The Trunk 10/9/2017: From the Vaults - Liquid of Choice

From the Vaults is an irregular series which takes a second look at some of BEM's older releases, those you may have missed if you're relatively new to the label. For this inaugural edition, we're going back to last October to revisit an album with what may well be the most confusing cover art we've ever seen: Liquid of Choice, by Bristolian instrumental quartet The Brackish.

We should start doing caption competitions.

The Brackish is composed of guitarists Luke Cawthra and Neil Smith, bassist Jon Short, and drummer Matthew Jones. Their first record was 2014's Big Guys, a varied, adventurous album that was extremely well-received, even finding some success outside progressive circles; Tom Colyer of Drunken Werewolf went as far as calling it "true musical genius", noting how effectively and seamlessly it blends influences from a huge number of different genres and styles. Indeed, Liquid of Choice continues this healthy tradition of stylistic mixing. Nobody's quite sure how to classify it - various websites have put it under "pop/rock", "krautrock", and "jazz-rock", and The Brackish themselves add psychedelic and metal to the laundry list in their official bio.

One might expect music like this to lack focus and drive and end up as a sort of homogeneous musical soup, but one would be sorely mistaken. What we have here is a record that can claim to draw equal influence from "Steve Reich, Sabbath, Can and Tortoise", as the band puts it, and continually make good on that claim over the course of slightly less than an hour.

The album starts out solidly psychedelic with the title track and closes on a similar note as 'Cactus Gulch and the Hellish Walk Home' winds down, but, in between, there's the faintly unsettling jazz-funk of 'Something Negative on the Dancefloor', the ominous crunch of 'Fun Factory', and the metal-inflected wall-of-sound guitars that dominate 'Physical Jerks'. Yet it's never quite clear where the transitions happen, exactly. The joins and seams are there, but you don't feel them.

I don't think I'm alone in this assessment, either. Québecois progressive podcast Profil praised "the perfection of every style and fluidity of the instruments" on the final track in particular, while Progradar mentioned that they "had no idea at all how... The Brackish have slipped through [their] radar". (That James R. Turner bloke seems like a pretty good writer! I wonder if he'll turn up later...)

All things considered, it's safe to say that The Brackish are a truly fascinating band and Liquid of Choice is an album well worth your time. You can pick up your copy from the BEM webstore right here.

I still don't know what that kid's doing there, though.

Status Update

This week, we're pleased to welcome James R. Turner (there he is!), who's taking his place alongside me as another PR mastermind for Bad Elephant Music.

The label is also now officially affiliated with the House of York. Sorry, Henry IV.

Other than that, it's business as usual at Elephant Towers; we're mostly preparing ourselves for the release of Whitewater's Universal Medium. It's less than two weeks away now, and still available to preorder here.

Review Roundup

My Tricksy Spirit's self-titled debut album continues to draw praise, with PROG Magazine's Kris Needs saying the band deserve "a bong of your time". And I didn't even know it was possible to measure time by pieces of drugs paraphernalia! The album is available right now here.

Also, this isn't strictly a review, but Mark Barton, former webmaster of losingtoday.com, really rates Schnauser! If that sounds like your cup of tea, you can grab a copy of Irritant here.

The Trunk 3/9/2017: Interview with the CEO

For our first week of actual content here on The Trunk, we sat down with our benevolent overlord, Mr David Elephant, to chat about his experience running the label! Without further ado, let's get down to business...

The Trunk: Let’s get started with the question on everyone’s lips. Where does the name "Bad Elephant Music" come from?

David Elephant: Well, back in the 1930s, when I was in the military in India... er, no. It’s actually quite a mundane reason. So, when I first had the idea for the label back in 2012, I didn’t really have an idea as to what sort of label it was going to be – at the time, it was just about one artist. Coming up with the name was something I was really struggling with. I wanted something a bit quirky, and, although we were looking at a lot of progressive rock bands at the time, I didn’t want anything that would identify us too closely with progressive rock.

I actually had the idea from a film we had out of the library, which was a film of Ivor the Engine, Oliver Postgate’s animated series. The film featured an Indian elephant which had escaped from the circus, and was rescued by Ivor the Engine and his hangers-on. There’s a scene in the film in which, in a very broad Welsh accent, Jones the Steam says "Oh, you’re a bad elephant!" I forget what it had done. But that’s where the name came from.

TT: You mention that one artist, so can you tell me a little more about that first collaboration that led to the creation of Bad Elephant?

DE: Like so many people, meeting Simon Godfrey has been my downfall. I met Simon through my podcast, The European Perspective, and I interviewed him and Rob Ramsay, another BEM artist, around 2009 or 2010. Tinyfish [Godfrey and Ramsay’s previous band] ran its course, and Simon wanted to release an album under his own steam, and came up with the project name of Shineback.
He played me some demos, and it was some of the most remarkable music I’d ever heard. And I said to him “I’d love to release this under my fledgling record label”, and Simon said, “yeah, that’s great”. So, yes, Shineback was the first release, we started planning it in late 2012, and released it in July 2013. That was where it all started.

TT: So, since 2013, how would you say that the process of running the label has changed?

DE: There’s a volume element to it. We released two albums in 2013, five in 2014, and then the whole thing just exploded. We’re up now to doing around fifteen releases a year. I couldn’t have done this without more people coming on board. The key guy in the operation these days, apart from myself, is Martin Hutchinson, who’s our sales director, and who basically looks after the BEM store and handles relationships with wholesalers. That was an element of the business which I just never expected – the idea that there would be interest from record shops outside our own store and people we already knew.

Also, as the label has become better known, we don’t feel that we’re the underdogs as much any more. We’ve got a core of fans who buy absolutely everything, which I find remarkable, since there’s such a wide variety of music. There’s one guy called Andy Langridge who’s just fantastic, and every time I see Andy, I tell him I live in mortal fear of releasing something he doesn’t enjoy. Fortunately, it hasn’t happened yet.

The Elephant himself, in his natural habitat.

TT: The label’s become better known, but you yourself has also become quite well known in some music circles, as Mr Elephant. What’s been your experience of that?

DE: It’s very pleasant, having people coming up to you at gigs or on social media and wanting to have a chat about the music or the label. If I was going to give advice to anyone setting up a record label, I think the most important thing is to be nice. You are essentially selling a brand, and it’s in nobody’s interest if you treat people in an offhand or unpleasant way. Fortunately, almost everyone we deal with is absolutely lovely. The musicians, the fans, our partners, everyone’s great.

Tom Slatter coined the "David Elephant" phrase. Elephant is not my real surname, folks! But yes, becoming known as an individual is actually quite fun. We don’t get paid for this, none of us make any money out of it, so it’s nice to get a bit of recognition.

TT: What would your biggest piece of advice be, then, to anyone who would like to work with Bad Elephant?

DE: A lot of it is about expectations. We are a small label. We haven’t got the clout of Sony or Universal, or even some of the bigger independent labels like Inside Out or Kscope. We’re never going to be able to have the same sort of reach as those guys have got. Having said that, it’s a very different proposition. I think we give you more artistic freedom, and the ability to express yourselves the way you want to, musically. We’ll do our absolute best, and I think the offering we’ve got now is better than it’s ever been, but it’s important to be realistic.

I also think you’ve got to be realistic about the way that the industry has changed. Even over the four years that we’ve been releasing records, we’ve seen huge changes in the way that music is distributed. Although things like streaming existed in 2013, and had been there for a while, the growth of that has really made a huge difference. An album that would have sold a couple of thousand CDs in 2013, you’d be lucky to reach a thousand now.

The third thing, I suppose, is that we can’t do it all. We really need bands to help us to help them. We’ll push your stuff as hard as we can, but, for best results, you need to be doing the same.

TT: They say elephants never forget. Do you forget, Mr Elephant?

DE: Sorry, what were we talking about?

Status Update

It's been a quiet week for the label, but everything's ticking over just as planned.

My Tricksy Spirit's debut album, My Tricksy Spirit, is out now! If you've not picked up a copy yet - maybe you were waiting on reviews (and there are a couple below) - then now's the time. Whitewater's Universal Medium also drops in less than two weeks, and preorders are open here.

Review Roundup

Hot off the presses, My Tricksy Spirit has been met with acclaim from both Progradar's Emma Roebuck and The Progressive Aspect's Roger Trenwith! Roger describes it as "a record for the sultry summer evening, star gazing or soul gazing, glass of Pimms in hand" - and, while I'm not a big Pimms drinker, I can't help but agree.

That wraps it up for this week. Until next time, happy listening!

The Trunk 27/8/2017: Welcome Aboard

Greetings and welcome, one and all, to The Trunk, the greatest innovation in the history of music publishing since yesterday! This is the product of literal minutes of hard work by the team, and we're very excited to get it off the ground.

About BEM

This is the brand new official blog of Bad Elephant Music! You probably got here through one of our social media channels, but, just in case you stumbled across this page by accident and have no idea where you are, we're a UK-based independent music label. We were founded in 2013 and we've put out fifty releases and counting since then.

We strive not to tie ourselves to any particular style or genre of music - in fact, a lot of our artists are those who don't really fit into any particular box, and we're proud of it. Our motto is "independent sounds for independent souls", and we hope to give a voice to musicians whose work is truly different and unique. From the energetic, punk-inflected Under a Banner to the powerful yet precise instrumental rock of The Fierce & The Dead, the classic pop sounds of Valdez, and the spoken-word weirdness of Robert Ramsay, we offer something for everyone.

About The Trunk

Wot's all this, then?

The Trunk is a new venture for us: a place for long-form content that doesn't quite fit our other social media channels. There will be an update every Sunday, and you'll find links to each post on our Facebook and Twitter feeds and on the (also brand new) official Bad Elephant Music subreddit, so hopefully it'll be quite hard to miss!

What can you expect to find here? Well, pretty much anything we like! Important announcements - new signings, preorders, releases, and so on - will stay right where they are, and the Wednesday Track of the Week isn't going anywhere, but this will serve as a bit of a variety hour, offering glimpses of aspects of the label we often don't have time to discuss.

Here's just a sampling of what's on offer:

• Interviews with BEM artists and members of the team. If you’ve ever wondered what our artists really do all day when they’re not slaving away in the Music Pits cranking out more material for us, or how our esteemed CEO David Elliott first came up with the name Bad Elephant, this is the place to find out.
• Retrospectives on some of our earlier releases, for those who didn’t catch them the first time around. (If you feel like exploring, we recently cut the prices of some of our earlier albums in half - why not take a look?)
• Thematic playlists with commentary - collections of BEM tracks connected by a certain theme, style, or mood.
• Opinion pieces, talking points, and other editorial content directly from the team.

In addition to the main feature, you can expect a quick status update on what's going on at BEM this week, and a roundup of reviews, publicity, and other exciting things that are happening with our artists. And, if you're very lucky, you might find the occasional discount code lurking around here, too. Keep your eyes peeled...

Getting in touch

If you have fanmail, hatemail, questions, comments, or anything else you'd like us to see, feel free to speak your mind! As well as the comments, you can talk to us directly by emailing huw@badelephant.co.uk. We're planning on doing a semi-regular mailbag segment on here where we answer reader questions, so, if you give us something interesting to work with, it might just be featured on the blog!

Status Update

In the new releases department, My Tricksy Spirit and Whitewater both have albums ticking closer to release - My Tricksy Spirit's self-titled debut album comes out next Friday, and Whitewater's third album, Universal Medium, two weeks thereafter. Both are available to preorder right now, so grab 'em while they're hot.

With Universal Medium out for preorder yesterday, BEM has reached fifty total releases!

The shelf's getting quite crowded now!

We'd like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who's released something with us, and everyone who buys them and helps us and the artists keep going. Here's to another fifty!

Review Roundup

Robert Ramsay's Confound and Disturb has generally been met with confused praise from reviewers - James R. Turner at Progradar offers some apocalyptica that we think amounts to a positive review, Background Magazine's Alison Reijman gives it four stars "for the sheer lunacy of it all", and Polish publication MLWZ concludes that it's "definitely worth seeking out".

Nomad, by Sky Architect, has also garnered some positive attention: Tim Fleskes of It Djents gives it an impressive 9/10, describing it as "full of everything a prog snob could ask for". We also have a rare video review from Notes Reviews - it's pretty in-depth and we highly recommend giving it a watch!

That's about it for this week. Make sure you join us next time, when we'll be interviewing David Elliott, the Grand Elephant himself, about the past, present, and future of Bad Elephant Music!