terrorbird

Event, et al.

 


Carpark Records Meet Todd:myspace  home  
 
Give us the background on Carpark. How did the label come to be and what year did it start?

Carpark began in 1999 in New York City. I was living in the East Village and working at a record store, fresh out of media studies grad school. My new friends from the store and I decided to start doing a weekly experimental electronics DJ night. It was called "Invisible Cities". We began hosting live laptop shows because no one else in town was doing it. We were the first folks in town to host artists like Kit Clayton, Kid606, Cex, Hrvatski/Keith Fullerton Whitman, Marumari, Greg Davis, Safety Scissors, et.al. There was so much going on that we had a different artist every week for over a year!

Anyway I was hearing all this exciting new music that wasn't being released properly. Back then there were only a handful of tiny tiny US electronic labels. So i decided to start up a proper label for this burgeoning US talent. Hence Carpark was born. All the early Carpark artists were met through Invisible Cities.

Carpark. Paw Tracks. Acute. The labels are all related, so what exactly is the difference?

The only thing that brings these labels together is that they are run by me. Acute is run by Dan Selzer and myself. I do Paw Tracks with the spiritual guidance of the Animal Collective. And Carpark is just me. They've worked together in various ways over the years but i think they are all pretty distinct. Acute is strictly post-punk reissues. Paw Tracks is the label of the Animal Collective. Carpark is a label that started out in the electronic world but has recently been focusing on the regional scene since moving to the DC area last year. Expect a lot of action from Baltimore in the coming year!

I know you have a college radio background, at WNUR. What did you do there exactly, and what was your experience like? Also, how is college and non-commercial radio important to your label and the bands you work with?

I would not be where i am today without WNUR. I wouldn't be running a record label if i didn't work there. I wouldn't be getting married now without WNUR (my fiance was an outgoing music director at wnur when we met).

I DJed there for five years and was rock music director for two. My music director tenure was during the first indie boom of the early to mid nineties. I saw Nirvana play a week before "Nevermind" came out my freshman year of college. Pavement in 1992 when they had two drummers. Sophomore year i witnessed My Bloody Valentine and Dinosaur Jr. play on Valentine's Day in Chicago. Every label big and small was trying to cash in. We were overloaded with music.

WNUR was my second home at college. It was in a weird way our own little fraternity. It was here, in the pre-internet days, that i had my first experience with the music industry, receiving calls from people who do the same thing as Terrorbird: "College radio promoters". It was a lot less systematic then; CMJ came as a series of black and white pages with a color front page and a staple in the upper left corner. Every quarter i mailed a packet of our top 100 playlists to all the cool labels so they'd still send us records. I remember my very first promotions call was from some guy at Mercury calling about the first Radiohead record.

College radio is pretty much the only place on the dial you'll hear our music. There are lots of different places to hear new music now, but i think people will still listen to college radio for some time. Sometimes you just want to hear what someone else wants to hear.

Big fall for Carpark. Big CMJ show case as well as lots of new bands for you guys like Ecstatic Sunshine, Over the Atlantic, and Beach House. How did you come across these bands?

We moved to DC last fall. I've been spending a lot of time in Baltimore since then. There is an incredible scene there at the moment. A new band pops up every week. The living is cheap, the spaces are big, it's the ideal place for a musician to live. Why pay $1000 to live in a tiny bedroom in Brooklyn when you can pay $100 to live in a warehouse in Baltimore?

Beach House and Ecstatic Sunshine are from Baltimore. We have also planned digital releases from Baltimore's WZT Hearts and Lexie Mountain Boys. With more to come....

Over The Atlantic is Bevan Smith and Nik Brinkman from Wellington, New Zealand. I've released several records of Bevan's as Signer on Carpark. He sent me his new project with Nik, I thought it was great, it's out now on Carpark!

Digital only Carpark releases, very cool. How do you decide what is digital only or not, and do you see a lot of labels moving to doing these kinds of releases?

That's a tough question. There are lots of reasons to release something digital only. Our first digital release Montag "Goodbye Fear" EP was digital only because it was already released in Japan, and we just wanted to make it available to us Americans without spending all the money to press up cds etc.

The upcoming WZT Hearts and Lexie Mountain Boys digital-only releases have already received cd and lp releases on other labels. We thought it was necessary to make this music available digitally. These are artists you will hear more of.

Other reasons would be say we might have something we really like, but is a bit weird. A digital only release allows us to get it out there without the financial risk.
I hope digital really takes off in the next few years. It's ideal for a record label. Less inventory means a better run business, less waste (ie unpurchased product) and no risk of returns. Environmentally it would mean less use of our planet's resources (much of the cd package is petroleum-based). If everyone went digital, it would put record stores out of business, but it would also make our planet that much cleaner. Fingers crossed on this one.

What are other things you do to get the word out about Carpark?

I don't think we do anything too crazy. We'll use folks like yourselves for radio promotion. We have people who do press. Our distributor helps with retail promotion. I think all our band's fall tours will get the word out about the "new" Carpark. And of course Myspace.

Rad Todd. Thanks for your time. Last question. Is Ariel Pink crazy?

Ariel's crazy in the way you think your family is "crazy". If you sit down and talk with him he's a super sweet guy. Though like anyone he has his bad days. It's tough to be a perfectionist who makes music on a crappy 8 track.

I haven't talked to him since SXSW actually. He hasn't had a phone since then. He left his last phone in Mexico City when he went for a family wedding. But i still occasionally get emails from him. I look forward to working with him on his next record sometime in 2007.