Walk into Repressed Records, and Nic Warnock will likely greet you with a smile and "How ya going mate?" before leaving you to browse at your own leisure. He’s not one to impose and, besides, he’s probably busy unpacking the latest overseas order, restocking shelves or pricing new arrivals. However, ask him what’s playing on the store stereo, or what new releases they’ve recently acquired, and you’ll weather a wave of musical knowledge that any respectable music enthusiast would find hard to match. He lives and breathes music and it is sometimes hard to believe that he grew up in the semi-rural setting of Cairns, a place devoid of any defined music culture.
Nic’s early musical experiences were limited to the trends of the day, with nu-metal bands such as Limp Bizkit and Korn featuring heavily in his early listening. It was via the rap element of these artists that Nic first came to hip-hop, which in turn led him to DIY music culture.
"I don’t remember having a strong connection to music. I think [hip-hop] was the first thing that gave me a sense that the mainstream wasn’t the best way to do things. I was drawn to groups that had really strong identities, that 'Fuck everyone – they’re wrong, we’re right' attitude. It was that teenage thing of being anti-authoritarian and it wasn’t that big a leap from Wu-Tang and Public Enemy to the Stooges, Sex Pistols and Pere Ubu. Not having any youth music culture to draw on made me look at things in a more ideological manner, rather than in a sonic manner."
Nic moved to Sydney in 2006, at age 17, to study graphic design at the University of Western Sydney. He lived in the far western suburb of Penrith and worked part-time at Repressed, then just an ordinary suburban record store. Always looking for new music, Nic would often commute to the city for shows, and quickly made connections within the DIY music scene. He would also form Onani, a noise/drone duo, with good friend Daryl Prondoso, who exposed him to free-form jazz and no wave.
"Going to shows like the New Zealand Noise Festival and seeing elements of UK post-punk, noise, drone and free-form music, then meeting the bands, giving them CD-Rs and eventually being asked to play shows with them was really the formative period for me. I was going to gigs in the city and pretty much immediately started meeting people who made me feel like I could be a part of and contribute to DIY music culture. My main musical connection was playing in Onani. Daryl was one of my first friends I really discussed music with. He made me a set of mix tapes, one with free-form jazz, one with a bunch of no-wave artists and one with more post-punk stuff. Onani was highly informed by the burgeoning noise scene like Wolf Eyes and Boredoms. It was all about not having sonic limitations, stuff like home recording, noise, drones, dodgy home electronics. They were all really exciting, liberating ideas at the time."
By 2009, Nic had moved from Penrith to Ultimo with his brother Ben and Joe Sukit, who would both later feature in Bed Wettin' Bad Boys. Repressed Records had moved to Newtown, the first step in its transformation into the independent music hub it is today. Around the same time, R.I.P. Society was born out of nowhere when Circle Pit, whom Nic was playing with at the time, couldn’t find someone with the appropriate vision for their debut 7". While Nic did not have a concrete vision of what the label should be, he felt that there was a need for a label for artists that didn’t necessarily have a suitable home amongst the Australian independent labels of the time.
"There was a jeans company who wanted to do [the Circle Pit 7"] as a CD EP and we’d [have to] go play all their shows and wear their jeans, which I thought was a disgusting concept. The only people who wanted to release a 7" in a cool manner didn’t have the resources. I was just thinking, here’s an opportunity to release something that should be released. I felt it needed to be released, and I also had in the back of my mind that some of the other things happening should be released.
"Two years prior there wasn’t even the idea that I could run a label. It wasn’t a lifelong dream, or an ambition that I’d been thinking about for that long. It was just obviously necessary in that time and place. I felt there was already support for the hardcore, metal and noise scenes, but I felt like there was this middle zone that didn’t really fit in. It wasn’t necessarily all DIY rock 'n' roll, it was just the kind of stuff that didn’t fit into either the completely marginal world or the shiny indie world."
R.I.P. Society released two more records in 2009, LPs for Lakes and Kitchen's Floor. Whilst receiving limited distribution and press, Kitchen’s Floor’s Loneliness is a Dirty Mattress was ultimately a slow-burning success. At this early stage, Nic felt as though there was a real distrust of local music by the majority of Australian music media, with his releases only garnering success via word-of-mouth and overseas recognition.
"[Loneliness is a Dirty Mattress] was one of those records that people would hear in the store and then buy. I don’t think it even got a review at the time. There was Repressed and Missing Link, a base in each city, and the rest was all word-of-mouth. Missing Link really treated it like 'This is important music, you should listen to this' and it was a good feeling for it to get that kind of recognition without any sort of radio endorsement or press validation. With Kitchen’s Floor, we never sold more than a couple a week, but at Repressed we sold that many every week for an entire year."
"It was the same scenario with Circle Pit. No one really bought that record to start with and everyone was so skeptical. It didn’t have the endorsement of distribution or being featured on community radio or Triple J. People just didn’t really look to our own backyard for music. Overseas media took note much more quickly. The Circle Pit 7" was in Wire, reviewed extremely positively by Byron Coley. Meanwhile I’m sitting there thinking 'how strange it was that the street press didn’t review it when I sent it to them here?'"
While the first few records were slow-burners, in early 2010 R.I.P. Society released 7" singles for both Kitchen’s Floor and Bed Wettin' Bad Boys that sold rapidly. However, they still failed to garner the media attention they deserved, with recognition only forthcoming from those within the DIY community. R.I.P. Society’s follow-up release, Royal Headache’s self-titled EP, would buck this trend, creating hype that went beyond the DIY community for the first time.
"[Bed Wettin' Bad Boys and Kitchen’s Floor] sold out in a couple of months, whereas it took me a really long time to get interest in the Circle Pit 7". It took over a year for it to start ticking over. I was seeing a change in mentality from people locally. Thanks to Missing Link doing distribution to other record stores and labels like Aarght Records and Stained Circles, peoples' attitudes towards local music were changing [in Sydney]. But in saying that the Kitchen’s Floor and Bed Wettin' Bad Boys singles were a success, they didn’t really get reviewed and they didn’t get radio play. It was all DIY networking and a few local institutions giving it the thumbs up. [R.I.P. Society] still didn’t feel like a blip on the Australian music landscape.
"Then the Royal Headache EP was released. It was an immediate success. That record actually generated buzz around it. Kitchen’s Floor and Bed Wettin' Bad Boys had sold well but they didn’t have that. It was the first record I’d released which felt like it drew in people who weren’t necessarily already interested in the DIY scene."
2010 would also see the release of LPs for Dead Farmers and ZOND, R.I.P. Society’s first vinyl LPs. Nic had become familiar with Dead Farmers having played on the same bill with them when in Onani. ZOND was R.I.P. Society’s first release for a band outside of Sydney and a project that, at times, Nic felt overawed by.
"[Dead Farmers] was my first attempt at a long-player. They were friends, people I’d met at gigs who also didn’t really have any scene that they fitted into and were looking for their place in the Sydney music landscape, which was kind of the same as Onani. So we felt like we had similar values. They did a 7" on Aarght and then I can’t really remember who asked who but I did the LP. It seemed like the obvious thing to do because we were at a similar level and place, that feeling of having to create our own path and if Aarght didn’t release their record there was no one else to do it, and of course I wanted to do it. They were one of those inspiring and empowering groups.""[Zond] were the first Melbourne band I had released and were people who had a track record of being in really good bands and doing good releases. I think Stained Circles had wanted to do the record but that was at the point when they weren’t really able to operate any more. I was asked if I could handle it and was thinking 'This is too big for me.' They were one of the most impressive bands I’d ever seen. The idea of releasing their record was mental. I was thinking 'Shouldn’t this be in the hands of someone bigger and better?' But at that point, in Australia, there was no one more appropriate to do that record and it worked. They ended up being submitted to Lou Reed for Vivid’s noise night. He really liked them and they ended up playing the Opera House. It was really strange releasing a record for people that were older than me and had been around music much longer. Did I have the knowhow to do this? I think that was also the point I realised that people interested in that tradition of DIY music were starting to look towards the label as a sort of stamp of approval, kind of in the same way I thought about overseas labels like Siltbreeze."
Late 2010 and early 2011 saw a flurry of 7" singles, including debut releases for Boomgates and Bitch Prefect, as well as a second Circle Pit single. Nic had developed a love for breaking ground with new and relatively unknown acts, pressing records with a view to long-term success knowing that they were likely to sell gradually. As R.I.P Society developed a clear identity, Nic found himself being selective about the acts he wanted to release.
"By now I had this gut instinct where I knew I could do something and it would work. Boomgates and Bitch Prefect were both really new bands and I thought they had all the signifiers of being something that would resonate with people. The Bitch Prefect record only sold out about two months before their LP came out and I bet they sold just as many copies of the LP within a couple of months of its release. But that was something I loved, doing the groundwork and developing links between communities in the Australian music underground. I had started getting approached by bands I really liked to release records for them, but I felt it wasn’t really appropriate for me to be releasing records for these kind of guitar-rock supergroups. I liked being there for newish bands and things that didn’t have another home. I felt like those other bands could be released somewhere else and so it didn’t interest me as much."
Nic’s next record was an LP for Perth band Golden Staph. While Nic again considered it important music, the band’s geographical isolation and their pre-planned split meant the record it didn’t travel as far.
"Golden Staph didn’t have as much reach as some of the other bands I’d released. At the time of the release they weren’t really a band any more and had put together the record because they knew that members were moving overseas and they wanted to create a statement. I think also being on the East Coast really helped with reach and they were from Perth. Most R.I.P. Society bands would go to other towns and play with bands with a similar mentality. There would be conversation and things would spread by word of mouth. But when you’re not playing shows it’s really hard to get stuff to spread. That whole network between Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, and if you were lucky Newcastle and Canberra, was just building at the time and part of the reason records sold were because bands were part of founding, building or even rebuilding that network. Golden Staph weren’t in that dialogue because of where they were as a band both in terms of development and geography. But again, I felt like it was something that deserved to be released."
2011 also saw R.I.P. Society release Naked on the Vague's last-ever record, a 7" single for their American tour. NOTV founders Matt Barking Hopkins and Lucy Cliche would later form Half High, whom R.I.P. Society would also release. They were also key, during Nic’s formative period, to giving him the courage to start the label.
"There’re a bunch of people that are in multiple bands that are on R.I.P. Society. I like people who are multifaceted and have several creative outlets, whether at different points in the musical lifespans or at the same time. I released Naked on the Vague’s final release, and later I did the Half High LP for them as well. I really love what Matt and Lucy do, irrespective of form. They’re incredibly easy to deal with and incredibly diligent. If people think of me as someone in Sydney who can link different musical communities, Matt and Lucy are the same. Before I even started they were doing that kind of stuff and they were some of the people who made me feel empowered and as if I could do a record label."
Late 2011 saw the successful release of Woollen Kits' Maths and Bed Wettin' Bad Boys' Nobody Else 7"s. But both were ultimately overshadowed by Royal Headache’s self-titled LP. Royal Headache caught the interest of the wider music community, something Nic had hoped would bring attention to other facets of the DIY scene.
"The singles came out just before and they both did relatively well. By that time we had an established relationship with [US DIY distributor] Easter Bilby and were able to get them into stores.
"The Royal Headache record came out at the latest possible point. I got the master just in time to fit in a Sydney launch show before we went on the first American tour, which was them playing Goner Fest. There was a lot of interest in all three releases but Royal Headache obviously went far beyond the others. There was a lot of build-up and the experience was unlike any other record I’ve ever done. There was a feeling that everyone wanted to be a part of the happening thing. Royal Headache actually had a singer who could sing and they were an exceptional band. I think they accidentally stumbled upon a time when garage rock was becoming this cool, emerging commodity. I feel that if it was released three years earlier, no one would have really cared. Well, people would have cared, but not the music industry or the cling-ons."
"They were definitely the most popular band I’ve ever released, with the most commercial potential. But what was funny about the experience with Royal Headache, whether with the EP or the album, was that there was only a small percentage of people that it seemed to introduce to the idea of the music underground. They were the door into that world for those people to explore the extended R.I.P. Society catalogue and things that went beyond that. But then there was a much larger percentage of people that only wanted to know about the 'happening' thing. It’s like now you’ll see people who come in to a record store and buy a Total Control record after it’s been validated by the media."
"That’s the type of audience that Royal Headache had. It was hard for me to grasp why that attention didn’t spill on. I was asking, 'Why has this band not changed people’s ideas about what they look for and where they look for it?' For me, more people could have used that opportunity to listen to something much more real and pure. It hadn’t opened the floodgates to this world of music that was available to them as the likes of the Stooges and The Saints did for me. That was the type of experience I had hoped people would’ve had listening to Royal Headache. Some did, but most didn’t."
Still riding on the success of Royal Headache’s LP, Nic started 2012 with the release of Woollen Kits' self-titled LP. It was the first of two albums the band would release on R.I.P. Society that year, with Four Girls released late in the year.
"The first one came out in January and the second in December. They were recorded a little over a year apart. The thing was that with the first Woollen Kits LP, the songs were quite old by the time it was released. If you listen to those records, both of which I love, you can hear how much they’ve grown in that period between. I was fine with doing two Woollen Kits records in one year. They just had this period of hyperactivity and a backlog of songs. Four Girls probably wasn’t meant to be finished so quickly; it just was."
Next was the release of Constant Mongrel’s debut LP Everything Goes Wrong, on which R.I.P. Society collaborated with American label 80/81 Records. The record was a departure from the recent flurry of joyful garage rock releases in Australia.
"I didn’t even know [Constant Mongrel] were making a record. I didn’t particularly like the band and I wouldn’t have asked them. I thought they were fine, but the time that I’d seen them and the tape that I had didn’t have the purpose the LP did. The American label that was doing the release asked me to come on board and by that time I’d heard one or two of the tracks and thought they were incredible. It wasn’t the same band. I think in part that came from Tom [Ridgewell] becoming dissatisfied with a lot of the cheery garage rock that was coming out. I think that was what turned that band. I could relate to it because I was feeling that burn as well. I loved all the bands I’d released and lots of other bands in that genre, but once garage rock became a thing that you could do to gain status in social circles, or to make it in the music community, you started to notice. The bands that did it for those reasons just seemed a bit half-baked."
With a gap in release schedule, Nic found time to release Ruined Fortune’s first single Bulls Eye. Having pulled together the act for a live show, he and Angie Bermuda, whom he had played with in Circle Pit, decided to continue with their project as more recording-oriented pursuit.
"Angie is one of my best friends. We always shared music and ideas. [Ruined Fortune] came together rather flippantly. I hadn’t ever imagined playing music with Angie again, and I think it was the same for her with me. She was asked to play a Circle Pit show, and they weren’t really active at the time. So she made up some story about having a new project going. We got together and completed four songs to play that show. We didn’t play after that for a long time, but we really liked the songs and eventually decided to do a recording oriented project. Then there was a gap in the release schedule and I thought I might as well release it. I find it funny that no one has really questioned me releasing my own bands so much. In a way, I guess I used myself as a guinea pig."
R.I.P. Society continued to refuse to be pigeonholed as a garage rock label with its next release, Holy Balm’s It’s You LP. Nic thought that this was an unreasonable view for people to take, especially considering a number of the label’s early releases.
"I just distributed [Holy Balm’s] record on vinyl and did a CD pressing for them. Holy Balm played one of the early Onani shows and they were completely different. They were two half-drunk kids, a bass drum with a drum stick, some effects pedals and a harmonica with a contact mic. It was definitely informed by no wave and that idea that you could be completely naive or unskilled and that was better than being in a rock band. Amateurism was celebrated and embraced and anyone who dared to play traditional rock 'n' roll was a bit strange as was anyone into the dance-punk take-over that was going on."
"When I first saw Holy Balm there wasn’t a synthesiser in sight. They just seemed to exist for years before they morphed into the live dance band that they now are, but to me they always had the same atmosphere and spirit. It was very different to anything I’d released up to that point but not different to anything I was listening to. I always thought it was funny that people saw R.I.P. Society as a garage rock label when one of our first releases was Lakes. Even Kitchen’s Floor, while being a guitar band, were total outsider basement rock. They weren’t jangly pop. 2012 signified to me that people wanted more diversity. As soon as a scene was pegged as a scene people were thinking, 'this is not interesting.' The idea of the Australian garage [scene] was a bit of a forced construct. It was just a bunch of isolated people that started playing in amateurish rock bands. If you look at the crossover of bands on the R.I.P. Society roster, and other bands they play in and other things they do, they aren’t one-dimensional people. For example, Tom Ridgewell. The agenda, atmosphere and goals of Woollen Kits and Constant Mongrel are completely different."
The end of 2012 marked the first acknowledgement of an R.I.P. Society artist by the wider music community with the Royal Headache LP winning Best Independent Release at the annual AIR Awards. The music industry had taken notice, to an extent. However, for many the most notable incident of the 2012 AIR Awards was Nic’s infamous "not independent" comment, made whilst Lanie Lane was presented the award for Best Independent Blues and Roots Album.
"The bigger independent music industry was starting to see the label as a representative of an authentic ideology. They looked at the label as this thing that existed. They liked what it represented, in a way, but they didn’t ever really want to engage with any of that filthy product. I think the music industry probably realises that this is a different thing and that we have a different set of values, that the bands are a bit more scrutinous of the manner in which the established music industry operates."
"[The AIR Awards] was probably the first time that I’d ever been in the depths of the actual music industry. So being in this room, it felt like everyone who was there knew what they were looking at was rubbish, but no one was willing to say it. The stuff that these people had created was the kind of stuff that would be embarrassing five years later. I had always felt like the music communities I had been involved in had shaped people’s views on the world, and even sometimes their ethics, in a very positive way and I didn’t think that any of the music on display did that and instead it really pushed towards this consumerist, fashion-orientated agenda."
"I felt like I was in this room of people that I could not relate to in any manner and it made me feel simultaneously baffled, amused and angry. It just made me want to be a brat. I have no disrespect for AIR as an organisation and they do a lot of good work, as do APRA and MusicNSW. I think a lot of those institutions are the only real help people in independent bands have. When music becomes more than something you only do a couple of days a week and it starts consuming your life, even if you don’t want it to, these institutions can really help you out. I don’t have anything against them."
The beginning of 2013 saw the release of Bed Wettin' Bad Boys' Ready for Boredom LP. It was their first widely recognised and acclaimed work, and one of few R.I.P. Society records that had received extensive coverage in the media. The band had developed considerably in the time since the release of their singles, taking a more introspective approach to songwriting.
"The record came out in January 2013 to much more interested and acclaim than I had expected. I think people thought, 'Well, they aren’t going to quit or change what they do. We might have to accept them.' A lot of being recognised is perseverance. I think that was the case with us. We just kept on doing what we did as long as we were – I don’t know if 'good' is the word. Because we released it in January, and there wasn’t much competition, there were a few places that wouldn’t usually run reviews that ran them. All those initial reviews were incredibly positive. They gave this impression that we were like the soundtrack to some subculture. It was quite strange because none of the older Bed Wettin' Bad Boys records had ever got that. For so many people we had been that really annoying band that they wished would go away."
"It was kind of satisfying being that band. Between the singles and the album I realised I wasn’t a very good punk. The music that we wrote together wasn’t in your face or nasty. The better music we wrote was more introspective. I think that’s what saved us from being a retro-genre band. The title of the album, Ready for Boredom, was a reaction against the tiresomeness of the party-dude rock band."
Single releases for Raw Prawn and Housewives followed – prompted, like Constant Mongrel’s debut, by the continuing flow of cheerful garage rock that was flooding the music industry and local scene.
"Housewives and Raw Prawn were that feeling of negativity that was going on in Sydney at the time. Maybe a bit of a reaction to the emergence of yet more fun garage rock bands that didn’t really have any real perspective or that DIY aspect about them. The kind of people who would have been playing in a Daft Punk type group a few years ago were now starting garage rock bands."
R.I.P. Society’s catalogue continued to diversify, releasing the third album from The Native Cats, Dallas. Nic had been taken by their unique aesthetic, something he found hard to get his head around at first. Again he chose to release the band, knowing that they were relatively unknown within Australia, but with the hope of again bringing important new music to a wider audience.
"I feel like Native Cats are not in the lineage of any sort of pop music dialogue. There’s certain stereotypes: the brooding sad man, the bunch of party dudes, the junkie, the smooth dapper guy or the fashionable, serious type. I liked that Native Cats didn’t fit into any template of a contemporary group. Most people don’t really know what to make of them. I have to admit, I wasn’t able to comprehend Native Cats when I first heard them, it really did take a while. I felt like this was a band that had two records released overseas and no one really knew about them here except in Melbourne. So I was really glad to have people interested in them."
He would also assist with the release of Constant Mongrel’s second album, Heavy Breathing. His role was smaller this time, and whilst Nic felt the record didn’t have as much impact in Australia as their debut, its quality was undeniable.
"[Heavy Breathing] was a Siltbreeze release really. I only did the distribution in Australia and a CD that nobody bought. I didn’t feel as much a part of the second album. It didn’t feel as present in Australia, but anyone that heard it thought that it was great – as good as the first one if not better. I think that band is so dark and unique in their own way. The lyrical themes, the way they write songs, it feels so classic but also extremely strange and intuitive. It’s such a warped universe. There’s definitely some really weird stuff going on in that band. They all have an unforced agenda of strangeness."
Closing out 2013 were the releases of Half High’s Suspension LP, Love Chants' second self-titled EP and Red Red Krovvy’s debut single. Half High and Love Chants broke new ground for R.I.P. Society, however the timing of their release proved inconvenient, with Nic preoccupied in his role as a director of the Sound Summit festival.
"Half High, Love Chants and Red Red Krovvy all came out around the time of Sound Summit. It was a really overwhelming time and it was really bad timing when the records turned up. Half High was a reissue of a cassette and a CD that was made and Love Chants was their second EP that had a very similar cover to their first, which led to some confusion. Both of those records were really different ground for the label to be exploring. A lot of people in Europe bought those two records."
Over its five years, R.I.P. Society has released a wide variety of new music, with a constant urge to break new acts. Nic has constantly had the courage to release music that may not seem to have a place in the current environment, but that will empower other bands and artists that are similarly different. Coming into the Sydney music scene as an experimentalist with an anti-authoritarian attitude, Nic has now found a renewed appreciation for traditional songwriting.
"I think a lot of the music I’ve released has instigated a shift, a necessary urge or a change in priorities, moving against one thing or another. It’s not a conscious thing, it’s just people have these desires to explore different territories and often you find that there’s a lot of other people around that are willing to go into that world as well. When I first started going to see music in Sydney, it was predominantly free-form and rejected traditional band structures and now you see this return to wanting to hear a traditional song. I think for me it was reassessing those teenage values that experimentation, extremity and anti-authoritarianism were the only pathway to follow with music."
"There was a definite reassessing of values that made me want to put out 7" singles for rock bands. I had been so engaged in experimental music and got a little burnt out by it. I started feeling some of it was cheap and people were using it as an outlet to get somewhere. I thought that it was silly to only have this agenda of extremity; say, to think that a band that sounds like Shellac is so much more forward-thinking that a band that sounds like the Ramones. I just don’t think that’s true. For me I think underground rock 'n' roll not being present at that time and place in musical history made bands subconsciously feel they needed to make the music that was missing in that timeframe. I feel like now there’s a longing for something more, now that some of these other ideas have been exhausted."
While R.I.P. Society has grown and cemented itself as a reference point in DIY circles, Nic is skeptical of the view that the Australian DIY scene is a healthier place than when he first started releasing records. With many key underground institutions – including some Nic felt a strong camaraderie with – forced to cease operation, it is an uncertain landscape that he believes does not bode well for new independent labels trying to establish themselves.
"I don’t really know whether [the DIY scene] is stronger or weaker than a few years ago really. I feel like I’ve lost a few staples, things like Stained Circles no longer being a label anymore. I felt a real allegiance with Negative Guest List. I felt like they had a similar agenda to mine and so did Nihilistic Orbs, although they dealt with things that were arguably more marginal and underground than R.I.P. Society. We’re a little more pop-orientated, but I felt like we were more at home among those labels. It’s cool to see Bedroom Suck still existing because I feel like we began operating around the same time and it’s cool to see things like Chapter Music. I wouldn’t consider us to be contemporaries but there are definitely similarities in our agendas."
"It does feel, though, like there are a few less well-known authorities that can give bands a leg up into this world – I would hope that I could be a linking point between Chapter and smaller things going on now like Major Crimes, Albert’s Basement or Heinous Anus. I do feel sorry for small labels trying to start up now just because of the global climate and people having that ADHD, internet-stream, BuzzFeed attention span these days."
With R.I.P. Society having become somewhat of an institution itself, Nic’s hope is that he has in some way assisted to bring people’s attention to the wider DIY music scene. For him, listening to an R.I.P. Society record should not be solely a listening experience, but rather an opportunity to view a new world of musical values.
"If I’ve provided an in to DIY music culture and helped people reassess the values of what they think is important in music, maybe getting away from the stagnant ideas of musicianship and professionalism – not that either of those things are always bad – or away from that idea of progress being the main avenue to explore in music. If I can do that, then that’s really good. But when people look at the label and see it solely as a garage rock revival, as some fleeting scene as opposed to people who are cultural voyeurs, that’s kind of disappointing. And that’s because the thing that I’ve always tried to promote is people engaging with music and music cultures on a more personal level and on a more pure human level."
"I hope that the record label and connecting the dots between some of the bands that are on it and where they fit into the wider scope of underground music history can give people more of an appreciation of music. The right way to listen to music, I feel, is – 'This band is doing this now. How did this come to be? What other music is there in this tradition?' I hope when people get into the label, they look at it in that manner."