Klang Tone Records will open its doors tomorrow, Saturday October 8th, in London Road, Stroud.
Owner Sean Roe explained the choice of name: “Klang means ‘sound’ in German, and a friend suggested Klang Tone and I loved it.”
The logo has been designed by Sean’s Son, Akira and features a cat, loosely based on Enid the resident cat at Sound Records, a business started by Sean and Tom Berry.
“The ‘klanging’ sound means that the music I’ve got is a little bit more abrasive or a little bit more edgy.”
Sean and Tom went their separate ways earlier in the year, with Tom opening a new Sound Records store in George Street, Stroud.
“Tom and I achieved great things over the four years we were together – Tom’s amazing energy and social media skills helped make the shop extremely popular – but I reached a point when I needed to concentrate on the music that was closer to my heart and so we agreed to amicably split – with Tom continuing with his plan to grow the Sound Records brand – and he’s doing remarkably well now at his new location,” explained Sean.
“My taste in music has always been a little bit off the wall, I like Japanese music, experimental music and jazz, but not just standard jazz, I’d say more sort of free jazz and improvised music, and I just wanted to become more of a specialist.”
Whilst around a third of Sean’s stock is jazz or jazz related there is also a wide range of other genres, from blues music through to rock and punk.
“The direction of travel for me is to become more specialist, with more off the wall electronica and 1960s experimental music, and also I’m making a point of stocking the same kind of CDs – jazz and experimental CDs,” added Sean.
Sean also sells cassette tapes: “The process to press a record is taking considerably longer now, and so a lot of smaller labels can do very small runs like 50 or 100 cassettes and it’s not very expensive.
“And people do still have cassette players, or you can go into a charity shop and find a cassette player easily enough. It’s very ‘indie’ and handmade – you can run off cassettes at home if you’ve got a tape recorder.”
Sean plans to launch a record label next year, the first album coming from Stroud-based musician Radiolarians. The shop is on two levels and the lower section is being used as a gallery with a new show planned each month. The inaugural exhibition ‘For Rituals’ features a series of collage works by Stroud artist, musician and poet Graham Sefton under the name Detritus Plates, and runs from October 8th to 29th.
“My background is in fine art, so I like curating the space and making it look really nice,” said Sean.
“Of course, I want to sell records, but I love to create an environment for people to feel they can browse even if they don’t buy anything.”
Klang Tone Records, at 50A London Road, opens at 10am on October 8th, and will be open Wednesday to Friday noon to 7pm, and Saturdays from 10am.
