Drag City

A Short History

Nearly twenty years after being founded by Chicago independent distributors Dan Koretzky and Dan Osborn, Drag City is one of only a few labels dating from the great DIY boom of the late 80s and early 90s to have survived with its independence and credibility intact. Beginning in 1989 with a Royal Trux release, soon followed by Pavement’s Demolition Plot J-7 EP, the earliest Drag City releases were characterised by the messy but intelligent sound of those two bands. With Pavement’s departure to Matador and the Royal Trux’ eventual shift towards coherence, the label kept its ears open and ended up with a who’s who of everything interesting and non-grunge in early 1990s America. Bands such as Smog, Stereolab and the Silver Jews held the middle ground, while DC explored alt-folk with Will Oldham (Palace Brothers, Bonnie Prince Billy) and pretty much everywhere else with Jim O’Rourke (Gastr Del Sol, Sonic Youth, producer, mixer, avant-garde composer). Towards the present day, Drag City retained their ear for something new and different. They continue to release the multiple albums a year Jim O’Rourke thinks up on various subsidiaries, as well as picking up on the Bay Area’s only surviving fairy minstrel, Joanna Newsom, arranging her marriage with Beach Boys string-arranger Van Dyke Parks for her 2006 opus Ys. With their twentieth anniversary coming up in 2009, Analogue turns the spotlight onto Drag City.

So what does Drag City mean?

One of the reasons for their longevity and growth into something of genuine importance is the chameleon characteristic. Drag City started out with similar enough music to most of the DIY labels starting up in cities around the US at the time, but by ten years later the music was unrecognisably eclectic. They will literally put out anything so long as it sounds good to them. A recent example: in Drag City’s latest newsletter, they put some effort into promoting a re-release of an album by Suarasama, a pair of Sumatrans with ethnomusicology degrees. It seems far-fetched for an American indie label to be promoting that, but they are, because they want to. And though they are commonly thought of as economical (i.e. cheap) by many of their artists, as Joanna Newsom says, “they’ll spend money on things if they believe in it”. Recently, they made the news on the blog circuit by pulling their catalogue off emusic.com, an mp3 site, because it wasn’t worth their while to have them there. This created a new round of debate on the future of the indie labels, with the received wisdom that paying for cheap downloads (without manufacturing costs) is just as good as buying CDs coming into question. Really though, the way to enjoy Drag City releases is to sit back with a copy of a zine, drop the needle on a 12″ and remember that there would be no Label Love features if it wasn’t for the common identity forged by record labels like these.

The Savant:

Jim O’Rourke – Eureka (1999)/Insignificance (2001)

Chicago’s dizzyingly prolific O’Rourke has been one of Drag City’s most important artists of the past twenty years. 1999′s Eureka is his most perfectly conceived record from start to finish, channelling Bacharach in a stab at inventing experimental lounge pop. Certain moments, including the mantric ‘Prelude to 110 or 220/Women of the World’, are sweet enough to jerk tears. Others are simply mood-lifting pop, but Eureka remains one of O’Rourke’s finest moments.

Being the chameleon of the underground music world, it was only a matter of time until O’Rourke tried out the rock and roll robe. 2001′s Insignificance shows the results of hanging out a lot with Thurston Moore, packing messy riffs and blue-collar drums alongside the zephyr-like qualities he perfected on Eureka. Having left Chicago for New York, O’Rourke lyrically burns his bridges with his former scene-mates, especially on the opener ‘Downhill from Here’. However much less likeable this may make him seem, it helps to drag him out of his aggregated “experimental” mythos and into the real world. Add to this the fact that the album is of course sonically gorgeous and even occasionally quite catchy, and you have the perfect introduction to one of the most intimidating back catalogues in modern music.

The Story-Teller:

Silver Jews – American Water

Plagued by the shadow of his own rhythm guitarist for most of his career, David Berman waited until 1998 to make his confession, thereby delivering the greatest opening line in singer-songwriter history: “In 1984 I was hospitalised for approaching perfection”. Berman’s songs are rife with these types of lines, single sentences that stand out and make you go “hah”. He’d been doing this for a while by the time American Water came out, but nothing before or after is as consistent as this. With Malkmus in tow, Berman explores the gauntlet of styles between Pavement and honky-tonk without submitting to either, while his untrained (i.e. occasionally flat) voice sings with the uncanny ability to sound like it’s on auto-pilot until the sixth listen, when a line will come out of nowhere and grab you. His other trick is managing to sound completely sincere without ever actually giving anything away. Fill in the meanings yourself.

The Anarcho-Hipsters:

Royal Trux – Twin Infinitives (2000)

The third Drag City record ever released was Twin Infinitives. On it, Royal Trux come off as a sort of Times New Viking left in the womb, rearranging the component parts of rock music into arrhythmic noise, and only occasionally breaking into something approaching an actual song. It is difficult to listen to and vaguely disgusting. But somewhere in the muddle of noise and silence, there lays an absolutely captivating thing: the sound of being really fucked up. The Royal Trux climb into your head and play the sound of the head cold, the hangover or the heroin addiction back to you. They did eventually calm down and come out with something approaching coherent indie rock, but on this formless double-LP, that was nowhere to be seen. It has been argued that the album is merely a group of substance-abusing art-schoolers ripping the piss out of a scene that celebrates disaffection. This is entirely possible. Listen to Twin Infinitives more as a historical artefact than an actual album.

The Fairy Maiden

Joanna Newsom: – The Milk-Eyed Mender (2004)

The best thing about The Milk-Eyed Mender is that, with a little added vinyl hiss, it could’ve been recorded any time in the last fifty or even hundred years. And it would still sound different. Rehabilitating the harp as a serious instrument with a greater purpose than new age esotericism, Newsom’s unclassifiable folk-classical style is so enchanting that it makes it seem like being enchanted is a reasonable thing to happen. Songs like ‘The Book of Right On’ and ‘Sprout and the Bean’ are profound and playful, beautiful and basic at the same time. The lyrics are sharp, sometimes funny and always delivered in a little girl’s voice that divides everyone who hears it. Newsom was lumped in at the time with ‘freak folk’ artists like Devendra Banhart, but The Milk-Eyed Mender is more timeless than anything that scene produced. The follow-up, Ys, is conceived on a much greater scale, with orchestral arrangements and ten-minute-long songs. It is incredibly impressive in its own way. But not as enchanting.

Kompakt

Hear that sound? That is the sound of the global music business groaning, splintering, falling apart and sinking like the Titanic in slow motion. Ever since Thom Yorke smugly jumped ship and escaped on a little lifeboat called ‘In Rainbows’, the world’s eyes have been trained on this hulking industry as it slowly goes tits up in a freezing ocean of illegally downloaded MP3 files. Many see the current state of the industry as the death knell for record label. Some see this as a good thing. Yer Trents and yer Thoms will happily jig (or do a jittery Ian Curtis-esque jig movement in Thom’s case) on the graves of record labels, as Music Industry 2.0 welcomes us into a brave new world.

While many will not mourn the potential loss of the so called big four (Universal, Sony BMG, Warner, and EMI), surely some flowers (gladioli perhaps?) will be kept to mark the final resting places of the more revered smaller labels? Before we all throw in the towel, however, and start awarding posthumous accolades, Analogue would like to direct some attention to the more groundbreaking record labels of our time. Believe it or not, there was a time when record labels (not blogs) played the part of your musically aware older sibling. When I was 16, it didn’t matter a jot what sort of tune I heard but as long as it was on Creation, I was bound to love it. Creation shaped my teenage music years and I thank them for it. For people older than me, it was possibly Rough Trade. For my American counterparts, it was likely Sub Pop or Matador. In short, good smaller record labels have personality and passion.

‘Label Love’ will focus in depth on a different label every month. The structure might vary, but the general idea is to highlight an influential record label, try to explain what makes them special and consider some key releases. In a ruthless game of spin the bottle in Analogue towers, I ended up marked for this first feature. While I am sure many future featured labels will be guitar based, I am going to choose the music label I listen to most right now, a German based techno distributor called Kompakt. Hey, you at the back, stop rolling your eyes and give 4/4 techno a chance. Now, a little back story on Kompakt and a few releases that best represent the full range of its sound.

A Short History of Kompakt
Kompakt began with three German DJs (Michael Mayer, Jurgen Paape and Wolfgang Voigt), who worked together (and still do) in a big house in Cologne with a record shop attached. All three look alike and are vegetarians. Sounds like a scary techno cult right? Kompakt is often lazily described as a minimal techno label. While there is no shortage of acts representing that sub-genre on Kompakt, such pigeon holing does little justice to the more diverse releases and the full range of the label’s sound. In truth, Kompakt is home to a remarkably broad range of tastes, running from the strange swinging time signatures of the sound called ‘schaffel’, to the near beatless, ambient washes of the ‘Pop Ambient’ series. Also, the main seam of 4/4 techno the label mines, traverses a long continuum from the playful, campy pop sound of Justus Kohncke to the gothic dramatics of much of Superpitcher’s output. Indeed, the only real thread that ties such varied wonders together is the sheer consistency and quality of the label’s output; a demonstration of its owners’ imagination, impeccable tastes, and never-ending endeavours to push the boundaries of what is possible within techno music. While some will argue that the label’s glories are a thing of the past, recent releases such as Gui Boratto’s ‘Chromophobia’ and The Field’s ‘From here we go Sublime’ show that Kompakt’s heart still beats strong.

Some Key Releases on Kompakt:

The Mix CD

Immer: Michael Mayer

For any influential DJ, the most challenging demonstration of your musical dexterity is how you mix a set. For your average Berlin deck monkey, a DJ set will last between 4 and 6 hours, allowing all sorts of breathing space for strange and wonderful build-ups and detours. However, cramming that experience into a one hour mix CD is another thing altogether. Kompakt founder Michael Mayer managed this twice; spectacularly. The big fish that got away from the label was his exemplary, revered and upbeat Fabric 13 mix. But ‘Immer’, his first true mix for Kompakt is a monolithic example of the DJ mix as an artform. The whole of ‘Immer’ is greater than the parts. Mayer selects and precisely mixes a series of pieces that mesh together seamlessly, which, while married to the ubiquitous 4/4 beat, progress through a fully realised journey. In contrast to the circular, druggy abstraction of Ricardo Vilallobos, Mayer likes narrative. Many Kompakt mixes feel like mangled pop albums. They have a beginning, middle and end. ‘Immer’ is the ultimate example of this.

The Sampler

Total 3: Various Artists

Every Summer Kompakt announce the arrival of the latest sampler from their ‘Total’ series with a huge party in Cologne. While the quality of the Total series has been somewhat erratic in recent years, the early compilations from the label’s hey-day contain an embarrassment of riches. ‘Total 3’ stands out in particular, and with tracks like Superpitcher’s brooding ‘Tomorrow’, Michael Mayer’s playful ‘Hush Hush Baby’ and Reinhard Voigt’s thumping, spare ‘In aller Freundschaft’ it plays like a who’s who of techno’s most innovative producers at the mid-point of the decade.

The Box Set

Nah und Fern: Gas

‘Nah und Fern’ is the brainchild of Wolfgang Voigt and is a re-released compilation of four near mythical albums of ambient minimal techno, sampled mostly from German classical records, and inspired by the depths of the Black Forest. The vapourous music made by Gas is difficult to convey in prose. It’s techno in the barest sense, in that you will often hear 4/4 beats, sometimes close, and sometimes further away in the thick mix. They beat dully like signals through thick fog, either anchoring you or tricking you into following them ever deeper into Voigt’s strange, sometimes scary but always beautiful sonic terrain. Essential.

The Full-Length

From Here we go Sublime: The Field

Like many dance labels, Kompakt butters its bread from the vinyl singles it distributes from its Cologne HQ. Techno is often about that one, blinding shit-hot track a DJ drops at the right moment. Tunes exist in isolation, waiting to be threaded into someone else’s mix. In short, it is an environment where the concept of the album as an artistic statement carries a lot less clout than it does in traditional indie or chart rock. Last year, this trend was bucked spectacularly by Swede Alex Willner (AKA The Field), whose full-length from ‘here we go sublime’ is, well, sublime from start to finish. Glacial, expansive, and exquisite, the album garnered rave (geddit?) reviews on its release and is something of a modern electronic classic.