One closes, another opens...

In Boston anyway. After sending out an email about Etherea closing, I received the following from my friend Andy:

"I have a philosophy degree, which has really come in handy in my life," says Weirdo Records owner Angela Sawyer. "Especially when I'm sitting here watching some guy drool snot on a $50 record."

We're sitting in Sawyer's bedroom (until now, the command central of Weirdo) under clip lamps attached to her loft bed. Half-packed boxes of records and CDs — Italian soundtrack imports, rare noise records, field recordings — sit piled in clusters all over the room and against the walls. Outside in the living room, which Sawyer shares with a houseful of roommates, pine record shelves line the walls and the floorspace, a futon and TV buried in the middle like newly discovered pieces at an archæological dig.

But it's all on its way out. Beginning this week, Sawyer is doing the unthinkable: expanding. She's moving the whole operation from her Somerville home to a Central Square storefront she's secured at 844 Mass Ave, and she's celebrating with two weekend-long moving parties. (The second one is this weekend and open to all volunteers — ahem.) It's the beginning of what seems like, in this rickety economy, a swashbuckling adventure of danger and peril. But if anyone's fit for it, it's Sawyer. Continued here.

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