Surveyed
Joe Blanchard, who had run the experimental label Blackest Rainbow, opened Bear Tree Records in 2015 in The Forum on Devonshire Street, in the middle of Sheffield's independent quarter. It is a personal project of a shop — the stock chosen and described by hand by its owner, across genres, with the kind of curation that comes from someone with a label behind them. It runs in-store shows and takes Record Store Day seriously. In a city with a deep, strange music history, Bear Tree is one of the shops keeping the record-buying part of it alive. Go in and read the handwritten cards.