Audio By Carbonatix
On July 4 at Revolver, the white-hot Friday-night party at the Design District’s Soho Lounge, Adam Johnson sequences beats from a laptop computer, formatting them into one long tapestry of melodies and softly percolating percussion. He rarely looks away from the computer screen, so he barely notices the 30-odd people gathered around him in the Orange Room, some sitting on white couches, others lying about on the floor, most listening intently.
But when Gabe Koch, the 23-year-old label owner of Merck — who brought Johnson, Travis “Machine Drum” Stewart, and others to the Orange Room — remembers that night, all he can think about is how packed Soho’s main room was with kids dancing to New Wave chestnuts by New Order in contrast to the modest reception his artists received. “I think people here are more focused on dancing, drinking, and being social than with the nerdier aspects of music,” he says during a recent interview at his home in Miami Shores. Here, he runs the label (www.m3rck.net) out of a small bedroom that’s surrounded by boxes of records and CDs as well as personal items like Lord of the Rings posters. Clad in a T-shirt and shorts, he seems preternaturally relaxed; the neighborhood in which he lives is so quiet that when there’s a lull in the conversation, all you can hear is the quiet hum of the two hard drives positioned by his massive work desk.
Normally Koch isn’t concerned with how Miamians perceive his label. He knows that the experimental electronic music, or “IDM” (intelligent dance music), it produces is by its very nature anticommercial and coveted by a small, dedicated following. In fact most of the artists who record for Merck were recruited from far-flung locales like Sweden (Andreas Tilliander, a.k.a. Komp), Britain (George Marinov, a.k.a. Esem), and Texas (Richard Bailey, a.k.a. Proem). He adds that an upcoming compilation, Dosage, will feature his first local artist, a producer who calls himself Shift. “I guess I’m a little antisocial. I’m just not out there, meeting artists,” he reasons.
Merck’s true following lies in the borderless environs of the Internet, where fledgling producers and aficionados trade MP3s and CD-Rs of the latest electronic sounds. Koch says it was his Internet friends who encouraged him to launch Merck in 2000 with $5000 that he had been saving since he was ten years old. The impetus came when he received some tracks from Stewart, who records as Syndrone as well as Machine Drum. Steven Castro from Miami’s Beta Bodega Coalition also helped him, passing along contact numbers for distributors and manufacturers.
“At that point I had been into electronic music for five years. I got into collecting, and I knew a whole lot about the scene, about the music, about what was selling,” says Koch, who was twenty at the time. “It was a natural move at that point to take a bunch of friends that I knew online and were doing tracks that I knew would have trouble getting into big labels because they were really small guys, and putting them on.”
Koch says Merck’s early output — including Syndrone’s Triskaideka, recorded while Stewart was still attending high school in North Carolina — benefited from the buzz surrounding Miami’s IDM scene. But it also gained attention for putting out an incredible amount of product: eighteen full-length CDs and several vinyl twelve-inch singles and LPs to date. That’s an impressive number considering that most major labels only release around ten to fifteen albums a year.
“A lot of labels, to do its first couple of releases, takes, like, three years,” he notes. “We were pretty fortunate as far as how everything worked out.” He claims to have never lost money, thanks to manufacturing low runs of each release (usually around 1000) and paying his artists 50 percent of the profits from their work with no advances. The label’s share of the money is then recycled into the next project. “I’ve kept going because I still have that $5000,” he explains.
Merck has built up a strong roster of internationally known artists like Machine Drum, Brothomstates, and Jimmy Edgar (the latter two now signed to Warp), among many others. Last June XLR8R magazine named it one of the top twenty underground labels in America. But it has also been criticized for trafficking in experimental electronic stereotypes — lush, harmonic compositions; glitchy hip-hop tracks with spliced-up vocals; and noisy, pounding beats. Koch freely admits that his label isn’t setting any trends, but merely exploring sounds created by others. All the paradigms, he believes, have already been set.
“As far as the possible styles of music, a lot more ground has been covered. Once you have guys who have done CDs of just noise or CDs skipping or silence or just static or whatever, it’s really hard to move beyond that in any way. You basically have to work back and fill the gaps,” he says. “I don’t think our label pushes many boundaries at all. I just do music that I really enjoy and like.”
But if Miami’s electronic revolution has come and gone with no one the wiser, then what to make of the busy, animated room generated by Audio Electric’s stable of artists on Friday, August 29, at Jazid in Miami Beach? Here in the upstairs lounge, young men play games of pool and smartly dressed women talk on plush chairs and love seats while H.A.L.O. Vessel generates a sheet of noise so grating most everyone has to cover their ears. Save for a smattering of lovely ambient sequences, the music he makes is arrhythmic and difficult to follow. But when he finishes his set by asking over the loudspeaker, “Is everyone enjoying it?” the entire room roars its approval.
According to Omar Angulo, co-founder and the driving force behind Audio Electric, the evening’s success came as something of a surprise. “I didn’t recognize a lot of the people. It wasn’t the same faces I’m used to seeing. But I saw people trying to get into it,” he marvels during an interview at his home in Miami Springs. “I would catch girls by the bar trying to dance along to it while talking to their friends. They weren’t aware that they’re hearing something that’s an unusual form.”
Audio Electric and Merck are two local electronic labels each run by a single person. Both label owners are adult hipsters; the 31-year-old Angulo’s home is decorated with his own visual art (he works full-time as a graphic artist for Barry University) and stocked with shelves of graphic novels and cartons of records by Aphex Twin and Global Goon. But that’s where the similarities end. Merck is a full-time enterprise; Audio Electric has put out an EP, a compilation, and an album by H.A.L.O. Vessel in the last four years.
Angulo, a long-time veteran of the local punk rock scene, began producing his own tracks with an SK-1 sampler after getting into Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, and Jean-Michel Jarre. Simultaneously Ed Matus, who had knocked around Miami for years with bands like Subliminal Criminal, Cavity, and Struggle, was exposed to jazzy, experimental sounds by Stevie Wonder and Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters, which inspired him to mimic them by making tracks on a Yamaha keyboard and recording to a four-track tape. “I guess it was that thirst for something different that we were going through at the same time,” remembers Angulo, who heard Matus’s stuff during a phone conversation the two had in 1996.
Angulo decided to put together a label to “document” their explorations, but nothing came out until a CD compilation, New Construct Committee, was released two years later. Each copy came in a white sleeve decorated with a still life hand-drawn in ink by Angulo himself and packaged in a plastic bag marked with a strange alphabet he had devised. Other friends like Richard Rippe, a.k.a. Enamored Gazes, contributed cuts to the disc. Limited to 100 copies, it’s more specialized art for connoisseurs of experimental electronic music than mass-produced CD to be hawked in record stores. But it was too esoteric for distributors who felt it should fit under a marketable rubric, even one as rarified as IDM. “A lot of the people that we would expect to carry it wouldn’t carry it because they said it wouldn’t sell,” he notes. The same fate befell the next release, H.A.L.O. Vessel’s self-titled debut.
So for the past three years Audio Electric has distributed its music through www.audioelectric.net. (The site is currently down for repairs.) Online, its discography has grown to include MP3 albums and broadcasts of live performances. But Angulo is optimistic about the label’s future prospects. He believes that IDM has grown stale and people are looking for something new in electronic music. “I think we’re a lot more likely to be more successful with the same distributors now,” he says, “because we’re offering something that doesn’t fit.”
