This looks and sounds great! The video looks good too; did you guys coordinate that, or the artist?
What kind of formats you putting out? Website?
Thanks man. Basically I had no artistic input whatsoever. We wanted to start a label, we have no experience or anything like that, you could almost say that we don't really know what it even means beyond that we pick music that we like and somehow make it available to people and when people get it, they understand that it has something to do with us cos it has our logo and name on it.
So.... we were here, we wanted to start something and I guess we thought that we needed to find some music that we loved and which wouldn't otherwise come out, and it seemed as though the first place would be amongst our friends and so on, so we kinda always had our ear to the ground - we didn't want to force it, we didn't have any idea like "we must release something by x time" we just wanted to find something we liked and then get it out. Now as it happened, when I was in the UK a load of our friends (including a guy who became my flatmate for a long time) called [Actually leave his name - let's just call him Billy for the moment] were in a band called Fat White Family. Now this band have now become quite famous and over the years they have had quite a large number of personnel. One time just before Billy moved in with us we went round to his house and bumped into their bass player at the time who was also ringing the doorbell - directly from the Letterman Show back to Billy's horrible junkie flat in Hackney must have been quite a come-down but there you go.
Anyway, got chatting to Taishi - I'd actually known him a little for a while before that (he was in a band called They Came From The Stars I Saw Them with Horton Jupiter if you know him and also his own band called Cosmik Onion Field or something) and always thought he was a nice guy, but on that occasion Liza met him too and they stayed in touch basically.
Long story short, like virtually everyone who comes into the orbit of Fat White Family, Taishi was quickly chewed up and spat out - he was soon out of the band and shortly after that he moved to Berlin. But luckily Liza (particularly) stayed in touch with him and while emailing he sent her a load of songs he'd recorded and that he wished he could get released. We heard the songs - we thought they were great, and that was just exactly what we were looking for of course.
So, a perfect mix - a band with great songs and no way to put them out, a nascent label wanting to put something out but lacking any great songs.
So we spoke to him and agreed to do it, and then I asked for help and advice from loads of people that I knew who run or have run or worked for labels or whatever. One guy put me in touch with a bloke to master them in Denmark, another recommended someone to cut the record and so on.
And really, all I did was put Taishi in touch with he guy who mastered them and just kinda stood back. In fact to me it's really important that I DIDN'T get involved at that point (
@woops will know what I'm talking about here but I've seen loads of people taking the label boss or publisher role but then suddenly half-way through trying to exert artistic control by saying "I hate that song take it off the album or I'm not paying for it" and so on), the mastering guy was brilliant, there was a long back and forth between Taishi and him in which he would keep asking for a minor tweak here or there and then he would change it a bit and then Taishi would listesn and make anther change and so on and so forth. Until it sounded as close to how Taishi wanted it to sound as he could possibly get it.
So eventually the files that were mastered to the best of our ability (but again I stress, I did nothing except pay for this to be done). Next step, I spoke to the guy who cuts them and, although he is based in Nottingham, he cuts them in Poland to avoid VAT or something. Whatever, anyway, after a load more work such as making the design for the cover and so on (Taishi came up with it and got itt shot by a girl we both know in Berlin) and he also really wanted the obi strip - you know what I mean, the thing down the side with Japanese writing on it that can be slid off. He was adamant that he wanted that to get the feel old Japanese imports.
After that he wanted a pull out with the lyrics in Japanese and, in fact, the nearest I came to artistic input was creating the English equivalent, in that he sent me the lyrics and a crude translation but I wrote them into sentences that made sense in English if you see what I mean.
So, yeah, I paid for the mastering, I paid for the cutting and for the guy to render the design that we sent him (which was made by Taishi and Britta in Berlin) as a front and back cover with a lyric pull out and obi strip. And this guy did all that and then sent us a big pile of records - a load to me to distribute from Portual and some for Taishi to distribute from Berlin.