|
www.bsi-records.
com
BSI releases
have won praise from such electro-culture bibles as XLR8R,
Urb and
The Wire. Bay Area lefty weekly The San Francisco
Bay Guardian acclaimed Systemwide as "the States' finest
dub band."
The label's recent
releases include Osmani Stepper, a Systemwide EP
that capitalizes on Ezra Ereckson's fascination with his
Albanian roots.
Wreck This
Mess, a propulsive compilation now available at local
shops, provides a good introduction to the label, while
Ereckson describes a forthcoming comp, due this fall, as
"the closest thing to our manifesto so far."
The three men who command BSI Records lounge over chile
relleno and chips and salsa in a gray-lit downtown burrito
dive. They survey the insurgent kingdom of strange and terrible
sound they've conquered in about a year and a half, a realm
founded on a bedrock love of Jamaican dub and all its massively
mutating forms.
Cold, sweating bottles of Negro Modelo ("a business expense")
rest in their hands. A chorus of praise in the electronic-music
press grows for the aggressively esoteric music they've
injected just under the skin of the often brainless dance
scene. They've landed deals to work with some underground
icons, like critically hip high-concept wax master DJ Spooky
and Daddy Freddy, the Kingston word-splitter once acclaimed
as the world's fastest rapper, four years running. There's
a lot to like. And damned if it didn't happen fast.
"I remember 18 months ago, sitting in Dots and scribbling
shit on a napkin," says Jason Lohr, probably closest of
the three to the archetypal smooth subterranean kingpin.
"Then we ended up releasing better records, by better-known
people, than we ever thought we could."
"And once that credibility is there, people are a lot more
willing to work with you," adds Ezra Ereckson, probably
the most earnest of a very earnest trio. "What we were optimistically
hoping for two years from now, we've already surpassed.
And that's a good feeling."
Josh Derry, the dreadlocked third member of the triumvirate,
nods. Derry, it seems, is mostly content to let the sonic
weapons of his alter ego Sound Secretion do the talking.
He does, however, offer a blunt verdict on how BSI made
it from barside doodlings to pressing-plant reality.
"Basically," Derry says, "we're all friggin' obsessed."
Yes indeed, and it's not hard to see why. The music BSI
chooses to specialize in springs from dub, a deliciously
deviant splinter of reggae born when Jamaican sound-system
scientists began dicing up existing records to suit their
own purposes. Well below the radar of mass commerce, the
subversive tenets of dub have spread with such viral success
that hip-hop, techno and experimental musicians obey them
every day without even thinking about it.
BSI, however, consciously embraces the cut-and-paste aesthetic
of dub, as well as its often-hot political rhetoric. The
imprint's push for sounds it considers revolutionary (or
maybe, since straight-on rock is the regional rebel culture
of choice, counterrevolutionary) arguably makes it Portland's
most ambitious label.
The label's releases--18 in all by the end of the year,
they hope--are diverse enough to incorporate both the late
British mosaicist Muslimgauze's rampant hijacking of Middle
Eastern sounds, the frenetic live grit of Ereckson and Lohr's
band Systemwide, and the bizarre esoterica of San Francisco's
Bucolic. Still, the BSI junta wants to create a coherent
body of releases, so you can generalize a little.
And generally speaking, the label has carved out its own
private Babylon, favoring ritualistic, dark, transnational
sounds that reflect both dub's earthy Rasta roots and the
apocalypse-culture vibe its latter-day practitioners project.
Some artists on BSI's roster evoke Trenchtown, some echo
Palestinian refugee camps; some do both on the same track.
"A lot of people hear the word 'dub' and think, oh, Lee
'Scratch' Perry," Ereckson says, name-checking dub's loony
godfather. "But really, dub is the birth of the remix as
a concept. It's the origin of hip-hop, the origin of techno,
the foundation for all this stuff that's considered the
music of today. We're interested in tracing the trajectory
of all the pieces of that as it continues to fragment. I
mean, no one's making dub records in Jamaica any more. But
they're making them in Nashville. They're making them in
Dakar."
Despite such global ambitions, BSI still runs on the scale
of the traditional "local" indie label. Ereckson recently
ditched his day job to devote himself to the BSI jihad,
but Lohr and Derry are still slogging away in the wage-slave
world. Still, the label's art and commerce are both flogging
expectations.
"The kind of records we release have a shelf life," Lohr
says. "They can sell fast or they can sit in record stores
for years until someone gets hip to it and starts doing
the archaeology of a particular vibe.
"And I'll tell you, the last thing you expect when you
start a record label is to sell records. It's the least
rational business decision in the world. So we've been pleasantly
surprised."
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 26,
2000
|
