Montreal post-rock is usually explained as a sound. It is better explained as real estate: an Anglo exodus, a loft above a garage, 500 hand-glued LPs, and two venues opened by a bass player. How Mile End built the infrastructure first.
The story of the Monks is almost always told as a costume. Five American GIs stationed at Gelnhausen, two German design graduates, shaved tonsures, black habits, a manifesto. It is a great story and it is also the least interesting thing about the record they made. What produced Black Monk Time was not an art […]
The story sells itself, which is the first reason to distrust it. Five boys at St Gregory’s College in Obalende, Lagos, borrow instruments, get signed by EMI, and cut a psychedelic rock album while still in school uniform. Try and Love came out on EMI Nigeria in 1973, catalogue NEMI (LP) 0032, with a parallel […]
Fifty years after The Saints pressed 500 copies of (I'm) Stranded in Brisbane, the details show that almost everything later read as punk ideology was a practical workaround.
Sahko Recordings was founded in 1993 to release one friend’s music. Six years later a trademark letter took a character out of Pan Sonic’s name, and the album that followed was named after the gap.
Richard David James was born on 18 August 1971 in Limerick and raised in Cornwall. The birthday gets marked every year. The more useful anniversary is the second half of that sentence, because the label he ended up co-founding was not built out of a taste. It was built out of a postcode. A supply […]
Most independent labels are built around a taste. Man’s Ruin was built around a squeegee. Frank Kozik was already the most recognisable rock poster artist in America when he started the label in 1994. He had gone from black and white flyers stapled to telephone poles in Austin to large format silkscreens for Nirvana, Soundgarden [
Most bands form to play. The Desperate Bicycles formed in March 1977 for the specific purpose of recording and releasing a single on their own label, and they were not being coy about it. They owned an amplifier and a bass guitar. The Dalston studio supplied everything else. Three hours later they had two songs, […]
