In some ways, we have returned to the era of the single, though your label seems focused on the physical more than the digital single. We still only have about 20 percent of the records we've released done by locals, and that's just fine.ĬB: Hozac puts put a lot of 7" singles. But to be specific, we've always been a record label that focuses on a variety of what we consider incredible sounds, so keeping it Chicago-specific was never the intention, as we didn't even release anything by a local act until our fourth release and to date. We still keep an eagle eye out for great new local bands, but despite a handful of exceptions, it's at a moderate point compared to the momentum that was churning at the beginning of the 2000s, but we're always optimistic that another era of greatness is right around the corner. I was the music editor/coordinator for the entire run, and we booked/hosted countless live shows for out-of-town bands along with picking out the best local support acts, including the five annual sold-out Chicago Blackout Festival shows (2001-06), which brought national/international attention to our city and the hotbed of incredible local bands around during the early-2000s peak. Our magazine Horizontal Action (1997-2005) basically reinvigorated what was once an indie-rock/pop-punk ONLY city, into a welcoming, creative environment that now 10 years later forced rock venues to become 500 times more accepting to other kinds of music than it used to. TN: We've been holding it down for a while, based on the fact that just like most respectable record labels, we were born out of a print publication. Seeing a hardcore punk fan enjoying an Eric & The Happy Thoughts ripper or finding a twee-pop fan really warming up to the echo-eerieness of Wizzard Sleeve really makes it all worthwhile.ĬB: How does HoZac fit in with the Chicago music scene? What is your own history within the Chicago music community, and do you think a label can still be an integral part to a city's music environment? If so, how? I think we really enjoy introducing people to bands and sounds they don't think they'd like, in hopes of broadening horizons, I guess. It's recorded by Richard Gottehrer (the guy from The Strangeloves who wrote the hit "My Boyfriend's Back" in the mid-'60s and produced Blondie and the Go Go's albums), and it's very clean, yet has our prerequisite scuzz factor boiling underneath the beauty kind of our Je ne sais quoi when it comes to all of our releases, actually. TN: Well, we do thoroughly enjoy the grittiness, and I still find it hard to release anything recorded super-clean-sounding, but if pulled off well, it can be just as jarring, like on the debut Dum Dum Girls album we're set to release next week. Why is it important for a label to specialize, as opposed to taking on a more eclectic, cross-genre philosophy? If not the sonic similarity, what would you say defines a HoZac band, or the artists with whom you're interested in working? TN: Two, mainly Brett Cross and myself, with a few ramshackle A&R types that we call our Bored of Directors.ĬB: Whereas other record labels have tended to broaden their rosters in terms of sound, style and genre, there is a singular grittiness and an unabashedly unpolished feel to many of your bands, not to mention a teenage sensibility (even if the bands themselves aren't teenagers). We'd always been fans of the "budget rock" mentality, and although neither sounded anything like The Mummies or the Trashwomen, these two bands seemed like a perfect fit for our first two releases. Both bands had odd similarities, in that one of the tracks on the Spider single was a tribute to Lili of Volt/Splash 4, and both bands essentially were home-recorded handmade miniature masterpieces in our eyes, which in the fall of 2006 was such an exciting concept. We gathered up a couple newly formed bands, the members of which we'd known for a while in their previous incarnations for our first two releases: Volt from Paris, France, who were formerly in Splash 4, and Spider from Los Angeles, which was the brainchild of Erin Wood from The Spits and his lady Jessie. It was no longer the norm to mail in a money order from 7-11 for a 7" single from some obscure band you read about it was PayPal and that instant ability to recoup your funds, combined with our unhinged excitement to keep introducing the world to newly discovered music that we just couldn't get out of our heads. Music was really changing around the 2005-06 point that we really started considering getting behind a label ourselves. Todd Novak: We had been helping friends of ours who had labels for years while living in Chicago during its big musical re-awakening in the 2001-04 period (Ponys, Tyrades, Hot Machines, Vee Dee and so on). The following interview took place over email.Ĭarrie Brownstein: What was the impetus for you starting a record label? When did HoZac start and what were the first records that you put out?
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |