I’m not really a businessman,” Toti Dalmacion says, surrounded by shelves of vinyl inside a room he calls his “office,” which, to any outsider, looks more like a man cave or perhaps a place of worship. Next door is This Is Pop, Toti’s new record store, or maybe record club, he’s not sure yet. It’s open most days — sometimes early, sometimes late — and some days it’s not. Toti is catering to the type of person who’ll care enough to keep checking because this isn’t the sort of place you just walk into on your way to buy groceries. This is a place you take a pilgrimage to.
“I mean, I try to be the best that I can, as far as business is concerned,” he explains. “But that’s not really my main thing.” So much has happened in the last two decades — and so much of it flattened by the Internet — that it’s easy to forget what Toti Dalmacion is really all about. To millennials, he’s the impresario behind Up Dharma Down, Skymarines, Popular Days, and other bands under the Terno label. To trendy Gen-Xers, he was the man who introduced Manila to rave culture. But to a quieter, more low-key set of Gen-Xers, Toti is that tall dude with the Madchester bowl cut, standing behind the counter of the coolest record store in ’90s Manila.
Groove Nation was more than a record store; it was a tiny portal to the world of indie music that, in 1993, was still a local mystery. Alternative music was slowly gaining mainstream recognition, but it was mostly MTV fare like The Lemonheads, Soul Asylum, and The Breeders. Toti’s Groove Nation took you to the netherworlds of Sarah Records, Adorable, Gene, Felt, El Records, and other figures of a lush and otherworldly British indie scene submerged under a hip-hop/grunge duopoly. I still remember walking into the store as a teenager — with its Cocteau Twins and Björk posters on the wall, autographed records behind the counter, Brick Supply blaring from the speakers — and feeling as if I was finally home.
Passion Project
“It was nice to help, especially at that time, I don’t think there were many options as far as music is concerned,” says Toti. “But it was mainly a way for me to get records for cheap, because I get them wholesale. So my main thing was, and still is, collecting vinyl.” It was a personal passion project that evolved into a mission to educate, eventually leading to NU 107’s Groove Nation Sessions (the only radio program in the country that played BMX Bandits and Northern Picture Library) and Consortium; the first ever rave outfit in Manila. As the side projects multiplied and the rent went up, the store eventually closed. “But the goal has always been to open again,” he says. “To continue Groove Nation.”
“What took me so long to reopen – aside from financial concerns, managing the label, and the fact that I have a family now — was that it’s so hard to look for space that’s just right for what I envision a record store should be,” Toti says. “The character of the place matters. Like Groove Nation — it was at a penthouse, which was not normal for a record store, but I liked that because it gave it character.”
As to be expected from someone who’s been to many record stores around the world, Toti obsessively looked for that je ne sais quoi to recapture the magic of that rooftop store from decades ago. “There is something about record stores that I like,” he says. “Either it’s really disorganized and dirty, really underground; or it’s nice, but there’s still some semblance of disorder, with stacks and stacks of records. Not like other record stores that try too hard to impress but have stocks that are ho-hum.”
This Is Pop is literally underground – it’s at the basement of an old building where a stairway descends into a tiny door that opens into a giant poster of Suede’s Britpop-birthing “Animal Nitrate” single. It takes me back to those roofdeck days by going the opposite direction. It makes me think that maybe This Is Pop is not so much a continuation of Groove Nation as it is the evolution of its owner. Groove Nation was a proud beacon in the dark ages of the ’90s, established by a brash 20-something “purveyor of taste.” This Is Pop! is a doomsday bunker in the end of music history, set up by a man old enough to feel secure with what he has.
I ask Toti if he’s interested in doing something similar to his old Groove Nation Sessions radio program (even in podcast form) now that he has a store again. “There are so many ‘experts’ now,” he replies, the quotation marks made audible by his smirk. “These ‘experts’ who are way younger than I am, preaching to their even younger following. So why even bother getting into that?” Besides, he doesn’t really feel like sharing the new stuff he’s into these days. “That’s how selfish I can be,” he says, laughing.
‘Poptimism’
The music snob — that simultaneously disdained and highly-respected connoisseur best personified by Rob Fleming in the novel High Fidelity — has been driven to near-extinction by the Internet and its democratization of musical knowledge. This has engendered a phenomenon called “poptimism”: the pollyannaish tolerance of all kinds of music that has rescued mainstream pop from snob ridicule, and thereby making indie music less special. Toti is an old school music snob, perhaps among the last of a dying breed. “I’m not apologetic about it,” he admits. “That’s how it is.” He says this with equal parts defiance and resignation, two states that characterize music snobs in the 21st century: their acceptance of their now marginalized place in culture and the peace they find in how perfectly uncontaminated their world is. “For me, legitimizing Carly Rae Jepsen or whoever people see as being good or somewhat indie, that to me is fine because I have my own ways of doing the same thing,” he says.
“This Is Pop” is as much a statement as it is a reference to a song by Toti’s favorite band, XTC. One of the effects of poptimism is the bastardization of the term “pop,” which is now exclusively used to refer to mainstream pop. Like many things in history that the Internet ignores, everyone seems to have forgotten what “pop” really means: it’s rock n’ roll, whether it’s a radio hit or a limited seven-inch single that only 50 people bought. Toti wants to reclaim that word, but to a more personalized extreme. “Like what the XTC song says, what you call noise, to me is pop.” he explains. “As much as there are genres, I just use those to differentiate between artists. But anything that I happen to like, whether it’s mainstream pop or shoegaze or avant-garde, to me they’re all under ‘pop’. Or rather, this should be pop.”
Toti’s idiosyncratically curated stock is what sets This Is Pop apart from any other record store. Well, that and the irregular operating hours. “I’d like to think that what I sell, whether used or new records, show the character of my store,” he says. “You won’t find Taylor Swift here or Bruno Mars or even what’s called ‘indie’ these days, like Chvrches or Alt-J.” Thumb through the shelves in This Is Pop and you will find old Groove Nation regulars like St. Christopher, The Bible, and Swervedriver mixed in with relatively newer titles by the likes of Ice Choir, Pia Fraus, and Arthur Beatrice. But make no mistake: the store is a throwback, not just to the long-lost ’90s of Groove Nation, but to that magical time when you first discovered the music that you love.
Memories of Music
Toti still remembers discovering bands like XTC, The Clash, and The Specials in the late ’70s through imported magazines, and even going to the British Council to read copies of NME and The Face. It led him to trips to various record stores all over the world, resulting in a 15,000-strong record collection, at least by his last count. That was more than 20 years ago. “The ironic thing about the Internet age is that, when we didn’t have that much info, people were more creative in getting information,” Toti says. “They worked hard for it. And so everything that they were able to acquire or discover was made more special. Now that it’s easier, all of those things got lost. It’s taken for granted.”
Perhaps the real charm behind record-collecting has little to do with sound quality, or making music more tangible. Maybe it’s all about the search. The long commute to record stores, the hours of browsing through shelves, the wait in between purchase and playing — those are all rituals in a forgotten tradition. And what we find in those journeys, apart from the records we collect, is a place we share with someone who’s in on a secret. In an age when there are hardly any mysteries left, it’s good to know that some still exist.
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This Is Pop is at Unit B, ground floor, Legaspi Towers 100, 148 Legaspi Street, Legaspi Village, Makati. Follow @thisispoprecords on Instagram to keep up with its ever-changing schedule.