Andy and Annie Skinner are the owners of Broad Ripple record store Indy CD & Vinyl. They are celebrating the store’s 20th Anniversary this year. Every month they DJ a dark-wave goth dance party called Spellbound. Their talent at collaborating and their extensive knowledge of music is felt in every song choice and transition.
We got to chat with Andy and Annie about the upcoming celebrations for the anniversary and the playlist they specially curated for PATTERN.
This isn’t your average playlist. They both took time to carefully select every song and provide us with new music. Finding new and different music isn’t always easy. Oftentimes we feel stuck in a bubble of artists we already know and love. That being said, we are so excited to share the mix they made.
Check out the Q+A below to find out what they’re up to.
Stay up to date with the latest drops and upcoming events on Indy CD & Vinyl Instagram.
Cory Cathcart: Tell me about your music and business background.
Andy Skinner: A-Squared Industries has been around as Annie and Andy since ‘06. We’ve been DJing together professionally since ‘07. We own Indy CD and Vinyl, which is celebrating its 20th Anniversary this year. Under the umbrella of A-Squared Industries we own the record store and we have a marketing company where most of our clients are bars, venues, other concert promoters, et cetera. We’re DJs with different monthly residencies. We won the Nuvo Best of Indy Best DJs in 2012. We’re concert promoters ourselves. I’ve been doing it since ‘99. That’s 23 years now. Annie and I together have been booking and promoting concerts since ‘06. We have a record label. We used to have an FM radio show as well. We do a lot of different things within the music industry, but all under the umbrella of A-Squared Industries. So… Annie and Andy do things. Our main focus now is the record store. It is more than a full time job. The Bicentennial for the state was in 2016, so we curated the playlist of Indiana music for the State Museum to commemorate 200 years of music in Indiana. Making playlists from historical perspective all the way through being DJs and doing it on party perspective, that’s what we do.
Annie Skinner: Yeah, definitely. We’ve DJ’d for the Naptown Roller Girls for a long time.
Andy: We are on the Girls Rock Indy Board of Directors. I served as director for the Broad Ripple Village Association. We have both been on the board for Musical Family Tree.
Annie: Also, Spellbound is what we’re doing. Indy CD & Vinyl and Spellbound are our two major focuses right now. Spellbound is a dance night at The White Rabbit we DJ. Those are really what keep us busy, so we have stepped away from board work and volunteer work. We couldn’t give everything to that, we’re taking some time to focus on work and our son. Spellbound keeps it fun.
CC: Do you always DJ together? Or do you ever do any separate gigs?
Andy: We do separate gigs, but it’s rare. We almost always do it together.
Annie: Right before the pandemic, I started to take separate gigs. There’s some times that I throw up songs and he’s like, uh-uh. I started mentally compiling those songs that I could DJ that are more techno or electronic heavy. That’s something that he isn’t as interested in. The pandemic kind of stopped that a little bit. I started a new night at the record store, but that was when the pandemic hit. I haven’t been doing that as much. We have some stuff on the horizon.
Andy: As COVID is hopefully winding down, we’ve been saying yes to a lot of things.
Annie: We enjoy DJing together because we get to spend time together curating the songs. It’s something for us that we get to share. We could do it separately, but it’s time for us to hang out. I enjoy having him as a partner because I do one part of DJing and he does another. It fits. I like to serve up the songs, and he’s better at actual DJing. I mean I can, but I feel like it’s both of our strong points together. It’s fun that we get to hang out. I know mostly the crowd. I can assess the crowd. When he DJs he doesn’t really look up. I have friends where I know certain songs are going to make them happy, so I serve it to him, he plays it, and then they’re like “yay!” I like to play to people. I like to remember what they like or what they bought at the record store, and play it for them later. It shows that somebody’s paying attention.
CC: Let’s talk about the mix you curated. What’s the mood? What should we be doing while listening?
Annie: I would say it’s a get ready to go out mix. It’s not super heavy on our Spellbound side, but it has tinges of it. You’d mentioned to make it diverse. It wasn’t all of the Spellbound mix, which we could have easily done. We wanted to have stuff that we’re interested in at the store.
Andy: Yeah, I think that’s pretty important because we really cringe at recommending music that we can’t sell in physical format. We’re big, big proponents of making sure that artists that we’re interested in and artists that we support, are also supporting us by putting out music in physical format. A good example is when each employee at the end of each calendar year makes their Best Of List, we try to make sure that at least 90% of it, if not more, is available at the record store. Same with this playlist; you should be able to come in and pick up this music in physical format. The idea of songs on the playlist being within the last three months, we took a little bit of license with that. Maybe the song came out on Spotify more than three months ago, but the physical piece dropped in the last three months at the store. That’s an important part to us that you can come in and find this music if you’re interested in it at the store. I’d say about a quarter of this is stuff that we would play, if not the song then the artist, at Spellbound. Odonis Odonis, Kontravoid, Pixel Grip, The KVB, those are all artists that we would play at a normal Spellbound set. The Beach House just came out. It’s really, really good. Especially that song (“Masquerade”). Annie was already a huge fan of Beach House. Personally, I think the album is fantastic. I think it’s their best work. Same goes for Bonobo. We’ve both been fans of their work for some time, but I think this new album is particularly strong, really good work. Aesop Rock, he used to work with Blockhead years ago, like early in his career. This new album that he just put out, Garbology, he’s back working with Blockhead. The song (“Kodokushi”) on the mix is coming off of an extras EP, where Blockhead is going back and re-mixing that work. I think that song was particularly strong. Cloakroom, they’re from Michigan City, Indiana, but they’re a national act. They played Indy on our shows before. We’re big fans of the band. They kind of merge the Shoegaze with harder… I don’t know if I’d call it hardcore…
Annie: Post-rock.
Andy: Yeah, really bringing a heavy sound into the Shoegaze genre. Really great stuff.
Annie: Also a local band in the mix, Demiricous.
Andy: Yeah, easily the best metal band to come out of the state. They’re from Indy. On the playlist is a song (“Merciless Slut Cult”) off their upcoming third album in May.
Annie: We tried to do stuff that maybe wasn’t on Pattern’s Stay Tuned playlist before, so it might have a darker ambiance overall.
Andy: Yeah, I think overall a darker ambience. Getting into the Author and Punisher, that’s a brand new album by an artist who has been around for a while. He’s a one man band. That genre is called industrial. Mainly because almost all of the sounds are sampled from factory noises.
Annie: He’s crazy to see, because he’s built machinery that he moves. It’s pretty visceral. I don’t know. It’s really conceptual. You have to see it to understand. If you hear it you’re like, “Oh, okay. The sounds are cool.” Then you see that he is actually creating the sounds based on machinery that he’s built that is responding to his body. It’s very cool.
Andy: Overarching theme on the playlist is that at least, if not more than, half of the artists on the playlist are female or female identified, which is really important to us always. Annie working in this industry for over 20 years, our experiences serving on the Board of Directors for Girls Rock, and seeing the built in sexism of the music industry, it’s really important that we help support women artists. These are artists we would have picked anyway, because they’re good.
CC: What artists, in Indiana and beyond, are you excited about right now?
Annie: I love 81355. I love what they’re doing. I love that they’re about to tour with that band Dehd. Always Oreo Jones, everything he does. Any of those guys (in 81355) really.
CC: What are you working on now?
Andy: I’m looking forward to our 20th Anniversary Party. It’s going to have a hell of a lineup. Normally Record Store Day falls on the third Saturday in April, which is true this year. We’re going back to the traditional, pre-Covid format. What most stores do is have a party on the same day as Record Store Day. We focus on selling records that day, then we have our party the next day. We put it in the alley next to Indy CD & Vinyl. It’s a festival. We have national acts that are coming, but also a lot of local bands. Odonis Odonis is coming back from Toronto. We’ve got Jenny DeVoe, Lily & Madeleine, Sweet Poison Victim, Kiddo, Clint Breeze and The Groove. It’s going to represent 20 years of the store. That’s the 24th of April.
CC: What project are you particularly proud of?
Annie: Our newspaper, The Spinner, that we’ve been doing for Record Store Day drops. Andy and I weren’t busy enough, so we started doing a newspaper. We’re looking forward to the new issue of that. It’s going to focus on our 20 years too, and what it all means. We needed a vehicle for the record drop list, because we were doing the Record Store Day differently. We were like, how do we get this to the people? Andy was in school in the military for journalism. And I went to Herron for design, so the newspaper brings our work together again.
