JD Twitch's Record Collection Goes on Sale in London

About 7,000 to 8,000 records from the collection of the late Keith McIvor, the Glasgow DJ known as JD Twitch of Optimo, will go on sale at World of Echo on Cheshire Street in Shoreditch, East London, from Saturday 14 November 2026. The shop will be devoted entirely to the collection until Thursday 19 November 2026, after which the remaining records move into its second-hand racks. A second part is planned for 2027. McIvor died of glioblastoma on 19 September 2025, aged 57, and the family has asked that anyone who wants a memorial fanzine donate to a research fund set up in his name.

The news broke on 13 October 2026 and Mixmag, Resident Advisor and The Quietus all carried it. This piece pulls the verified details together, sets out who Keith McIvor was and what Optimo did, and then asks what a sale this size means for people who buy, sell and care about records. Where sources disagree or we could not confirm something, we say so.

What is being sold, where and when?

The first part of the sale is about 7,000 to 8,000 records, sold in person only at World of Echo from 10am on Saturday 14 November 2026. According to RA and The Quietus, each record has been cleaned and graded, and carries a sticker reading "World of JD Twitch". Prices have not been published in any report we read.

One number needs a caveat. The Quietus subheading refers to 20,000 records, while the body of that article and every other report we read describe the first batch as 7,000 to 8,000. We have not seen World of Echo or the family state a total, so we treat 20,000 as unconfirmed and only the first-batch figure as established.

How does World of Echo fit into this?

World of Echo is a small independent shop that launched on Columbia Road in 2018 and, per RA, moved to Cheshire Street, just off Brick Lane, last year. RA describes its stock as early electronic music, krautrock, noise, EBM, punk, post-punk, industrial, jazz, art rock and DIY music. The Quietus notes it takes its name from Arthur Russell's album World of Echo, which Keith McIvor admired. That is a close fit with the tastes Optimo built its name on.

Groove reports that Marissa Costello, McIvor's widow, and Optimo's Jonnie Wilkes wanted the collection to go to an independent shop. We were unable to open World of Echo's own announcement page directly (it returned rate-limit errors every time we tried), so the sale details above come from RA, The Quietus, Groove and Mixmag, which agree with each other on dates, venue and format.

Who was JD Twitch?

Keith McIvor, born 2 March 1968 and raised in Balerno on the outskirts of Edinburgh, was a DJ, promoter, remixer and label owner who spent three decades building one of the most influential club nights in Britain. He died on 19 September 2025 at the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow, aged 57, according to RA's obituary and Mixmag's tribute. The death was announced on 20 September 2025 in a statement from Jonnie Wilkes on the duo's Instagram.

He moved to Glasgow for university in the mid 1980s and started out playing electro and EBM, then moved through acid house and techno. In 1990, per Mixmag, he co-founded the Edinburgh night Pure, which RA describes as a founding residency at The Venue in the early 1990s and which helped put Scotland on the international techno map. Pure ended in 1997. It was also where he met Wilkes.

In July 2025 he told followers he had been diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive and currently incurable brain tumour. STV reported that the illness progressed quickly and affected his speech, mobility and independence, and that a fundraiser launched by his wife Marissa paid for care. STV put the total at 50,000 pounds in the days after his death. Mixmag's tribute later put the crowdfunder at nearly 150,000 pounds. The two figures were reported at different times and we have not been able to reconcile them.

Wilkes, his partner of 28 years, described him in Clash's report as someone who changed his life immeasurably. STV also reported that McIvor was to receive the Special Recognition Award at the Scottish Music Awards, with the ceremony scheduled for 8 November 2025 at Glasgow's Barrowland Ballroom. We did not verify the ceremony itself.

What was Optimo?

Optimo (Espacio) was a weekly Sunday night at Glasgow's Sub Club, founded in 1997 by JD Twitch and Jonnie Wilkes (JG Wilkes). It ran for about 13 years, ended in April 2010, and became known for mixing techno and house with post-punk, disco, dub, no wave and live bands in the same night. The name comes from Liquid Liquid's 1983 EP "Optimo", per RA and Wikipedia. Mixmag adds that Derrick May played the track at Pure.

Mixmag puts the run at roughly 570 editions. The music policy was the point. It was built around the tastes and record collections of its two DJs rather than around a genre, which at first put off some purist house and techno fans, according to Mixmag, and then became the reason people travelled for it. Mixmag also reports that early bookings included Jeff Mills's European debut under his own name and Richie Hawtin's first UK gig. Live acts over the years included Franz Ferdinand, Peaches, Grace Jones and The Rapture, and Mixmag says LCD Soundsystem's James Murphy became close to the duo and that the night influenced DFA Records. If that connection interests you, our piece on hi-fi sound systems at festivals, including Despacio covers Murphy's own sound system project.

What happened to the weekly night?

The Sub Club suffered a fire in 1999, and Mixmag says Optimo moved to other Glasgow venues before returning to the Sub Club in 2002. On 11 March 2010 the duo announced the end of the weekly residency. RA's 2010 report quotes them saying they had loved doing it with all their hearts but their hearts were also telling them it was time to call a halt. The final night, titled "Optimogeddon - The End Of Optimo", was on Sunday 25 April 2010. They said they would keep touring, promoting and releasing music, and that they would keep playing the Sub Club irregularly.

What about the label, the mixes and the solo work?

Optimo Music launched in January 2009 with a 7 inch by Big Ned, according to Wikipedia, and has since put out over 200 releases across its sub-labels as of March 2025, including Optimo Trax, So Low and Against Fascism Trax. RA lists Bergsonist, Tornado Wallace, Dennis Bovell and Chris Carter among the artists, and notes that McIvor said of the label that it was whatever tickled his ears at a given moment. Factory Floor are also on the roster, per Wikipedia.

The mix albums are where many people first met the duo. How to Kill the DJ (Part Two) from 2004 is the best known, followed by Psyche Out (2005), Walkabout (2006), Sleepwalk (2008) and fabric 52 (2010), per Mixmag. Release dates for How to Kill the DJ (Part Two) vary between sources (AllMusic and Brainwashed disagree between 2003 and 2004), so treat Mixmag's 2004 as the figure we use rather than a settled one. RA also lists McIvor's remixes for acts including Primal Scream, Hot Chip and Django Django, a brief stint on Matador Records in the early 2000s, and one-off aliases such as Tomorrow The Rain Will Fall Upwards and Betty Botox.

What does a sale like this mean for record collecting?

It shows a collection of this scale can stay in circulation as stock rather than vanish into a single buyer's storage. Part one alone is roughly 17 to 20 times the size of the 400 records and 200 CDs from the late Philadelphia radio DJ Pierre Robert, which a Pennsylvania shop put on sale for a single day in April 2026, according to Philadelphia magazine. That sale priced records at estimated value, not marked up, with some records at $10 and rare bootlegs reaching $150.

Here is some arithmetic of our own. If the first 7,000 to 8,000 records all sold during the six days the shop is dedicated to the collection, that would be roughly 1,200 to 1,300 records a day. They will not all go that fast, which is exactly why the remainder moves to the racks. For scale, our write-up of the record year for vinyl found UK buyers took 7.6 million vinyl units in 2025. The first batch is about 0.1 percent of that, which tells you this is a significant cultural event but a small commercial one.

Is this a different kind of collection sale?

Yes, because the seller is not a dealer, and because provenance is being turned into a product rather than a rumour. A famous DJ's records ordinarily surface piecemeal on Discogs, with the story lost on the way. Stickering them as "World of JD Twitch" keeps the origin attached to each copy. That has a market effect and an emotional one, and the two are hard to separate.

There is precedent for artists selling their own stock. The Vinyl Factory reported in 2021 that DJ Shadow's fifth sale from his collection, run through the Los Angeles shop Rappcats, priced records from 2 pounds to over 700 pounds to serve casual fans, shop owners and grail hunters alike. That is a living collector choosing to sell. The JD Twitch sale is different because the choice was made by a family and a partner. Mixmag quotes Costello saying records are ultimately there to be played, discovered and loved.

Does the pressing and pricing climate matter here?

It does, quietly. New vinyl is expensive and slow: we have covered why pressing plants still cannot keep up with demand, with independent labels waiting months for slots. When new pressings are scarce, good second-hand stock matters more to the people who actually play records. A collection assembled over a lifetime, per The Quietus beginning in childhood in Balerno with a grandfather's inheritance, carries a spread of reissues, originals and obscurities that new releases cannot replace.

It also lands in the middle of an economics problem for the scene itself. Our look at what underground DJs actually earn shows how thin the margins are for most working DJs, and our study of how long independent labels last shows how few small labels stay independent. In that context, a shop moving thousands of records for a family, and a fund that helps research, is a rare example of the independent ecosystem working.

How can you attend or help?

To buy, go to World of Echo on Cheshire Street from 10am on Saturday 14 November 2026. Part one is in store only, per RA, The Quietus and Groove. Reports do not mention an online sale, queue system or purchase limits, and we did not find any, so check the shop's own channels nearer the date.

To help without buying, the Keith McIvor Glioblastoma Research Fund is hosted on JustGiving under Marissa Costello, in support of Brain Tumour Research. The page says it funds research into new glioblastoma treatments through the Brain Tumour Research Centre of Excellence Scotland, a partnership between Brain Tumour Research and Beatson Cancer Charity involving the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh. When we read it, the page showed 30,042 pounds raised, which includes 30,000 pounds the page says was committed from crowdfunder donations during his illness to start the fund. That total will have moved since. Memorial fanzines made by friends and family are available at the shop in exchange for a donation.

What we make of it

This section is RTS.FM's own opinion, not reporting. Everyone involved in the sale deserves the benefit of the doubt, and we are not second-guessing a family's choices. We are offering a view on what the sale tells us.

1. Selling to an independent shop, in the open, is the right way to honour a working collection. The people who were closest to these records said they were there to be played. Putting them in front of hundreds of buyers does that better than any archive could. The strongest counter-argument: a single DJ's collection is a coherent document of one person's taste, and scattering it across thousands of shelves destroys the thing a stickered copy can only gesture at.

2. Turning provenance into the product is smart, and it is also where the risk lies. The "World of JD Twitch" sticker gives each record a story and lets a shop stand behind its grading. Our worry is that the same sticker invites speculation, with copies resold online at inflated prices to people who never meet the shop. The strongest counter-argument: resale is the market working normally, and a cleaned, graded, in-person sale is far fairer to fans than a single online auction would have been.

3. The scene has few institutions able to hold a collection like this, and that is a gap worth naming. Clubs, labels and radio stations generate huge amounts of culture and very little of it has a permanent home. A shop sale is a good outcome, but it should not be the only available one. The strongest counter-argument: archives cost money and impose their own agenda, and most collections, however loved, would not justify the burden of cataloguing them.

Frequently Asked Questions

When does the JD Twitch record sale start?

Part one starts at 10am on Saturday 14 November 2026 at World of Echo on Cheshire Street in Shoreditch, East London. The shop is devoted to the collection until Thursday 19 November 2026.

How many records are in the first sale?

Reports from Mixmag, Resident Advisor and The Quietus put part one at around 7,000 to 8,000 records. The Quietus subheading mentions 20,000 records, but we have not seen that total confirmed by the shop or the family.

What happens after 19 November?

The records that remain after the dedicated week move into World of Echo's second-hand racks. A second part of the collection is planned for 2027.

Can you buy the records online?

Reports say part one is in store only. We did not find any announcement of an online sale, so check World of Echo's own channels for updates.

How much do the records cost?

No prices have been published in the reports we read. Each record has been cleaned and graded, and carries a sticker reading "World of JD Twitch".

Who was JD Twitch?

Keith McIvor, known as JD Twitch, was a Scottish DJ, promoter, remixer and label owner from Balerno near Edinburgh. He co-founded Optimo (Espacio) with Jonnie Wilkes in 1997 and ran the Optimo Music label.

When and how did Keith McIvor die?

He died on 19 September 2025 at the Prince and Princess of Wales Hospice in Glasgow, aged 57. The cause was glioblastoma, an aggressive and currently incurable brain tumour that he had announced in July 2025.

What was Optimo (Espacio)?

Optimo was a weekly Sunday night at Glasgow's Sub Club that ran from 1997 until its final night on 25 April 2010. It mixed techno, house, disco, post-punk, dub and live acts, and was named after a 1983 Liquid Liquid record.

What is the Keith McIvor Glioblastoma Research Fund?

It is a fund set up in his memory by his widow, Marissa Costello, to support glioblastoma research in Scotland. It is hosted on JustGiving in support of Brain Tumour Research, and memorial fanzines at the shop are available in exchange for a donation to it.

Will Optimo continue?

Mixmag's tribute reports that Jonnie Wilkes will continue to DJ as Optimo, in line with Keith McIvor's wishes.