcome. So we kind of wanted the antithesis of that. And I think we've done it.
01:03:20
Speaker
Brilliant. And I'm trying to pinpoint the smell of vinyl. Is this the smell that you're talking about, Oberon, or do you spritz something special? It's got like an oil burner thing, so it smells like there's like a peppermint eucalypt and... It smells fresh and lovely. It doesn't smell like...
01:03:39
Speaker
70s final cigarettes my record. Ceremones to some. Well it is it's so delightful hearing about your endeavor that isn't quite so new now it's a good couple of years and very much hoping to visit you when we're next in TAS and
01:04:03
Speaker
just love the iterations and seeing your story and connecting with you again. Just such a pleasure. Thanks for getting the thought-provoking questions to push us into thinking about this stuff because we're just often so busy living our lives that we're not necessarily spending time reflecting in this way. So I love these sorts of discussions that prompt us to remember some of the why and realize that
01:04:33
Speaker
We're a bit freaky in our approach to things, or a bit different, and other people might be interested in hearing that.
Closing Thoughts and Future Episodes
01:04:41
Speaker
I feel like I forget. We don't talk about it as much as we probably would like. Absolutely, yeah. Sharing the freak love is powerful. Don't stop. Okay. All right, thank you so much.
01:04:57
Speaker
Thank you to Lauren and Oberon Carter, who must be two of the coolest and most thoughtful humans alive. I've linked all the places you can find them in the show notes, including Suffragette Records, which even if you don't live in the quaint and frosty matrix of Battery Point in Hobart, you can still peruse their collection of vinyl to find your favorite women artists. And that's in their online store. And what's more, you'll enjoy low waste shipping and support a small Tassie business too.
01:05:24
Speaker
Speaking of support, you are all knocking my socks off over on Patreon. Thank you, thank you to the wonderful folks who are stoking the fires of resculience with small yet significant monthly contributions, which both helps pay the bills and also further the conversation, because as a patron you can pitch questions for our upcoming guests and also connect with other like-minded listeners.
01:05:49
Speaker
Soon, I'll be hosting monthly resculience saloons, where we can all hang out and nut out some of the larger themes and provocations that arise from the podcast episodes, and that'll be up by Winter Solstice. You can also join up just as a free member, which means you'll hear about new stuff when it happens.
01:06:08
Speaker
the biggest, heartiest thank you to new patrons Danny and Sam of Folk of All Trades. Check them out if you haven't already. Their work teaching traditional and homesteading skills over in South Australia is absolutely epic. Thank you to Rachel Lockie, who is the apple of my eye.
01:06:26
Speaker
Thanks for your support, Rachel. Ellie Young, who is an absolutely radical midwife and permy, who you'll actually be hearing from as a guest in a few weeks time. You are amazing. Ian Olston, who's tuning in from Tassie through Nat Mendham. Hey, Ian, thank you so very much.
01:06:44
Speaker
Jordan Osment, one half of Happen Films. And Happen Films are doing amazing and powerful work showing, not telling, how we can all live more beautifully. If you don't know them, which I'd be surprised if you didn't, please check out their work. They have a kick-ass Patreon as well.
01:07:00
Speaker
Thank you to Madeline Hudson, Mads, the greatest singing caterer of all time. Yes, singing caterer. She has catered a retreat that I've been on and serenaded us with absolutely glorious folk tunes. And to all the podcast patrons, I really appreciate you. Thanks for being here. If you'd like to join the community, just head to patreon.com forward slash reskillience.
01:07:27
Speaker
I've also been really tickled to meet listeners in real life.
01:07:31
Speaker
I met Sunshine recently, who is a 22-year-old student of architecture and village building from China, who's been here visiting, hanging with the folks at Tree Elbow and pitching in at Meliodora. Sunshine, you totally lit us up and left such a beautiful imprint. To Lauren from Brizzy, who I met at a permaculture potluck, huddling like penguins around the fire on a freezing night, glasses of homemade grape and strawberry cider in our hands and bellies full of roadkill, rue, Lauren, it was a delight to make your acquaintance.
01:08:01
Speaker
I've been receiving particularly generous and reflective emails too from listeners like Helena, Jude and Gillian sharing where they're at in life and how the podcast is playing in. I'm really grateful for the stories that are choosing to roost in my inbox. So if you feel to, you can drop me a line at katie.com.au. It does take me a little while to get back to everyone, but don't be deterred by that. I read and absorb your messages and emails and we'll get back to you eventually.
01:08:31
Speaker
I also had a really rich conversation on the phone with Nat Mendham, who is setting imaginations alight in Tassie, Lutruwita, with her art and design and activism. I'm really so stoked and humbled that you tune into Resculience, Nat. So if you don't follow Nat Mendham's work already, please do, especially on Instagram. She's really active there, but also on her website. So many creative and disruptive offerings.
01:09:00
Speaker
So that's that for shout outs. There are so many and it's really warming my heart. Just so you know, I have back-to-back brilliance lined up for you in the next month with episodes on work, rest, birth, urban homesteading, body sovereignty, and resilience inspiration, of course, with two exceptional women. These are some of my favorite conversations so far, so they will be dropping in the next month.
01:09:26
Speaker
Make sure you subscribe to the podcast wherever you listen. I mean, you don't have to, but that just means that you'll get the next episode flashed up once it's cooked and ready. Thank you so much for listening. I'll see you in a couple of weeks time. Bye.