Why Vinyl?
People sometimes ask me why I still release music on vinyl.
It's a fair question. Most people listen to music through streaming services today, and honestly, so do I. Spotify is convenient. It gives us access to almost every album ever made within seconds. From a purely practical perspective, vinyl doesn't make much sense anymore.
But for me, music has never only been about listening.
From the very beginning, I was fascinated by album artwork. Long before I started releasing my own music, I could spend hours looking through record sleeves, studying illustrations, typography and photography. The artwork wasn't separate from the music. It was part of the experience. It shaped how I imagined the world behind the sounds.
That connection has stayed with me throughout the Code Elektro project.
When I begin working on an album, I rarely start with a technical idea. More often it begins with an image, a mood or a place. A distant skyline. A forgotten highway. A city that only exists in the imagination. The music becomes a way of exploring that world, and the artwork becomes the first visual frame of a story that unfolds through sound.
That's one of the reasons vinyl remains important to me.
A record sleeve gives the artwork room to breathe. It allows the visual side of a release to exist as something more than a thumbnail on a streaming platform. The illustrations, layouts and details become objects you can spend time with. You can hold them, study them and discover things you didn't notice at first glance.
I still remember the first time I really sat down and listened to a record from beginning to end.
What struck me wasn't the sound quality. It was the ritual.
Taking the record out of the sleeve. Placing it on the turntable. Dropping the needle and hearing the first crackle before the music began. It demanded attention in a way that digital music never had. You weren't listening while doing ten other things. Listening became the activity itself.
That feeling has never completely disappeared.
Today, music is available everywhere and at any moment. That's a wonderful thing. But it also means that music often becomes something that happens in the background. Vinyl encourages the opposite. It asks us to slow down and spend time with an album as a complete work rather than a collection of individual tracks.
There's also something reassuring about the physical permanence of a record.
Streaming services change. Platforms come and go. Algorithms decide what people discover. A vinyl record simply exists. It can sit on a shelf for decades before someone picks it up and becomes curious about what is hidden inside. I like that idea. I like knowing that the music, artwork and stories surrounding a release have a physical place in the world.
Perhaps that is the real reason I continue making vinyl records. Because they create a deeper connection between the music, the artwork and the listener.
And every time someone sends me a photograph of one of my records spinning on a turntable somewhere in the world, I'm reminded that this connection still matters.