by Diana Phillips, Senior Staff Writer | IgniteSA Magazine | Cover Story

“When I first experienced music it was on old records that seemed to be magic vessels,” Alex Scheel recalls. “I would take in the artwork, read every word, look at every picture and imagine the far away places that the music came from.”

Scheel, the frontman of San Antonio-based beat-centric, atmospheric, indie electro-rock band Pop Pistol, waxes nostalgic about the vinyl experience: the artwork, the liner notes, sliding a 12-inch record out of its sleeve, placing it on the turntable and dropping the needle onto the first groove. All of this, the experience of listening in a room, holding the tangible product in your hands, the pop and sizzle of the static teasing your eardrums as the first track begins to play, this is the allure of vinyl - still cool even as ever-shifting technologies transform the music industry into a predominately digital marketplace.