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Eric
"Audio Dregs" Mast also writes and publishes an excellent
'zine called Thumb. The most recent issue focuses
on musicians who invent their own instruments. It's available
at Ozone Records for $2.
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When Rob Jones talks about CD-R, the technology
that allows you to burn sounds of your choice onto blank compact
discs, he sounds a little like a Marxist cadre in action.
"If you're running a label, one of the benefits of CD-R
is that it allows you to build up a catalog," he says. "If
you really want to do a label, you don't want to have just
one artist. But you can't do that without a lot of capital
unless you have something that lets you control production."
Jones has seized the means of production. He runs Jealous
Butcher Records--or, more exactly, he is
Jealous Butcher. The label is a one-man job, and its obsessively
designed, creatively packaged products seem to owe more
to Old World craftsmanship than to the cookie-cutter Babylon
of the modern music industry. While Jones remains loyal
to cassettes and blessed, wrongfully scorned vinyl, the
oh-so-now CD-R has become a prime weapon in his campaign
to claim a slice of sonic territory.
"I think that CD-Rs are like the cassette revolution,"
Jones says, referring to the hundreds of mini-labels that
have mushroomed out of various musical undergrounds through
the '80s and '90s, manufacturing their products with the
high-speed dubbing function found on home stereos. While
cassette-only labels, like cassettes themselves, still hang
around, the long-awaited advent of CD-R has allowed do-it-yourself
record impresarios to move up-market.
Jealous Butcher isn't alone on the CD-R launching pad in
Portland. Hush
Records, the entrepreneurial brainchild of artist
and musician Chad Crouch, and Eric Mast's Audio
Dregs Records also use CD burners and artful, hand-built
packaging to get music to the masses. Crouch, Mast and Jones
all know each other. In fact, their labels form a loose
triad, each operation claiming its own signature sound and
graphic look. Between the three of them, they cover a lot
of aesthetic ground.
Jones seems to favor the aggressively off-kilter indie-rock
that takes its cues from Olympia and D.C.; Crouch's label,
as the name implies, is dominated by low-volume singer-songwriter
types; Audio Dregs specializes in mad-science music like
the Sensualists' experimental rock and the loopy
sci-fi bossa nova of Dim-Dim.
Of the three, Hush is probably the best known. Crouch inaugurated
the label in 1997 with a CD of his own--manufactured the
conventional way at a commercial pressing plant--then used
the accessibility of CD-R to pile up a slew of releases.
He says burning discs himself allows him to release albums
by the likes of Amy Annelle and Corrina Repp
in small, limited runs--a scale that seems to match the
intimacy of the music itself.
"The big benefit of running a label this way is the ability
to get a lot of attention without money," Crouch says. "When
you have title after title coming out, the attention tends
to build--it becomes its own publicity."
Crouch says he started at a fortuitous time, when the price
of blank discs dropped to $1.80 or so apiece, about half
of what they had been going for. This low price allows small
labels like Hush, Jealous Butcher and Audio Dregs to make
just enough copies to satisfy the demand for the relatively
non-commercial genres they specialize in, without getting
bogged down.
"Even with good press and some distribution, it's really
hard to move 1,000 of a given product," Crouch says. "I've
done a lot of limited pressings; I number them and when
I hit 200 or 300, it's done. That's really easy to do with
CD-R, and it makes them more dear, in a way."
Of course, this method eats up a lot of time--it takes
about 10 minutes to burn one 40-minute disc, and the cut-and-paste
art and hand-screened graphics favored by the three labels
don't exactly take care of themselves. In fact, Crouch and
Jones both say they're likely to have more of their future
product made at the factory now that their foundations are
in place.
"I'm at 20 titles. I'm either going to get bigger or quit,"
Crouch says. "At the same time, though, I have all these
titles, I've made money, and I don't have this huge backlog
of product that no one will want lying around. You get too
many of those big boxes of two hundred CDs and it just kind
of becomes a lot of emotional baggage to face."
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Willamette Week | originally
published July 28, 1999
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