Interview: Telephone Explosion / Morning Trip
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Telephone Explosion records has been releasing high quality music since 2007. Starting off with a focus on local garage rock, the label has expanded in the years since to include new music and reissues, spanning ambient, post punk, folk, and hard-to-categorize music of all kinds.
The label is an expression of the collective taste of founders Jon Schouten and Steve Sidoli, and Jon stopped by to deliver us a special guest mix of music he’s listening to, and to talk about the label’s history, and their new venture with imprint Morning Trip.
Telephone Explosion Bandcamp Telephone Explosion Instagram Telephone Explosion site Morning Trip Bandcamp
So the label started as a garage rock label, and I feel kind of a kinship to you because you have pivoted into a more open-format and outsider music label rather than sticking to the sound you started with. Yeah, I mean I feel it's what you're into at a time. I think the label is this physical record, documenting our movement through music as enthusiasts. And like even though it started, like you said, as a garage rock label and it was really genre-focused, that's the world we were in, that's the music all of our friends were playing, and that's the music that we were playing. I don't know if it was too much of one thing or something, but we grew out of it. We just wanted to be able to do anything we felt like, without being limited to a genre. We're at a point now where I feel good that we can do anything. Our next record is a free-jazz record, and that's our first jazz record.
I remember when you did the Steve Roach reissue — actually it was the Bruce Haack that started it. It surprised me and made me pay closer attention to the label. How did you get to that place? Yeah, I mean we were just fans of Bruce Haack. Bruce started the whole reissue side of the business for us. We did Electric Lucifer 2 which was our first ever reissue, and it's a bit of a weird one to start with because it wasn't Electric Lucifer 1, but that's the album that we gravitated to, and we got in touch with Ted who passed a few weeks ago, unfortunately. We didn't even know if there was a market for reissues, which, sitting here today [laughs] it's such a funny thing to think. That started it. I think we did a couple-a-year for a few years. But that led into us doing four albums by him. We just did Preservation Tapes which is an archival projects that we did last year. And then getting into Steve Roach, again it was just we discovered that album and had a conversation with him that was going on probably about a year, and trying to figure out how to do it. Eventually it just came together. But I mean Structures From Silence, again, it's just such a pivotal album for me. When I discovered it, I was like "this is insane, this music is so deep."
Tell us about some of the choices in the mix. Well I mean, I'm going to obviously highlight the Laraaji & Lyghte track Celestial Realms, because that's one half of the first release of the new imprint that we're doing which is called Morning Trip with a friend of ours Dave Nardi. It's a new imprint that we launched this year that we'd been working on for the last half year, and it's dedicated to experimental and ambient reissues. So Celestial Realms is a pretty obscure cassette-only release from I think '85 that Laraaji did with Lyghte who is a guitar player and his name's Jonathan Goldman. It's two tracks that are 23-minutes-ish apiece. It's kind of based in Laraaji's tonal palette, which is zither and bells, and Lyghte is playing guitar over top of it. You can't even tell it's guitar for the most part; it's just this beautiful ambient voyage that is perfect for background music. Perfect if you just really want to zone out and pay attention and get into an expansive piece. Yeah it's it's it's a fun listen, it's a trip, you know? It's a morning trip.
Yeah, let's talk about Morning Trip, how how did it come about and why did you want to do an imprint? Yeah I mean we wanted to do another imprint just because of capacity issues for Steve and I. Steve works full time, I'm freelance, and I work on this more. But still it's a lot of work to put out records. And we wanted to be doing more, so it just made sense to find the right person to do an imprint with, a separate imprint. We're facilitating Dave's vision and helping him with it, but it's purely you know curated by Dave. So yeah, we want to do more, we want to do something different and grow, and Dave has impeccable taste that's very much in line with where we're going.
How do you divide the labour up in a reissue imprint, between having the vision and executing? Yea, it's very collaborative. Dave presents ideas and we talk about it and we look at the details of it because obviously the reissue climate is like kind of insane right now. You know you'll stumble upon people, you'll find them, you'll e-mail them, communicate with them one way or another, and they'll be maybe paranoid that you found them, and they've left music for one reason or another, and maybe it brings up something in their past where they don't necessarily want to revisit that. And then there's other people that were maybe a bit more successful when they were doing music, and the music industry has changed so much that they're extremely unrealistic in terms of the finances of repressing you know 500 or 1,000 albums. So it's just kind of unpredictable.
Yeah I find it interesting, owning a label in 2019 seems as challenging as ever. Having been around for a little while, is it more challenging than ever, or are there just new modes of behaving? For us it always feels new because we're always pushing into new territory and trying to grow. We don't really know, I mean the label started as like a cassette-only label 10 years ago, we weren't really participating in the proper music industry, and it still feels like we're learning as we go. Every year feels like there's more successes and there's more challenges, and they're different. They change with the times. And everyone's always afraid of this vinyl boom coming to an end, and it always feels like it's kind of on the horizon but it never is. So there's a little bit of fear involved I guess.
So if you were starting from scratch in 2019, would you do cassettes again? Would you do digital? I think we would be kind of where we are today. I think offering a physical product is still really, really important. It gives people something to connect with, and I connect with it personally. It supports artists on the road, and it helps us diversify your revenue streams. You're not going to make pretty much any money [laughs] off of Spotify. I feel like everybody knows that. But Spotify, for us, and kind of the digital realm, we treat it more like marketing. It's marketing that kind of pays us vs. us to paying into it. Like if somebody sees a review or their friend posts something cool on Instagram and then they go to check it out, the first place they're gonna go to is Spotify and if it's not there then they're gonna go "OK, next."
Alright, give me another favourite moment from the mix. I'm going to go with Terry Riley and Don Cherry - Descending Moonshine Dervishes. I'm a huge Terry Riley fan, and this isn't a real album, this is a bootleg live session, I think it's from '75, There's a couple versions of it kicking around. When I heard this it just floored me. There's no other way to say it. It's classic Terry Riley, crazy arpeggiate-y micro-tonal organ riffage with this beautiful Don Cherry trumpet over top. And to me it's the perfect combination of two people coming together for a project. I'm kind of sad that maybe it wasn't released properly or whatever, but I also like the fact that it's kind of obscure and live and very of-the-time that these guys just got together, probably didn't rehearse, and jammed it out live and recorded it, and I'm just happy that exists.