Label spotlight: Eggy Records
Eggy Records (and Eggy Distribution) is the brainchild of Portlander, Raf Spielman. He is perhaps best known as the guy behind the excellent project, The Polyps, and also as an integral member of one of the most underrated pop bands around, The Golden Hours. Yet it is with the tapes and 7”s he’s been quietly releasing on Eggy that he’s really making a name for himself. All the releases are packaged in beautifully silkscreened sleeves (all designed by Spielman – his work is instantly recognizable). The music generally has a bit of a pop-bend, but is always interesting in other ways as well. If he could, he’d eat spaghetti every day and he has a book of drawings coming out through Container Corps (which I’m damn excited about). I highly recommend heading on over to Eggy and seeing all the goodies Spielman has to offer.
I started the label because it felt like the most natural thing to do. There are a handful of great, small labels in Portland but no real pillar of the community, and I think there are a lot of us working to try to fill that void. It's also nice to keep Portland in the bigger discussion of fringe music, to be importing interesting music from other places and exporting the best of the local crop.
I wish I had a good one! I knew I wanted something that wasn't a reference and that wouldn't sound dated in year or two. I also wanted something short. I'm not sure how "Eggy" came out of all that but it's served me pretty well. Sometimes I worry that it's too silly but too silly is better than too serious, I would say.
A big motivator is the community. It's really a thrill to feel like a part of the great big ball of small label energy and creativity. It's also nice to fantasize about the kind of projects I would undertake if I had the funds or the clout. Someone should really press Alastair Galbraith's records up on vinyl, for example. Laurie Spiegel's "The Expanding Universe" really, really needs to be reissued.
I've had a whole lot of trouble finding regular distribution, I think a lot of the normal channels are pretty saturated at this point. Slowly but surely the tapes move, though. I'm wondering, too, if or at what point I'm going to have to engage with the digital world in a more serious way, which will be a challenge, both the logistics and also in terms of maintaining good energy and a sense of community.
I mentioned Alastair GaIbraith already, "Mirrorwork" and "Talisman" are pretty important records for me and he continues to do interesting work, so that would be a dream. I would love to work with Pierre Bastien. Going 180 degrees, I'm actually a pretty big Lindstrom fan; that would be a thrill!
Some of my favorite releases on Eggy have come out of the blue. So I'm all ears.
In the very near future, two tapes from opposite ends of the pop spectrum. EarthMasters is a mysterious fellow named George who lives in Brooklyn; really woozy, sea-sick stuff, but then it'll suddenly have this weird, catchy British vibe. This'll be his first tape and I think it's really gonna turn some heads. And Orca Team do a kind of early 60s, surf-leaning, pre-Beatles pop and they just keep getting better and better.
Graham Lambkin's "Softly Softly Copy Copy." I think this record was particularly huge for me both because I missed Salmon Run and because I'd never come across an audio collage record that was so easy to listen to. The logic holding it together is so intuitive. It's exciting, too, because I get the feeling that we're going to hear a lot of records in the next year or so that take the ideas on this record and run with them. I also want to shout out the Operative 12", in terms a great record forshadowing what the world will sound like in the next couple years.
Small ambitions, small rewards.
-- Brad Rose (4 August, 2010)
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