Are you a music freak?

The return of vinyl records as a musical format has brought about an increase in collectors who would not be exempt from being called fetishists, going to extremes with their favourite artists including collecting multiple editions of the same album. But the most unusual case in the world is Zero Freitas, a Brazilian who has the record for the largest collection of records in the world: More than 8 million. He explains that his goal is to create the largest, most ambitious music archive in the world containing all the albums from around the world. All of them. And that is what he is doing.

At the other extreme we find ‘Once Upon a Time in Shaolin’, the seventh album by the New York hip-hop band Wu-Tang Clan. Only one actual copy of this double album was made and it has not been digitalised, so only the person who owns it can enjoy the 31 songs. Of course it could not be cheap, the last known owner is the cryptocurrency collective PleasrDAO which paid the equivalent of 4 million dollars for the copy.

Without going so far we can mention one of the greatest musical freaks, the Argentinian Rodolfo Renato Vázquez, a real fan of The Beatles who has a collection of 11,000 articles associated with the band from Liverpool. 2,000 of them are part of a museum that he created and opened in 2011 in Buenos Aires. Obviously there are not only records so the collection includes a wide variety of things including magazines, books, newspapers, musical scores, posters, autographs, photographs, videos, promotional material, stage passes and concert tickets. With a somewhat smaller number of articles, Matthew Lee from London, has the largest collection of articles relating to the Rolling Stones. He says that he was caught forever by the cowbell sounding on 'Honky Tonk Women' when he was only 12 years old. He then started out on a path that has led to him owning, for example, 18 of the 100 copies that were released of 'Dead Flowers' as a single, the only known copy of the band's first recording and performance contract, an original acetate of the band's first studio recording, the first known concert poster for March 1963 and many numbered copies of their number 1 records. As we are talking about freaks in this article, we could not resist mentioning Claus Solvig from Denmark, an unconditional fan of Black Sabbath and the owner of the largest collection of articles relating to Ozzy Osbourne, or Jeff Vrabel, from Indianapolis, in the United States, who, according to the Guinness Book of Records, is apparently able to identify in one minute 20 songs by Bruce Springsteen just from the lyrics. According to him it has taken him 40 years to achieve this.

But records are there to be played, and the Irish DJ Norberto Loco knows a lot about that. In 2015 he managed to beat the record for the number of hours playing music. Specifically, from 19 to 27 November of that same year he met the challenge of reaching a session lasting 200 hours. 

This would appear to be quite an extraordinary achievement, but this is nothing compared to 'Longplayer'. A piece of music composed by banjo player Jem Finer, a member of the successful folk group The Pogues. Finer used a computer bank located at the Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse in London (United Kingdom) to sequence simultaneous combinations of six short pieces of music performed on Tibetan bowls. The session started when clocks entered the new millennium, on 1 January 2000, and will not repeat the exact same combination of music until the last second on 31 December 2999, when the second session of piece can begin. That's right, it will last 1,000 years. 

If this surprises you, we recommend you take a look at the work of Bull of Heaven, an American experimental duo formed by the late Clayton Counts and Neil Keener. They managed to create the longest album in history: 310: Px0(2^18×5^18)p*k*k*k, which lasts for 3,343 quindecillion years. We can assure you that we tried to understand the concept, but it has blown our minds. Here is the reference in discosgs.com.

If we return to more reasonable space-time circumstances, we should mention Kitai, a band from Madrid which holds the record for the longest concert in history after exceeding 24 hours by just a few minutes when performing at the Sala Sol in Madrid, from 13 to 14 November 2018.

On our journey through the world of musical freaks we really have to include the gourmets of sound systems. Some people are able to invest a real fortune so they can listen to music in the very best conditions. For some people this means have the most extraordinary loudspeakers, Kharma Enigma Veyron. This is one the most sophisticated audio systems in the world, because it is not only extraordinarily powerful, the dynamic speakers have the most advanced technology. But first you will need to have the €375,000 that they will cost you.

Much cheaper, less bulky but nevertheless quite cool, you have Focal Utopia headphones by Tournaire. These will only cost you a measly €115,000. But of course they are made of 18-carat yellow gold and diamonds. The sound is obviously quite spectacular.

To finish the article, we return to collectors and go to Irún, in Gipuzcoa, where Lourdes Yarza and José Luis Loidi have the largest collection of musical instruments in the world. The incredible number of 4,400 traditional musical instruments from all the continents. These include drums made with human skulls. Yes, you read that correctly.

So this is how far we have come on our journey through the extremes of passion for music and musicians. Does this include you? Welcome to the club!