Milford punk rocker opens record store in hometown
Static Era shares name of owner’s record label
Local hardcore hero Jay Reason has a new record store called Static Era, but he may not know the meaning of the word “static.”
Reason can’t keep still. On top of his career as a digital marketing specialist for major music labels, he started his own Static Era record label just a year ago, touting some great tough young punk and hardcore acts.
This month Reason opened a Static Era record store in his hometown of Milford. It’s a destination for punks of all stripes, plus record collectors and just plain music fans. The store is a crash course on the state of loud music today, but also carries classic rock
albums and some top 40 material.
The Static Era shop is at 43 River St., across the street from the Milford train station. Reason, who lives in the neighborhood, knows the station well from years of commuting to a corporate music
job in New York. “I toured for years, for years,” he says, with his nationally known hardcore bands Voice of Reason and The Distance, “and I always came back here.
“Having a store was always a dream of mine. I’d pass this storefront all the time and think about what it would be like to have a record store in the center of town.”
After a couple of months of planning and negotiation, he signed a three-year lease and set about removing the “crazy green paint” favored by the previous tenant and started setting up racks for records, T-shirts and merchandise like Funko Pop figures. He added a black-light art installation in the back and a performance space in the front window.
Reason brings a true do-it-yourself punk philosophy to everything he does. He got into music as a career by having his own hardcore bands, then by figuring out how to bring bands he liked to Connecticut as a promoter, then by helping out fellow musicians with practical advice about how to survive in the business. He worked for years with one of Connecticut’s biggest hardcore success stories, Hatebreed.
“I’ve been doing this since I was 15, 16 years old. I’m 41 now,” he says.
Reason still works as a freelance marketing consultant, but he also runs two small record labels, Static Era and Warg od Collective.
The Static Era name is a nod to the song “Static Age” by the Misfits, which goes “I can’t see a thing in the video, I can’t hear a sound on the radio, in stereo in the static age.” Besides stocking some seasonally appropriate Misfits trick-or-treat buckets, the Static Era store carries action figures evoking the bands Slayer, Venom and Anthrax.
“I’m not trying to compete with other stores,” Reason says, nodding to Connecticut’s established indie record stores. Reason says he partly modeled Static Era on the much-loved punk emporium Trash American Style, which had a storefront in Danbury from the mid-1990s until 2007 and now exists online and at record fairs.
It’s important to Reason that Static Era has its own style. The store focuses mainly on rare vinyl — from new releases (which this month includes the vinyl editions of the latest albums by Flaming Lips and Deftones) to “gently used,” in many genres.
Reason’s own tastes are “all over the place. I’m still listening to hardcore, a lot of rock and rap, but I’ve worked with current R&B acts like Brian McKnight.”
Reason is letting some local hardcore bands sell their cassettes through the store, just in the spirit of helping out young bands. There’s also an assortment of vintage (thoroughly laundered) T-shirts “curated” by Harley Carrara of Tradition Custom Motorcycle Co.
The store’s grand opening was Oct. 16. For now, Static Era will be open two days a week, Fridays and Saturdays from “about noon to 6 or 7.” He limits the number of customers in the store to three at a time due to the coronavirus, and is looking to hold virtual events until the time when he can hold live ones.
The response from those who attended a preview event as well as curious passersby has been completely positive. “I wanted to know, who are the people in the neighborhood?” Reason says. “This is about building up your community.”