If you are like me, most holidays hold nothing but the annoyance of consumer companies constantly throwing annoying reminders and vapid icons in your face. However, there are a few exceptions, one of them being the xmas for music nerds that is Record Store Day. Not a real holiday you say? Well I’d beg to differ, but that’s a different topic for a different time. What is important here is to note that each year there are special releases to coincide with this day. And this year’s Record Store Day held one, and only one, precious jewel for me: the Radio Galaxia compilation put out by B-Music.
Allow me to believe the fantasy that every music nerd evolved the way I did. In the mid to late nineties, we stumbled across Capital Record’s genius idea to re-release damn near their entire back catalogue as the “Ultra Lounge” series. After being eternally hypnotized by everything from the rat pack to Louis Prima (before that horrific, swing revival/long winded Levi’s commercial), to swinging French pop, and finally off to the islands of Martin Denny and Yma Sumac. We rode the waves until we washed up on those same said latter shores, and our eyes were finally open. We were deep in the jungles of Exotica, joining in anglo-faux tribal rituals with Les Baxter, Arthur Lyman, Eden Ahbez, and a whole quiet village more.
Then, somewhere in the middle of the last decade, (and by that I mean 2000-2009), we tried to dig deeper and deeper until we found the hidden cave of Library Music. After plundering treasure coves of bizarre BBC background sounds and the similar like, around the globe, all bets were off. We could not tear ourselves away from the generically quaint, obscure, bizarre, and forgotten sounds from disparate nooks and crannies.
I’d like to imagine that Andy Votel tread the same path, but I’m willing to bet that this may not be the case for the UK DJ veteran. As well as being a Dj and a producer, Votel has also had a hand in large retrospective events that have included the music of Serge Gainsbourg and Jean-Claude Vannier and included guests such as Jarvis Cocker and Badly Drawn Boy.
But it is his shared interest with obscure and outsider music fans, under the B-Music collective and record label, that follows in tandem with Finder’s Keepers, Twisted Nerve, Bird, Battered Ornaments, and a host of other sub/labels, that interests me the most.
I stumbled across B-Music when I was blown away by what easily made my best records of the year for ’09, Vampires of Dartmoore, “Dracula’s Musical Cabinet. It was an amazing slab of bizarre, lounge, Krautrock, muzak, that turned out to be a fake soundtrack for a vampire movie that never existed, but was, in reality, the 1969 mutant offspring of German studio musicians, Horst Ackermann and Heribert Thusek. After discovering an entire label dedicated to finding these sounds and either giving them a fitting re-release, or reimagining them in mixtapes,I felt as though I’d re-connect with lost family members.
I must admit that B-Music/Finder’s Keepers is light years ahead of me in their depth of knowledge and understanding of these yetis of sound. A quick perusal through their discography reveals Pakistani, Lollywood albums, a London based, singer songwriter album by Emma Tricca, compilations of the 9 plus identities of 60’s-today French music genius, Jean-Pierre Massiera, Turkish Anadolu Pop albums, the soundtrack to the Czech New Wave film Daisies, and this is just scratching the surface in a mesmerizing world that literally looks as though it were created by spinning one wheel with every country on the globe, another wheel with every genre ever conceived, and then putting the results out on an LP. Beyond all of this, are the mixtapes that take all of these sounds, and craft the most beautiful aural frankensteins that the recent world has known.
B-Music, beyond re-earthing forgotten classics, has their finger in similarly gened, contemporary artist such as Twinkranes, Jane Weaver, or even the Faust-esque, Samandtheplants. Really, it just proves they are master curators of everything they touch, and they know their subjects like a surgeon.
Beyond the Deep house, ghettoteck, Baltimore house, and Euro-inspired dance jams of Mad Decent, and iheartcomix, the mad wizards of the B-Music DJ mixes run gleefully in the opposite direction, melding together quirky, funky analogue beats, with strange exploitation guitar rhythms, hypnotic Turkish bass lines, celestial library synth chords, and a host of b-rated film and tv samples. It’s a deeper more primitive dimension that Dj’s and producers like The Gaslamp Killer, Dom Thomas, Anagram Jam, and even Andy Votel himself are grappling with here. And while I love the average DJ night in the DMV as much as anyone else who has their hands up yet thumbs down, I would take a double jump for an opportunity to float off into an evening of these deeps and odd grooves.
B-Music/Finder’s Keepers show no sign of slowing down, and will certainly never be at a loss for content to put out. Their imprints continue to multiply like untended rabbits, from the Krautrock, Germanic Miner, to the Pakistani, Sounds of Wonder, to the library, Disposable Music, to the Parisian, No No Years, or even the Arabesque, Anatolian Invasion series. Beyond being one of the most interesting record conglomerates/labels, B-Music is also one of the more important, and they definitely have the market cornered in their chosen subject matter. With one foot resting firmly in both the UK and the US, this vanguard label is even closer to our French fry grease covered fingers. As their bizarre empire grows I, for one, plan on being there every step of the way.
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