Pretty on the Outside

The beastly beauty of local niche noise label Archive.

by Jakob Dorof

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Published: Apr 14, 2009

Michael T. Regan WHAT A RACKET: Scott Slimm has been recording and releasing music by obscure artists since 2004.

[ record label ]

"Are you hearing this shit?" asks Scott Slimm, turning to my friend and me. "It's fucking terrible. Isn't this scary bad?"

Currently blaring from his mammoth stereo system (the speakers of which look fresh off the Starship Enterprise) is a pristine bootleg Slimm just recorded at Johnny Brenda's a few nights ago, of the veteran Japanese hard-rock outfit Flower Travellin' Band. It certainly sounds like a train wreck, but Slimm swears that they put out a fantastic record in the early '70s — which he plays next, visibly deepening his disappointment.

"This one's a great jam," he grins during one of Hideki Ishima's searing sitarla solos. "And I couldn't even bear to stick around and see if they played it." Slimm walked out of the show after just five songs, a telling breach of conduct for a principled documentarian such as himself.

Had the band lived up to his expectations, the show might have been the next release on Archive Recordings — the prolific music label Slimm founded in 2004, when he discovered that Japanese noise guitarist Keiji Haino had recently subjected a Tokyo university theater to an aural assault that lasted seven maddening, uninterrupted hours.

"I felt like I had to do something to honor such a feat," Slimm says. So he teamed up with Anthony Vogdes from Tequila Sunrise Records to produce an extravagant six-disc CD set documenting the event, encased by chipboard boxes wrapped in black-on-black bookbinding fabric — made by hand, one by one.

"The intent was to make just 20 copies," he recalls. "We wound up calling it quits after six."

Since then, Slimm has taken the label more and more seriously with every step. Almost all of the 40-odd releases on Archive — spanning everything from dirty psych rock by Philly locals to import Asian synth duels and freak-outs — have been culled from the constantly expanding universe that is Slimm's collection of live recordings. Ever since buying his first MiniDisc recorder in 1997, he has personally bootlegged and amassed well over 2,000 hours of audio — some spread across winding bookshelves, others buried deep in external hard drives that sit like the undeveloped film canisters of a pro photographer. It's understandable, then, that he views Archive as a Philly-based operation despite its Cherry Hill basement reality: The man goes to fringe music shows in this city like the Bible Belt goes to church.

"My preference is to keep it homegrown, what I do, my niche," he explains. "If someone makes a record in a studio, there's already thousands of labels that release that kind of thing. Archive is more my little snapshot."

Granted, the big picture produced by Slimm's "little snapshot" is pretty big. Some highlights include a brilliant live DVD of the spare and haunting pop seamstress Ai Aso playing a cathartic set in her native Tokyo, a psychedelic double-disc collaboration between Japan's LSD March and Philly's own Bardo Pond that Slimm helped bring together at the Lemur House studio in 2006, and a 40-minute washout by a 20-piece Japanese sitar orchestra called Sitaar Tah! Aside from the elegant artwork and beautiful packaging that always wraps the music, the only common thread between releases is their obscurity: Even the biggest names Slimm's worked with, such as drone legends Sunn O))) and Earth, are hardly known outside the small realm of obsessive rock critics and subgenre specialists.

And while Archive runs are limited accordingly at an average of 500 units per release, even that can seem ambitious when the music in question is by, say, a Chinese noise guitarist who nobody's heard of even in China. But according to Slimm, releasing lavishly produced CDs of largely freeform music by subunderground bands hasn't been the monetary black hole you might expect it to be.

"I like keeping the runs small, so I don't get hung up on trying to move thousands of CDs at a time, and that works very well for me," he explains. "For example, that Chinese noise guitarist, Li Jianhong — the run of his release is completely gone. I think even he was surprised by how well it did."

The small runs also help keep Archive moving at a breakneck pace — a way to keep the excitement going for a project that involves many long hours logged in the basement.

"Somebody asked me why I only made 600 copies of the three-CD set by Boris when I could've sold 2,000, and I asked him, 'Would you wanna put together 2,000 CDs by hand?'" Slimm laughs. "The best part is putting that first one together — the rest of it kinda sucks."

Hearing Slimm list the music that inspired him to start a label is sort of like the "See also" section of Wikipedia on a meth binge: He's collected countless releases, demo tapes and live bootlegs since being reared on '80s SoCal punk as a young skateboarder, and he can connect the dots between the side projects, labels and distributors of them all. He also stresses that the free-jazz movement of the '50s and '60s paved the road as the earliest live releases to be considered as important as studio recordings, and notes that much of his aesthetic inspiration comes from the "cost no object" packaging that metal maven Pushead put together for his highly limited Bacteria Sour label.

Then again, looking at what Slimm puts together for the average Archive release might make it seem like he's got a bottomless wallet, too. Between the uniformly gorgeous artwork, the fine French Paper, the vellum overlays, 7-inch lathe cuts and custom-sized magnetic shielding bags, each and every Archive release appears to be the product of an immense love and financial fortune before you even hear a note — but Slimm maintains that the project has to stay in the black in order to continue.

"I don't have to make money on Archive, but I can't lose any either," he says. "I don't know how long it'll stay self-sustaining, it might all just go away at some point." For now, Slimm plans on dropping his next two releases — an EBow duel between the local duo of Zaika and an East vs. West battle of the analog synths between Japan's Hiroshi Hasegawa and local boy Aaron Igler, both recorded at the late Big Jar book shop in 2007 — and seeing what happens next.

Working perhaps the nerdiest musician day job since Girl Talk quit his gig as a biomedical engineer, Slimm spends his days running a department of cytotechnology — something that only heightens his appreciation for his more creative pursuit.

"My job is a very stringent, structured thing with lots of microscopes and procedures — and then I come home, crack a beer and do mail order," he grins. "Nothing is, or should be, stressful for me, when it comes to Archive."

As the recorded memory of Ai Aso playing live at Brickbat Books last summer seeps from the stereo and fills the basement with the warm thrum of a sleepy guitar, Slimm pauses for a moment to take a look around at the sea of design mock-ups, live bootlegs and rare vinyl that surrounds him.

"This is just fun."

(j_dorof@citypaper.net)

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