7-28-04

drama: I am on a street corner somewhere near the heart of the los angeles metroplex. My cell phone rings and I pick it up to hear, “Is this Alex?” Certainly it was I. “Yeah, I think we spoke through emails last week and we were wondering if we could somehow make you an offer for your label,” he says.

Moscow Sunday – a band on the steps of ubiquity; Print – a band on the brink of creation? Conceived at a high school lunch table, the dream is that you can be a part of the machinery of music – close enough to the instruments that you seem to have some control over the sound and far enough from A&R head of Capitol Records Loren Israel, who is at the back of the room, that you can keep some of your sanity.

“Oedipus” sounds like a good name for a record label. And it is. It’s very… clever. Cleverness is often held against you, though.

Three days ago I received a voice message from someone claiming to own a record label, a developing one that hasn’t put out any big releases yet. He stumbled upon us, so he says.

Portrait of Henry Titmus as a cellist: The young man shared an outlet on the four-track with a drum machine. Constant experimentation is what we prided ourselves on, and it consumed a good amount of our time in what was formally a library, but I would liken more to a renegade recording studio with books. There were the classics: dickens, camus, an improbable count of Hitler biographies more prominent than they should have been.

We have our sanctuary – which is not to be confused with a business office. We dreamt in color and sound; we acted in complicated excess both. This was on permanent display during both tours and casual conversations.

Painting a picture of the greater Los Angeles music scene: The scene kids from each respective city hated each other. Newberry Park hardcore constantly clashed with the much more liberal sfv hardcore. I don’t know what the fucking fuss was about; ten months ago they were all listening to watered down pop punk. As bad as the taste was, it was your first of something independent and moving on from mainstream radio was like moving out of your parents’ house.

So much image is so easy to get caught up in. It was like a right of passage. There is a point where music is so secondary to image that some begin to listen to bands simply to maintain the sub-elitist society that the radio wouldn’t dare peddle to its jetta drivers. But that’s how it is with any scene.

The kids who inhabit the local venues? They revert to a fashion forty years their elder, born from a revolution that waited hundreds of years to take place. They convolute music and the mythology that follows it around. The mod culture soundtrack is spun by peers but is delivered, essentially, by people who might as well be lepers. //The most amiable hardcore venue north of Sunset was a dojo in Thousand Oaks. Kung Fu Corner.\\

Image is nice to have but not pleasant to earn. For these guys walking around as the owners of Oedipus Records in present day, touting such bands as Xiu Xiu, who Pitchfork Media reviews as “challenging not because it's particularly dissonant or noisy, but rather because it addresses you in a manner that's categorically different from what you've come to expect from any kind of music-- pop, experimental or otherwise,” the dream isn’t just bought and sold. If it was, they would be musing on their childhoods and book-ending it with correspondence with me.

And a year later I am listening to a Xiu Xiu seven-inch that I had to buy off a website whose largest collective audience was once a sixth period journalism class. This is where you almost lose it. What could we have done? Who could we have told people we were years later? One day you think, “Were these kids just ambitious young music lovers who thought it would be a good quick fix to get their own band started?” But at some point the next day you realize, I already wrote a similar recount.

If there is one lesson to be learned from all this, it is that music, for some reason or another, doesn’t seem to stand on its own in enough circles. It can. It does somewhere. But in most cases it is only in places where people have been immersed enough merely to observe, but not embrace entirely, all the overdetermined influences that attach themselves to, but really have nothing to do with, the music itself. The scene is an end in itself. Business and the hierarchies that influence so much of what we hear in the end, but would never know, are similar phenomena. Unlimited potential is in escaping these influences, I suppose – just listening and not looking.

drama: I am on a street corner somewhere near the heart of the los angeles metroplex. My cell phone rings and I pick it up to hear, “Is this Alex?” Certainly it was I. “Yeah, I think we spoke through emails last week and we were wondering if we could somehow buy your label from you.” I guess at some point in the interval of about three seconds between his question and my response, I concluded that it would be easier to sell it to him than to try to keep making something of it myself. One day I was a clever genius in my mind. Today I am a clever genius. As much as I hate watching my own experiences reinforce the underpinnings capitalism, what am I to do? I suppose that is just as up in the air as tomorrow’s fashion – which really isn’t up in the air at all.

Alex Knowles