Sakura Saunders, who also knew the band, and asked if she
wanted to start a label with me and put out an A Frames
record, as well as a bunch of 7”s....Things kinda fumbled
forward from there.
You mentioned that seeing a band often makes you want
to put out the record, or at least did in the beginning. Is
that still true? It seems like a lot of bands you’ve put out
recently, you wouldn’t have had a chance to see live. Do
you mostly go off of demos you receive?
Our cover boys this month, Austin’s Spray Paint, released a
phenomenal LP earlier this year on Sacramento’s S.S.
Records. S.S. is one of the most consistent labels around, and
has been for years, so we figured we’d interview mysterious
label head Scott Soriano rather than fill up this issue with
yet more Spray Paint worship. Scott was good enough to take
time out of his busy schedule to converse with us via e-mail.
--Miranda Fisher
So let’s just start out talking about the history of S.S. as
a label. A number of your early releases were by the A
Frames. Did you start a label specifically to put out their
stuff? Was the intent always to put out other bands as well,
or was it meant to be only A Frames in the beginning?
Well, I did a label in the 1990s called Moo-La-La, which was
dedicated to Sacramento bands. After about 8 years, I got
burnt out and quit, but there is something about putting out
records that is addictive. You see bands and you think,
“Hmmmmm....” As well as doing a label, I ran a practice/
show space called the Loft. Toward the end of the Loft’s
existence, a band called Bend Sinister played there and
discovered the Karate Party 7” I had put out. Karate Party
was Chris Woodhouse’s band. When Bend Sinister became
the A Frames, they wrote Woodhouse and asked if he’d record
them. Woodhouse recorded at the Loft and lived across the
hall from me, so I sat in on the sessions and the mixdown in
his apartment and we had a great time. I contacted my friend
Actually, seeing a band live rarely makes me want to put out
a record. There are a lot of bands who are good/great live
but mediocre on record, most bands really. Every once in a
long while a band gels perfectly live and you know (or think
you know) that they will be perfect on record (Life Stinks,
who I am doing an LP with, are a recent example). Still, it is
all about the recording. Most of the bands I’ve released I’ve
never seen live. They are either thousands of miles away, on
different continents, or are no longer active. I work from
demos, word of mouth, old recordings, things like that.
MySpace used to be a great resource before they sunk it in
continuous redesigns.
In regards to Spray Paint specifically, had you seen When
Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth pre-Spray Paint, or were you
just familiar with their recordings?
No, I never saw the Dinos. I do have some of their records, as
Cory used to send them to me and I’ve sold some through my
mail order. I am not sure Cory mentioned the Dinos when he
sent me the first Spray Paint recordings or that I associated
Spray Paint with the Dinos or the Dinos with Cory until later.
I mean, now I know Spray Paint is Cory, Christopher and the
other guy. What’s his name?
George
Yeah, George.
So since you mentioned MySpace, what do you think about
the technology in its current state as it relates to music?
You’ve been fairly vocal about the way filesharing has had
an impact on your sales, and when you stopped updating
Crud Crud about a year ago, you said it was because you
were uncomfortable with the ethical issues involved, and
that you’d go on hiatus until you could figure out a way
to rectify that. Do you think you -- or anyone -- will ever
figure that out? And do you think the spread of filesharing
has been beneficial to you as a listener of music?
32
Robert Anton Wilson has a theory of knowledge called the
Jumping Jesus Phenomenon. Wilson thinks that, using 1
AD as the starting point, the discovery of scientific facts
or knowledge doubles with every discovery. Every doubling
accelerates the accumulation of knowledge so that we know
more faster. The first doubling of knowledge took 1500 years.
When he came up with the theory (1982), he wrote that it took
only three years to double knowledge. Today knowledge
accumulates at so frantic of a pace, we cannot humanly
catalog everything. Apply that to technology: With music
talk, it is no longer about filesharing. It has done its damage
and now it is near obsolete. Streaming is the challenge now
and for labels and especially artists that means how to cope
with an absurdly low royalty rate (read Galaxie 500’s Damon
Krukowski’s piece on Pitchfork:
http://www.pitchfork.com/features/articles/8993-the-cloud/).
Streaming will be replaced by something else before we figure
out how to pay artists fairly (actually it is easy to figure out,
it is difficult to apply). The only real solution is to kick the
fucking plug out of the wall and return to an analog-based
culture.
Go back a second, the real damage filesharing did is not on
sales (which we all bitched about at the time), but on the
way music fans consume music. It also cre ]YH