and owner of Rewound Sounds, and his shop
cat Monkey Butler are at work in Wichita.
Chris Trenary fs ’05 is a visual artist, musician and independent business owner whose store, Rewound Sounds, caters to vinyl junkies and jazz heads with a little bit of punk rock thrown in for good measure.
He is counted among the most important young members of the Wichita arts and music community. His paintings are informed by hip-hop culture, as is his music, especially as heard on last year’s hip-hop intensive album Everything Gets Used.
And he’s gaining a reputation as a tenacious businessman who has beaten the odds, holding his ground as an independent record store owner at a time when even chains such as Tower Records have folded under the pressures of a sagging music industry.
Trenary began painting and drawing in elementary school, when he also began music lessons. Hip-hop culture became highly influential to the young artist. He wasn’t as much inspired by what he saw on TV or heard on records as by his immediate surroundings.
“My elementary school was predominately black, my friends were mostly black,” he says. “I got into punk music in high school, but Dan Davis had me listen to (rapper) Biz Markie and that sparked my interest.” He began favoring hip-hop gigs: “The energy at those shows was so positive. Everybody loved each other. At some punk and hardcore shows you could get a real negative vibe.”
Along the way he cut his teeth on punk rock with several fellow Shockers. He served as a drummer in Hanoi Chevrolet with Davis fs ’06 and Marcus Stoesz fs ’06, then played in Stoesz’s The Music Wrong and Paper Airplanes and even found time to suit up for one gig with the Air Capital’s notoriously raw and occasionally burdensome The Cups, also featuring current WSU student Aaron Rivers. But his taste for hip-hop continued to grow, as did his interest in collecting records.
In his high school economics class, he undertook a special project – running his own record store. The project was successful enough that he and a friend opened The Riot Room, a radical library and bookstore. The results proved less than spectacular, and Trenary opened Rewound Sounds on his own. Circa 2005 the last of the independent records stores in Wichita had closed their doors, giving him a unique advantage. Sort of.
“I wanted to do something that catered to the hip-hop crowd, but I quickly got into selling used records because that seemed to be where the clientele was going,” he says. “Wichita did need a record store, and I recognized that and tried to fill that void.”
But there is a big difference between the theory of business and its practice. “In high school we played with fake money. The real world plays with real money and before long you realize how broke you are and how fast money’s being spent and how steep the other expenses are. None of it’s the kind of thing you can anticipate while you’re in high school.”
It’s not every day that a twenty-something opens his own business and so, for a time, Trenary says, he existed under the radar of the local business community. “No one seemed to know that I was the owner. They thought that I just worked here. When I tell people that I own the place, they’re caught off guard. I feel like I get a little bit of nurturing. They seem to have admiration for someone my age opening a business.”
He tried to balance school with his pursuits in art, music and business, but, he reports, something always suffered. “I went (to WSU) full time for a while,” he says. “I wasn’t able to get much done with music or art because I was doing a lot of schoolwork and running the store. I think I was mediocre as a student, though my teachers knew I had potential to be better than I was.”
Among the faculty he catalogues as influential are Paul Flippen, Robert Bubp and Ron Christ. Hip-hop was something of a rarity in the art program but, Trenary says, the faculty seemed to like what they saw. “They nurtured me,” he relates. “Bubp and Flippen really enjoyed what I was doing. You encounter some people who are conservative, especially when it comes to graffiti. But I think it was refreshing. I wasn’t trying too hard to be weird. I just did what I knew. I don’t think that any hip-hop-oriented painter had been through in a while.”
While he has yet to complete his degree, he will return for classes in the fall while continuing to run his store. He hopes to emerge with a general arts degree and one day become a teacher.
In the meantime, he’ll continue to work at his store. “As long as I can keep it open,” he says, “I’ll be at it.”
