Franklin Street in Biddeford, Maine is home to a record shop that does not try to be everything to everyone, and that focus is exactly the point. Color Sound Oblivion, at 43 Franklin St, is a specialty vinyl boutique built around goth, industrial, post-punk, deathrock, darkwave, new wave, no wave, experimental, noise, and dark ambient music, along with the wider orbit of underground electronic subgenres that surround those scenes. Where a typical used record store might carry a little of everything, this shop narrows its shelves deliberately, and the result is a browsing experience that regulars describe as unusually reliable: nearly everything on the racks fits the shop’s aesthetic, so crate-digging here rarely turns up filler.
The shop’s tagline, Art. Musick. Death., gives a quick read on its personality before a customer even steps through the door, and the inventory backs it up. Alongside new and used vinyl, Color Sound Oblivion carries CDs, cassettes, and DVDs, plus shirts, patches, books, and other physical media tied to the same underground music communities. The original storefront opened in Biddeford in 2021, and the shop expanded into its current, larger Franklin Street location in 2024, a sign of steady growth for a business built on a genre niche that many bigger retailers overlook entirely. That growth has come alongside a loyal following built through the shop’s active presence on Discogs, where it also operates as a seller, along with Bandcamp, Instagram, and Facebook, giving out-of-town collectors a way to track new arrivals between visits.
Biddeford has spent the last decade transforming from a former mill town into one of southern Maine’s more interesting small-city arts destinations, with old textile mill buildings along the Saco River converted into studios, breweries, and shops. Color Sound Oblivion fits naturally into that shift, occupying a niche that draws music fans from well beyond Biddeford’s borders, including visitors making a special trip from Portland, thirty minutes north, or from further afield in New England, specifically because so few record stores anywhere curate this particular slice of music history with the same depth. Customers who have found the shop describe it in blunt terms, with one longtime collector calling it the best record shop encountered in three decades of browsing, and reviewers consistently point to the depth and consistency of the goth and industrial selection as well as the knowledge of the staff.
The shop keeps a tight, predictable schedule: open Wednesday through Saturday from noon to 8 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 6 p.m., with Monday and Tuesday reserved as closed days. That schedule rewards planning a visit around a weekend trip to the area, since walk-in browsing on the off days is not an option. For anyone building a collection in the darker corners of alternative music, from early post-punk and deathrock reissues to newer dark ambient and experimental pressings, the shop’s narrow focus means less time sorting through unrelated genres and more time finding something worth taking home.
Color Sound Oblivion is a specialty vinyl record store in Biddeford, Maine, known for curating goth, industrial, post-punk, darkwave, and related underground music genres inside a Franklin Street shop that expanded to a larger location in 2024.
