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How to launch a record label with a Sonic boom
David Keenan recently realised his dream of putting out a free jazz record … with a little help from Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth
AMERICAN underground music legends Sonic Youth were the first group to fully bring together everything I loved about rock music. Combining exhilarating blasts of de-tuned atonal guitar noise, primitive punk rhythms, extended passages of free improvisation and a passion for the more hamburger-and-horror aspects of popular culture, they simultaneously extended rock’s language while bolstering its most basic traditions.
I first saw them play live at Rooftops in 1987, a top floor venue somewhere in the lofts of Glasgow’s Sauchiehall Street. They were so gloriously noisy they virtually tore my head off. The late rock critic Lester Bangs once confessed that he used Lou Reed’s notorious Metal Machine Music LP the way certain heads used LSD, taking it once a month in order to blow all of the crap out of his system. For me, it was always Sonic Youth.
A few years later , I began writing about experimental music for a living and while working as a journalist for The Wire I eventually got to know Sonic Youth guitarist and vocalist Thurston Moore. My partner, Heather Leigh Murray, even played with him in a group called Hot Asphalt, one of many Sonic Youth satellites birthed to satisfy Moore’s constant craving for free music jam situations.
Over the years, I began to order records from the Ecstatic Yod store, an incredible record shop and performance space run by Moore and underground music journalist Byron Coley, and later my partner and I played live in the store as part of our own group, Taurpis Tula. It was while hanging out after one of the shows, drinking beer and flipping through the most eye-boggling collection of rare psychedelic and free jazz LPs I’d ever seen, that I began to lament the fact that there was no comparable store anywhere in the UK.
Drunk on rock’n’roll – not to mention eight bottles of McNeill’s Big Nose Blond – I decided then and there to open up a record store when we got back. I bought a bunch of records from Yod to start us off, and two weeks later Heather and I were running Volcanic Tongue from our front room in Glasgow, with the kitchen as the dispatching room. Two years on and we now have a thriving mail order business as well as our own shop on Argyle Street, Scotland’s first – and only – record store dedicated to nothing but experimental and underground music.
Of course, it wasn’t enough. As a long term record collector/addict I had long harboured ambitions to run my own label, and soon after we opened the shop we began to release limited art editions of new music on our own Volcanic Tongue imprint. Parallel to all this activity, I had also been co-curating Scotland’s first experimental music festival, Stirling’s Le Weekend. The year 2005 was to be my last on the job so I was determined to finally bring Moore over to headline the festival. I dropped him a quick email. “Thurston, you wanna play Le Weekend?” He mailed back. “Sure.” I suggested putting together a version of the Dream/Aktion Unit, a group he had formed in order to more fully explore the kind of free jazz-inspired improvisations that his playing in Sonic Youth repeatedly implied. “Sure,” he said. This promoting game was easy.
In the event, second guitarist Jim O’Rourke was tied up with film work in Japan so we drafted in No-Neck Blues Band bassist Matt Heyner to replace him. Then on the night – two hours before they were due on stage – Thurston asked Heather Leigh, herself a formidable free improviser, if she wanted to join the group for the show. It was turning into a pretty momentous occasion, both personally and musically.
The gig was incredible, with Thurston invading the crowd and literally flipping an unsuspecting audience member onto his shoulders as he took a gnarly single-note guitar solo while Matt, Heather, saxophonist Paul Flaherty and drummer Chris Corsano huffed and roared in the background. We recorded the whole deal straight to 24-track and made up our mind right then and there that it would be the first “real” CD release for Volcanic Tongue. Over the next 12 months we ran up against the usual brick walls: lack of decent printing and pressing plants in the UK, the whole process of commissioning and designing the artwork, an endless back and forth over titles (Matt Heyner’s idea of naming it Third Reich From The Sun was eventually shot down), getting the disc mastered in the States – and then getting them all back to find the first pressing of the discs had the wrong colour on them and had to be scrapped. But we finally made it; with the end-result all dressed up in gory, video nasty-style artwork and packaged it in a gatefold sleeve with individually silkscreened discs.
It was truly a labour of love, a thanks to Moore and co for all of their liberating music, a committed fanboy’s dream come true and a coming full circle that went some way towards proving to friends and family that 20 years of collecting 10s of thousands of “unlistenable” noise records needn’t necessarily mean an adult life spent entirely in your parents’ basement, struggling with personal hygiene issues and drooling over obscure discographical titbits. Nowadays, I get to do it in my own shop.
Blood Shadow Rampage, the debut CD by Dream/Aktion Unit, is out tomorrow on Volcanic Tongue.
www.volcanictongue.com 01 October 2006