This is not about Fearless Records or Immortal Records. They're doing quite fine. Or at least Fearless is.
This is about my own bumbling run through the gauntlet of music creation and release, and the lessons learned along the way.
I have a soft spot for the early days of record labels. The exploratorily curious years when nothing seems all that carefully curated and nothing seems off limits.
There was a time when 4AD had a roster that included Clan of Xymox along with the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir. There was a time when Secretly Canadian had Racebannon along with Early Day Miners and Jason Molina.
Enigma Records, one of my all time faves and probably the record label that first ushered me into the seething underbelly of underground music as a morbidly curious twelve-year-old, had Motorhead, Pere Ubu and Stryper, all at the same time.
There was no appeal to a "market segment." They were just all-in on music that was interesting regardless of how loud, quiet or weird it all was. And I guess that's something I took with me over time, because I've struggled for years to define what I do and how to share it.
I’m not a rock guy, or a pop guy, or a beat-making guy on Ableton. I’m sort of a creatively schizophrenic mutt in the middle who's always seemed to identify with other mutts with an oeuvre that doesn't want to fit in a nice tidy box.
After Brazil and my time on Fearless and Immortal Records, I came up with the name Elefant & Haus (a play on Edward Gorey's Elephant House) as the home for the melancholy keyboard demos I was coming up with straight out of the band, and it seemed appropriate at the time.
But then along came JC Autobody and I couldn't reconcile its noise and swagger with the keyboard stuff in a way that felt right. Elefant & Haus pivoted and became Young Tobacco Records.
But then JXMAS and City Water came along with the flowery "rococo-pop" and ambient drones, and the label split off yet again into Nap Factory.
In the grand scheme of things, none of this probably mattered because it's not like anything I was making was flying off the shelves. This was all a curation exercise of neurotic self-cataloging and it was only really important to me.
Which makes it a bit hard to build, as it should come as no surprise. Juggling two "record labels" and the hungry content machine that goes with them is something no one can do without a full staff, of which I've never had the desire nor the means to have.
So all this time I've been plodding along, overcomplicating things and releasing music under different logos and Bandcamp accounts, hoping something will come along that makes sense. And after almost two decades, I've finally arrived at what I think is the The Big Idea.
Death, Love & Broken Records.
After all this time, I finally feel like I can finally scratch all my itches, rotate all my crops and abuse all my metaphors from a single place that I control. A platform approach, with DL;BR as the mouthpiece at the top with Young Tobacco, Nap Factory and the blog as its outlets.
It feels good, and seems to be the secret sauce. A place for creative whims, regardless of if they are grounded in writing, art or music. The Enigma Records approach, not caring what anything sounds like or looks like together. Death Angel, Roky Erikson and The Minutemen all in the same creative universe.
It only took fifteen years, but I think I've got the hang of it now.
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