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Double Negative Records! Terrorbird chats with Double Negative's own Shawn Reynaldo

Why did you decide to start Double Negative Records? Did your involvement at KALX have anything to do with the way you organize your label?

Double Negative Records was kind of started on a whim. After working in radio for a few years and being pretty involved in the Bay Area music scene, starting a label was an idea I had started to kick around but I didn't decide to actually do it until I saw the second-ever performance by Postcoitus in a friend's kitchen at an Oakland house party. The show was literally a blur of cheap synthy beats blaring out of a PA while Derek Wood screamed and danced around with a handheld strobelight. For some reason the show really inspired me and I contacted Derek a few days later and said that if he wanted to make an album I would start a record label and put it out. In the months that followed I began talking to other bands like The Death of a Party and started to get serious.

Initially the label was planned as an outlet to start releasing bands from the Oakland underground. At the time there was a pretty vibrant warehouse and house party scene in Oakland, largely because the whole dot-com boom had pushed a lot of artists and musicians out of San Francisco. As a DJ at KALX I was hearing a lot of these bands and going to a lot of local shows so I figured Double Negative could really help showcase the scene. Unfortunately within a couple years the dot-com bust had settled in and the Oakland music scene really quieted down. At that point I started to cast my net a little wider and hooked up with San Francisco bands like The Fucking Ocean.

Coming from a background in college (KALX) and commercial radio at Live 105, what do you think has been the most important role of radio in promoting artists on smaller labels? Does that fact that you've now had experience both on the radio and the label side of promotion affect how you operate?

Unfortunately, the power of radio has shrunk pretty dramatically since I first started at Live 105 in 1998. (I joined KALX a few months later in 1999.) During the past ten years the internet has taken off, commercial radio has become even more corporate and the whole downloading phenomenon has exploded. There used to be a time when college and specialty radio were true leading indicators of musical trends, but now it has become a very reactive medium. While radio can still break bands and college radio is thankfully still a sanctuary for underground artists, music freaks are now looking elsewhere (internet, blogs, myspace, etc.) to discover new sounds.

That said, I still do promote my releases to radio. Thankfully, my experience working in radio has taught me a lot about what not to do during a campaign. So many bands waste money and time on elaborate presskits and stupid tchotchkeys that are more likely to garner staff ridicule than actual airplay. The fact that bands still send glossy press photos continues to baffle and amaze me. I've learned to keep it simple and just send the CD along with a succinct one sheet that quickly spells out the basics. Furthermore, I've also realized that so many things have to happen for a release to be successful and radio is just one piece of the puzzle. Press coverage is essential and the artist needs to be playing shows and ideally touring.

Will Double Negative forever be a label for bay area artists?

Not necessarily. So far all the artists have been from the Bay Area but honestly I'm just looking to release good music.

It seems like Emily Jane White is the first artist to be signed to Double Negative who doesn't really align with the electro-dance and post-punk sound of the other artists on the label. How'd you decide to take her up on Double Negative?

Oddly enough, I heard about Emily Jane White through Battleship. You would never guess that because Battleship was such a crazy, noisy punk band, but apparently Aleks and Emily knew each other at UC Santa Cruz. A few months after I released the Battleship 7" To Give, Not a Gift, Aleks emailed me an mp3 of Emily's song "Wild Tigers I Have Known". I really liked it, but I didn't have a chance to meet her or check her out live because I was getting ready to move to Buenos Aires. Oddly enough, I was only able to communicate with her at length after I had moved down there. She sent me some more tracks, I really liked what I heard and eventually I asked her if she would like me to put out her record. Emily liked the idea of working with a smaller Bay Area label, so she said yes and we kept communicating via email and managed to get the album made despite the fact that I was living in Argentina. I never even spoke to her on the phone until this past November, and we only met in person in December. In retrospect it's kind of crazy, especially because the response to that album has been so good.

You've just recently started another label, Bersa Discos, with another Bay Area DJ, Oro 11. How'd you find each other in your year-long hiatus in Buenos Aires? What do you find the Bay Area influence doing for Buenos Aires music and cumbia?

Oddly enough I met Oro11 because of San Francisco band Lemonade. When I moved to Buenos Aires, I literally didn't know anyone there or much about the music scene, so I quickly started exploring and grabbing flyers to try and figure out what was happening down there. Oro11 was a name I saw listed a few times and some locals told me that he was from San Francisco, so I looked at his myspace page and saw that Lemonade was in his Top 8. I basically wrote them and said "who is this guy", they told me that he was their friend Gavin from SF State and that I should track him down. My girlfriend and I literally walked in unannounced to a gallery his girlfriend (now wife) was running at the time and basically said "Hi, we're from the Bay Area and we have friends in common, let's hang out." Thankfully it worked out and we all liked one another. In the months that followed we found ourselves DJing together, began trading music and eventually decided to start a label (Bersa Discos) to start releasing some of the experimental cumbia we had discovered.

As for the Bay Area influencing Buenos Aires and cumbia, the major influence that we're having is bringing these sounds to people who probably would have never heard them otherwise. The Buenos Aires scene that we are a part of largely consists of bedroom producers cutting up cumbia rhythms and mixing the music with hip hop, electronic music, dancehall, dub and all kinds of other sounds. Most of these guys don't have proper releases - the culture centers around burned CD-Rs and swapped mp3s. With Bersa Discos we're hoping to change that because there is some really amazing music happening.

What do you see for the near and distant future of Double Negative? Any exciting plans under way?

Honestly Double Negative isn't a big "plan ahead" kind of operation. I only release a few things a year because I'd rather promote quality than quantity. For now we're still waiting to see what's going to happen with Emily Jane White and Tempo No Tempo. Both of those releases did really well and 2008 should be a big year for them. There will definitely be more Double Negative releases, although right now I'm really focused on Bersa Discos. The first Bersa 12" will drop in February and hopefully we'll have new ones every few months for the foreseeable future. We're also doing a monthly party called Tormenta Tropical in San Francisco where we can expose these cumbia sounds to gringo dance floors.