Sound Advice

Sound Advice trades from a unit inside Banana Block, the converted linen-mill retail space at Portview Trade Centre on the Newtownards Road. DJ and producer Marion Hawkes opened the shop in 2021, stocking new and secondhand vinyl weighted toward electronic music, soul, disco and jazz, with weekly restocks drawn from her own collecting trips. The shop buys in secondhand collections from customers as well as selling new pressings, and Hawkes runs the counter herself rather than employing sales staff. Banana Block sits behind the trade centre's original mill frontage, sharing the building with other small independent traders rather than forming part of a chain. The shop has become a listening-room fixture for east Belfast's electronic and soul scene since opening, without adding a second branch elsewhere in the city.