Home Grown: A tropical music paradise in Holland

Because every record collection has a story.

Home Grown is our series profiling you lot and your excellent record collections. Taking our cue from the brilliant submissions to the #VFRecordCollections thread on Instagram, we want to share a little of your hard-earned love for vinyl with the world.

Each week, we’ll be profiling a different collector from around the world and finding out what makes them tick. Want in? Send us a pic of your collection and a few words about your collection to social@thevinylfactory.com.

Name: Palo Santo

Location: s-‘Hertogenbosch, Netherlands

Size of collection (approx.): 1,000 LPs and 500 7″s

How long have you been collecting for?

Fifteen years ago I inherited a small collection of jazz LPs from my grandfather. After that I started buying a lot of hip-hop, disco and tropical music to play in a small café here. A few years later I bought a big collection with a lot of Detroit house, dub, soul and jazz music, but a lot of it got sold over the years as I got more into jazz and tropical music, The record shop in my hometown had these Brazil reissues that opened my ears and I went searching for more Brazilian music. A few years later I made a trip to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

What part of your set-up are you most proud of?

My Fisher Price portable record player because without that I would have bought a lot of rubbish music.

Which records are you most proud of?

My bag of Brazilian 7’s because a lot of them I’ve found in shady neighbourhoods in Rio de Janeiro and they are not findable online. The picture covers are beautiful too. The stack of reggae blanks I have I like as well because I like to research the titles and get to know more about the production and artists, especially since a lot of Jamaican artists only recorded 1 or 2 songs. I’ve bought a few boxes with 100 random rocksteady and ska blanks straight from Jamaica with crazy takes from the Wailers in the early days and other recordings that likely will never pass by again.

What does your record collection mean to you? It’s a fun archive for me, also to see how my taste evolves over the years. I heard music is the best trigger to get memories back. Beside that it’s good to see people dance and have fun with a 50-year-old recording that still works.

Follow Palo Santo on Instagram and Soundcloud.