Music to Your Ears

You Say Hello

Another new all-ages venue popped up this month. The newly minted concert haven is a mashup of 1Kind Studios, a for-profit recording studio/performance space, and the Albuquerque Arts Consortium, a nonprofit group seeking to cultivate and nurture new artists.

The space is at the corner of 10th Street and Coal, which used to be La Iglesia Church. The place is run by a small group of Burque natives who, according to Arts Consortium Vice President Caitlin Padilla, is looking to help out the music scene and drop some knowledge. “In the public schools, arts are the first programs that get cut,” Padilla says. “We want to be there to pick up the slack where the school systems have let us down.”

Padilla says 1Kind will host an all-ages concert or two every month, and the Arts Consortium plans to provide music lessons, visual arts classes and recording studio tutorials.

The concert space is about the size of the now-charred Golden West Saloon. “It's relaxed and you’ll feel very welcome here,” Padilla says. “Large venues can lose their soul, and small venues can seem cheap. We’ve got a good combination of comfortable and professional.”

Padilla says she hopes 1Kind will attract local and national acts, but it’s especially geared toward Albuquerque’s talents. “There's a lot of great music and art coming out of this city,” Padilla says. “We want to show everyone that this is what our community can create.”

Classes are expected to start at the beginning of next year, and Padilla says the Arts Consortium is committed to keeping them affordable.

You can find out when the next 1Kind Studios gig is at myspace.com/1kindstudio. Read up on the Albuquerque Arts Consortium at myspace.com/abqconsortium.

Vinyl Boneyard

For months he contemplated closing his doors, but We Buy Music (Harvard and Central SE) owner James Bongard has decided to move instead. He’s relocating the store to Lomas and Truman NE (just west of San Mateo). Bongard hopes to be up and running by the first week of September. What changed his mind? The 30,000 records stockpiled in his house. Bongard will be selling them off in groups of about 400 for the next year or so. He's also got about 10,000 tapes he's looking to unload. "I've got every style of music there is," Bongard says. "That many records takes up a lot of space in your life."

Some of Bongard's personal stash has been placed in what he calls the "vinyl boneyard." There's nothing spooky about the records—they're just more common than some of the rarer finds in the store. You can get 10 records from the boneyard for 10 bucks. "There's some pretty good stuff in there, too," Bongard says.