Turn on, tune in, chill out: Anton Ramos' high fidelity life

What came first, the music or the misery?

Rob Gordon, the record-collecting, list-rattling fellow in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (played by John Cusack in the off-kilter flick), muses upon this chicken-or-the-egg dilemma when his girlfriend Laura leaves him for a new age fruit named Ian. The question that Rob popped as he was thinking about aural bruisers from The Smiths’ Last Night I Dreamed That Somebody Loved Me to Nazareth’s Love Hurts, makes us wonder: Can music make us transcend our misery or is music the very culprit in turning us into miserable blokes? Do records (think Torch or the Blues) turn us into melancholy persons? Anton Ramos is quite familiar with all this only too well.

Ramos, whose grandparents put up National Bookstore, is the head honcho of Music One and Tower Records — two establishments that have changed the record retail landscape in the country. He is also the music consultant and resident DJ of Wasabi, a Japanese restaurant on Makati Avenue. Anton has put out a couple of "The Chillout Project" compilation albums from Universal Records. He has hosted radio shows for RT, Citylite and Joey. He has roughly 5,000 titles (and counting) in his record collection. Even with all his accomplishments, Anton still had some personal ghosts to exorcise, thus he found himself in a recording studio making music with friends.

"You just run out of things to say, and for some reason I ended up in a studio," says Ramos, adding that his composition called Longing (All I Hear) by AR Presents SWIM is about his painful break-up with a girlfriend. "I just can’t go back to the studio and do another song. It takes a lot from you," he shares.

In Anton’s case, misery birthed (original) music. But he was drawn to music since he was in grade school, long before he was ever miserable, at an age prior to misery taking up residence in the ratty apartment called the soul. It was in ‘86 when he found himself at Stargazer and was immediately attracted to the hits at that time: Amy Stewart’s Friends and Rico Mambo by I-forget-what-godawful-group. The Breakfast Club, I think.

"My preference has always been Euro-disco," Anton shares, who says his record collection straddles all genres — new wave, jazz, pop, electronica — except classical and heavy metal. "You never know what you want to listen to tomorrow."

Collecting records is not like collecting stamps or beermats... There’s a whole world in here, a nicer, a dirtier, more violent, more peaceful, sleazier, more loving world.

A piece of Anton Ramos trivia: Did you know that he once bought a disc so rare it cost him P12,000? No, not a demo of Miles Davis jamming with Jimi Hendrix or Prince but a John Kaizan Neptune platter. "It’s hard for me to pay for a book worth P500, but it’s different when it comes to albums," shares Anton, laughing.

At first, Anton collected vinyls. (Hardcore music fanatics will tell you they prefer the warm and scratchy meanderings of long-playing records compared to soullessly mechanical CDs.) But when he got his first set of wheels, Ramos sold his entire collection for a snazzy car stereo system — the biggest mistake of his life. Anton shakes his head, "And I’ve spent the last two to three years trying to build back my vinyl collection."

So how does he arrange his CDs — alphabetically, chronologically or, er, biographically?

"I arrange them in the order I bought them," Anton reveals. "Because albums tell the story of what you’re going through in life at that particular moment." (This reminds me of what Hornby’s Rob says: I pull the records off the shelves...look for Revolver, and go on from there... I like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howling Wolf in twenty-five moves.)

That’s why Anton can relate to the John Cusack movie, especially when making compilation tapes for his girlfriends, a madly methodical undertaking for Hornby’s character. Ramos started out by mixing tapes for friends, and now he compiles chillout tracks for release.

"I share with listeners what I am going through at the time I was putting the album together," he explains. "Whether a happy moment or a bad break-up — it always comes out in the album. Even in my set as a DJ, I can’t separate the music from what’s going on in my life. To me, it’s practically inseparable."

A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do. You’ve got to kick off with a corker...and...oh, there are loads of rules.

Anton’s latest compilation disc, "The Chillout Project: A Soundtrack to Modern City Life," contains his composition, as well as chillout tracks from Roger Sanchez, Chicane, Jam and Spoon, Zero 7 and Bliss.

"I heard this song by Bliss called Kissing, and it’s absolutely the most beautiful song I’ve ever heard in a long, long time," he raves. Bliss’ "Afterlife" album is sold only in Denmark by a small label. For Music One’s Greenbelt opening slated before the end of the month, Anton managed to strike a deal with the Danish company to have discs pressed just for the Philippines. "So there will be lucky some 300 persons who will get to listen to the album. But after that, that’s it," he says.

(Anton’s desert island picks: Kissing by Bliss, Groove is in the Heart by Dee-Lite and Friends by Amy Stewart.)

See, records have helped me to fall in love... I hear something new, with a chord change that melts my guts, and before I know it I’m looking for someone, and before I know it I’ve found her.

Before Music One or Tower Records, buying albums was a drag. You go to one of the mall stores and ask for, say, Primus’ "Sailing the Seas of Cheese," and the saleslady would lazily mutter, "Waarner ba siya, Soneh o B-em-jhe?" So you play Roller Derby with your brains trying to remember Les Claypool’s label. After an eternity, the saleslady would tell you they never had the album in the first place and offer something from Lloyd Umali or Siakol instead. Well, Anton’s version of Championship Vinyl in Music One has changed all that (with a wider selection of artists and salespersons who know the difference between James Taylor and the James Taylor Quartet).

"I’ve always been and always will be a consumer, a collector," admits Anton, adding that he set up the store primarily for music lovers like himself. "I wanted to give people the experience of discovering new music. Iba ‘yung feeling of listening to a beautiful song for the first time."

As for Tower Records, Anton has a bevy of plans.

"Tower is going to be a musical supermarket of sorts. I still don’t know how I’m going to do it but I’m planning to sell our Top 25 selling albums every week at half the price — and find a way to survive at the same time."

It’s Anton’s way of fighting that economic gargoyle called piracy, as well as a way for him to share that delicate angel called music with people. ("I’m a believer. I don’t think the Philippines will be stuck in this piracy rut forever; something good’s bound to come," he says.)

It’s the same reason why Ramos established a radio station (104.7 FM) that plays chillout music 24 hours a day, with no commercial breaks. The station has a permit to test broadcast until the 30th of September, but the "guardians" of the industry have already given him nothing short of fire and brimstone (the details of which we will not divulge here). But Ramos is determined.

"Even if you own all the music in the world, if you don’t get to share it, or kung ikaw lang ang makikinig sa bahay mo, bale wala rin. The purpose of the station is give people the chance to listen to new stuff, and since I work in a record store, part din ng promotions namin. Here in our country we’re only limited to commercial music. I feel we all deserve to hear something better."

The station plays a lot of down tempo, deep house, chillout stuff. The type of music that Anton discovered at the Virgin Megastore in San Francisco in ‘95 ("Cafe Del Mar Vol. 4" and, prior to that, trailblazing albums by Massive Attack and Tricky) and weaned him away from acid jazz.

Ramos was someplace else during the station’s first hours on air (Air Supply songs courtesy of the sentimental engineer). He was so euphoric that he texted his friends. His message: "It works!"

"I asked five people to send me e-mail and tell me what they think about the programming. I’ve gotten a hundred messages. People are listening. They tell me stuff like, ‘It was a very stressful day but when I tuned in to your station, everything became OK!’ or "Hindi na kami mabuwi-buwisit sa traffic,’" Anton enthuses.

The outcome of the 104.7 soap opera is still being written by the scriptwriter from beyond. But whatever the ending is, Anton Ramos will (to steal from a James Ingram song, ugh) "keep the music playing," or hunt down that elusive muse one way or the other.

"One time, I only had thirty minutes in a store in Tokyo on the middle of nowhere and I had to get back on a train. Panic panic panic," Anton relates. "The album I picked up was the very album I was looking for. It’s a collector’s mentality — it’s the chase, it’s the hunt, it’s the finding that matters."

You just never know what will pop up in the existential turntable.

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For comments, suggestions, curses and invocations, e-mail iganja@hotmail.com.