Once upon a time, there was a record store.
Not just any record store. In 1970, a little shop opened its doors in San Francisco's Castro district. It didn't look like much from the outside. But inside, something extraordinary was happening: people who cared deeply, almost unreasonably, about music were gathering in a small room full of records and deciding, together, what was worth listening to.
Aquarius Records moved a few times over the decades — down the street in the Castro, once landing right next door to Harvey Milk's camera shop, then to Noe Valley, and finally to a storefront on Valencia Street in the Mission. The address changed, but the mission never did. The staff listened to every single record that came through the door, and if they didn't love it, they didn't carry it. Every record on the shelf had a hand-written tag — not a price sticker with a genre label, but three paragraphs of someone telling you why this particular piece of music mattered and what it would do to you if you let it.
Somewhere along the way, they started writing it all down. In 1995, "It Came From Aquarius Records" appeared — a biweekly email that opened with "Beloved Customers and Friends" and then spent 10,000 to 25,000 words telling you about every record, cassette, CD-R, and zine that had arrived at the shop. Drone, psych, metal, krautrock, avant-garde, field recordings, things that didn't have a genre yet — it was all there, described with the kind of breathless enthusiasm that made you want to buy records you'd never heard of from a store you might never visit.
The writing was the thing. Andee Connors, who co-owned the shop through its final chapter, wrote roughly a thousand reviews a year. His collaborator Jim Haynes, a contributor to The Wire, matched that intensity. Together they built something that read like jazz liner notes written by people who'd just had a religious experience in the listening room. Over 4,000 subscribers around the world waited for those emails. Other stores — like Other Music in New York — started writing their own versions, but aQ was first, and nothing quite matched its fever.
Aquarius Records closed its doors in the summer of 2016, after 46 years — San Francisco's oldest independent record store, finally overtaken by a city that was changing faster than anyone could keep up with. The store's space was taken over by Superior Viaduct, a reissue label that kept the spirit going under a new name. But the 503 issues of "It Came From Aquarius Records" — two decades of obsessive, joyful documentation of the outer edges of music — lived on only in scattered web archives, slowly disappearing from the internet.
This project brings them back. Every issue, from #1 (June 2, 1995) to #502 (June 3, 2016), delivered to your inbox at whatever pace you choose. It's not nostalgia — it's a reading list, a listening list, and a window into a world where people still believed that the right record could change your life.