(idm) Downpour, Drop Beat, Panacea and the obscurity of American labels
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Aaron Gregory posited something that made me think:
quoted 6 lines DOWNPOUR (oh so aptly titled aren't they! - you'll see ...) come forth with> DOWNPOUR (oh so aptly titled aren't they! - you'll see ...) come forth with
> the third release on Drop Beat Records. A FAR cry from the greyness and silky
> smoothness of Kristian's effort, this 5-tracker presents a rather (at many
> times) SCARY (want proof? Strap on the sample from track 4, "The Bitterest
> Man in the Living Room") affair! Simply put, this MUST be the closest thing
> to PANACEA I have heard on an American label WITHOUT question.
("Widespread DISEMANATION of this IMPORTANT INFORMATION is ENCOURAGED!" LOL)
This got me wondering ...
Most of us on this list have probably heard Panacea ... or heard about
Panacea ... but hardly anyone has heard about Downpour ... or, indeed, WILL
hear about Downpour ... or the other stuff on Drop Beat ... (outside of
this august body, of course)
My first thought was "Well, obviously, because Panacea's on Mille Plateaux"
(I think???). That led me down the parse tree to the leaf that thinks about
how the "famous" labels - at least, the ones most pertinent to this list -
are almost all UK labels, with a smattering of a few others on the Continent.
For the most part, US labels aren't even players in the "Well-known-on-the-
IDM-tip" scene. Yes, we can make exceptions ... let's ignore Detroit for
the moment ... and labels like Nervous and Strictly Rhythm that are certainly
"well-known" but are more on the House tip ... but even if we talk about
US Techno labels in general (i.e., not just Experimental/IDM ones, like
Plug Research/Isophlux/Schematic/Side Effekts/etc.) ... we're Not A Player.
I guess I have this vague feeling that it'll always be this way. And I'm
not quite sure why. I could point to Sahko's raised presence above water,
and I think the canonical example at this point of a label not from England
rising up out of the stew with high visibility is Dot/(.). I think a few
years ago, you could have said that Exist Dance were qualifiers in this
realm, but of course then Mike Kandel promptly submerged to let his freak flag
grow erm fly :-)
Note that I'm not saying this situation reflects even the slightest on our
US home-grown labels, it's just an observation that it seems somewhat ironic
because in the mainstream music world, obviously the American conglomerate
labels tend to dominate, and in our little universe that's completely tipped
on its head.
(This somehow vaguely relates to a post I made in a galaxy long, long ago
about deciding what labels to send one's music to, since label identification
in this realm is far stronger than artist identification. At least until
the artist is well-known to some extent.)
Erm, it's almost 3:25 AM and I'm babbling. I'll shut up now ...
- Greg