About the shop

Mars Records is a vintage vinyl record shop offering quality/curated music to the Piedmont neighborhood and its visitors. All styles of music represented, including a robust “local music” section. Buying and trading welcome!

In addition to vinyl records, Mars also offers a smattering of other media types (cassettes, Vhs, CDs, DVDs), as well as media storage options, cleaning supplies and other assorted music-related items (books, mugs, etc). Mars also hosts art by local artists, rotating every few months.

About the owner

Steve Adams has been an Oakland-based career musician/bass player for over 20 years, making records and touring globally with solo artists and bands.

He has also part-timed at record shops (Tempo Records, Tower Records, Downhome Music and Open Mind Music) and sold at Bay Area record swaps. With live music on a temporary hold in 2020, Steve decided to lean into his love of vinyl and begin the journey of Mars Record Shop.

About the art/artist

Cameron Matthews is a black, queer, abstract artist based in the Piedmont Ave neighborhood of Oakland, Ca. Their work explores the complexity of human emotion through expressive faces, bold colors, shapes, and lines. Each painting develops through a process Cameron calls “intuitive painting”. During this process he blends movement, color, and texture through intuition, rather than having a fixed plan. The faces that emerge range from joy, grief, tension, vulnerability, desire, pain, and everything in between. For Cameron, painting is a way to process emotion and get in touch with the present moment in this chaotic world. They have been painting these faces since 2010.

Links: instagram.com/camdowncam

Past artists-in-residence include: Danny Luehring, Michael Wertz, Peter Foucault, Yoko Okay, Brad Bolton, Jeff Boozer, David B. Hoppe, Fernanda Martínez, I Love You Tattoo, Eva Edgren, Lea Zelenskis, Forthrite Printing Anavictoria Avila, Richard Blakely