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In this week's blog, music writer Chris Parkin casts his eye over the some of the independent record labels that we should be paying attention to right now...
A few weeks ago in America, Wisconsin’s sweet-voiced cabin-dweller and former guitar teacher Bon Iver followed up his 2010 collaborations with Kanye West by selling 100,000 copies of his second album in one week – and all on the independent label Jagjaguwar. This is, of course, while EMI – home to The Beatles (THE BEATLES!!) – goes to wrack and ruin.
It seems these flexible indies – especially the small cottage-industry ones born out of obsession – are looking far safer bets for great music than the debt-burdened behemoths pressed into signing popular but toxic-sounding assets. Indeed, a good number of RBMA alumni are on independents and it’s out there, beyond the tall shiny offices, where the curious sounds exist...
Kompakt
Owned by RBMA lecturers Wolfgang Voigt and Michael Mayer, this Cologne-based label emerged from a techno record shop in the city in 1998 and almost singlehandedly made micro-house and once nerd-only music almost radio-friendly. Well almost. Everything they release does at least value melody over punishing minimalism and the label has given us mesmerising albums of late, such as The Field’s Yesterday and Today and Matias Aguayo’s Ay Ay Ay.
Label chief Wolfgang Voigt told us the imprint is a ‘family-owned, pop-influenced electronic label that meets under the requirements of techno,’ and they welcome ‘any kind of modern, charming, concrete or abstract electronic-based music... that isn't “drum and bass”’.
Voigt recommends...
The Field From Here We Go Sublime
Gui Boratto Chromophobia
Various Artists Pop Ambient 2011 (see video below)
Ghost Box
School friends Jim Jupp and Julian House set up Ghost Box in 2003 to release the pastoral-tinged eldritch electronica they were brewing up as Belbury Poly and The Focus Group respectively. But they opened the floodgates and out of the UK woods came a lot of likeminded souls interested in the same wyrd-futurism – music that’s surreal, haunting and visionary, and inspired by The Wicker Man and old children’s telly as much as by the PlayStation 2 and Aphex Twin.
Jupp describes the label as something ‘for a small group of artists sharing a love of vintage electronics, TV soundtracks and library music.’ The idea, he adds, is to create an imaginary world. House designs sleeves that owe a debt to iconic 1960s penguin paperbacks and, says Jupp about their A&R policy, ‘all our releases expand the parallel world that Ghost Box has created – I get rather tired of demos described as “dark ambient”’.
Jupp recommends...
The Advisory Circle As The Crow Flies
The Focus Group Sketches and Spells
Belbury Poly The Owls Map
Finders Keepers
Finders Keepers unearth dusty old music from around the globe that we were always meant to fall in love with – but that’s not all. Says its founder Doug Shipton, who runs the label with Andy Votel and the help of a collective of vinyl nuts called B-Music: ‘I like to think Finders Keepers can't be pigeonholed. It could easily be seen as just a reissue label but I like to think it’s more than that – we cast our net far and wide; beyond musical genres and into the realms of cinema, design and literature.’
What they release ranges from bonkers Hungarian rock to Jane Weaver’s bewitching 2010 psych-folk opus Fallen by Watch Bird. ‘We’re always looking for the next new thing – be it first-time releases of Czech New Wave OSTs, previously unreleased folk-funk masterpieces. There’s too much picking over the same tired old ground when there’s a much wider world to discover.’
Shipton recommends...
Jean Claude Vannier L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches
Zdenek Liska Mala Morska Vila
Various Artists Pomegranates
Smalltown Supersound
Oslo’s Joakim Haugland is a label nerd who’s read all the books there are about the classic labels: Impulse, Motown, Factory, Mo Wax, 4AD, Rough Trade, Warp. And he’s put the knowledge to good use, running a label that runs the stylistic gamut from Lindstrom’s fleet-footed twinkly space-disco to Japan’s all-girl wiry noiseniks Nisennenmondai.
As well as trusting in the taste of fans, Joakim’s other guiding principle is diversity. ‘Very often a sound will die out and the label dies too. Mo Wax is a good “bad” example of this. So I have two labels – Smalltown Supersound and Smalltown Superjazzz. I do all the avant-garde stuff on Superjazzz and what I sign to the Supersound label is all based on gut instinct. I hope this gives the label personality’.
Haugland recommends...
Meanderthals Desire Lines
Bjørn Torske Kokning
ARP The Soft Wave
Trunk Records
Jonny Trunk defines the label he set up in 2005 as a ‘labour of love,’ a mission to issue music that’s never been released before. Specifically, says Jonny, ‘unreleased British film music from the ’60s and ’70s.’ Trunk Records’ first release was The Super Sounds of Bosworth. Claims Jonny: ‘It was the world's first ever commercial library music (early electrons, avant-garde madness) release’.
The reason for his obsession with this and phone-sex tapes from the ’70s? ‘It’s partly because I can't help myself, partly because the recordings I issue won't exist unless I turn them into LPs. And the sex thing? Well, we all like a bit of sex. I think the recordings I issue are beautiful, played by talented musicians at the top of their game. And you don't hear music like it made today.’
Trunk recommends...
Life on Earth: Music to the 1979 BBC TV Series
Dirty Fan Male
Basil Kirchin Primitive London
Honourables...
Of course there are lots more we should mention. Labels such as the German-based crate-diggers Africa Analog; UK experimentalists The Leaf Label; London’s indie-pop darlings Stolen Recordings; synthy cold wave specialists Angular Recording Corporation; hip-hop overlords Big Dada... Well, the list goes on and on, just the like the future of the indies.
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