Houston Police Shut Down Kanye West’s ‘New Slaves’ Screening

by Sheme Jobs

A Houston screening of Kanye West’s “New Slaves” video was shut down last night (May 24), the Houston Chronicle reports

West planned to project the music video for his new song around the world Friday night, including at three Houston locations. However, the showing at the Rothko Chapel was shut down before it even began. Houston police arrived on the scene and ordered the gathering crowd to disperse or be arrested for trespassing.

The screening’s premature end apparently wasn’t because of an unruly crowd; according to the Chronicle, those gathered were excited, yet respectful.

The two other Houston screening locations had issues, too. Technical difficulties apparently hampered one location, while another was a no-show entirely, with fan Janet Quiroa revealing that the only entertainment was having sprinklers come on and “obnoxious people screaming Kanye threats.”
West debuted “New Slaves” last week in a similar fashion, with building projections around the world, including New York (a full map of screenings is located on West’s website). Houston’s projections were part of the second wave of screenings in preparation for West’s new album, “Yeezus,” which is set for a June 18 release.

Watch a video of “New Slaves.”

Independent Study: Sacred Bones Records

by Sheme Jobs

Label: Sacred Bones Records
Founded: 2007
Location: Greenpoint, Brooklyn
Number of Employees: 5
Next Release: Pharmakon, Abandon, May 14
Distributor: Secretly Canadian
Twitter: @SacredBones
Website: SacredBonesRecords.com

The music of Margaret Chardiet, a New York-based artist who records as Pharmakon, is anti-commercial in the extreme. Her songs are dark and pulverizing, marked by industrial drones and modulated shrieks that will reshape a mood as quickly as an eardrum. To hear Chardiet’s music, or, more accurately, experience it, you used to have to catch one of her live shows in the DIY dens of Brooklyn and Queens, or browse their shadowy facsimiles on YouTube. But the first properly recorded Pharmakon material, a 4-track mini album called Abandon, will get a wide release on May 14 thanks to Sacred Bones Records, the Brooklyn based label with a reputation for embracing the dark side.

Sacred Bones was founded in 2007 by Caleb Braaten, a tall, bushy-bearded former punk and goth kid from Colorado who was raised in a record store. Its first releases were by friends of Braaten in post-punk bands The Hunt and Blank Dogs, and the label soon developed a track record of bringing critically lauded, left-field artists to the precipice of the mainstream. The SBR roster, which in addition to Pharmakon includes noise-pop queen Zola Jesus, melodic psych duo The Holydrug Couple and jangly punks The Men, defies easy categorization — but there’s a barbed through-line anchored by foreboding and dismantled beauty. Last year, the label reissued the woozy, haunting soundtrack of David Lynch’s 1977 cult horror film “Eraserhead” with the cooperation of the director, a personal hero of Braaten’s.

Sacred Bones HQ

“There’s a certain kinship between the things he puts out, but it’s not always musical,” says Nika Roza Danilova, a.k.a. Zola Jesus, who has been with the label since 2007. “It could be aesthetic, or conceptual or based on an emotion.”

Born in a Record Store

As a child, Braaten’s best friend’s parents owned Denver’s famous Twist and Shout record store. Braaten embedded himself there, absorbing everything from Testament to John Zorn via osmosis. He decamped to New York in 2003, when he was in his mid 20s, and took up residence at Bleecker Bob’s (RIP) and Academy Records, where he worked as a buyer. All of Sacred Bones’ early releases were assembled in Academy’s basement.

“Some of the Academy guys helped me, but none of us had ever put out a record before,” Braaten says of the first SBR 7”. “I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t have the songs mastered before I pressed them, which was really stupid. I just said ‘Sounds great!’ and sent a CD-R of MP3s to the pressing plant.”

Braaten may not have known much about mastering records in those days, but he did have a sharp sense of how they should look and feel. He’d always admired the output of ‘60s jazz labels like Impulse! Records, whose album art retained signature aesthetic flourishes from one release to another. To this day, every Sacred Bones record is instantly recognizable — the company’s logo (a snake eating itself forming a ring around a triangle) rests in the upper left hand corner, while the artist name and album title are written in an elegantly understated serif in the upper right.

Out of the Basement

Up a pale gold freight elevator, above a reclaimed woodworking shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Sacred Bones’ headquarters are in a nondescript waterfront warehouse leased by the larger indie label Mexican Summer. Braaten moved the company here a little over a year ago after it had finally outgrown the Academy basement and its lack of inalienable amenities like windows, Internet and phone service. In the warehouse, light pours in from over the East River on potted desiccants and Braaten’s artfully daggered knife collection. A French bulldog named Carter keeps watch from a plush brown couch.

Sacred Bones’ office bodyguard, Carter

If Braaten is Sacred Bones’ patriarch, its maternal figure is Taylor Brode, a simpatico record-store refugee who joined the label as general manager in 2010. Brode worked for years in sales and marketing for the distribution arm of Touch & Go Records in Chicago before that segment of the business was folded in 2009. Upon joining Sacred Bones, she secured a worldwide physical and digital distribution deal with Secretly Canadian and has steadily increased the label’s output from 20 releases in 2011, to 24 in 2012 and 28 this year. In Brode’s presence, Braaten reclines twenty degrees and lets her do most of the talking.

“Taylor knew more about a lot of industry stuff than I did,” says Braaten, who first met Brode when he was a buyer at Academy and she was his sales rep. “When she came on, it kind of took everything to the next level.”

Team Sacred Bones is now five employees strong, including an in-house graphic designer and publicist, and does 25 percent of its sales internationally, with bands based in Chile, Australia and beyond. While the label is growing, Braaten and Brode are careful not to grow it too quickly. They’re highly selective about new signings, tending to recruit primarily through an extended network of friends and bands they already work with. Contrary to popular belief, there is no grand scheme or occult ritual behind the music on which the label chooses to focus.

“I think that having an A&R strategy would be completely contrary to how Caleb and I would approach music,“ Brode says. “We go after bands because we love the music and we love the people. And it’s gotta be both those things. We’re friends with all of our bands and I think that makes us work harder and it makes them work harder.”

Sacred Bones is a 50/50 profit split label, meaning that after expenses are recouped on a given release, revenues are split 50/50 between the artist and the label. Rather than owning the master recordings, Sacred Bones leases them, with the terms and lengths of recording agreements varying on a case-by-case basis. In all business dealings, Braaten and Brode are artist-friendly to a fault.

“It’s kind of like a family where under any circumstances we’ll treat each other as if we’re blood,” Danilova says. “Just to know that and deal with someone in business like that is really comforting, because you know they’re always going to have your back.”

A Visceral Experience

In a lot of ways, Sacred Bones is as old-fashioned as the artwork that adorns its records. Known for its sophisticated packaging, designed by David Correll and hand screen-printed by longtime label friend and Crystal Stilts drummer Keegan Cooke, 70 to 80 percent of the label’s sales are physical, a dizzyingly high figure in the age of MP3s and streaming. Each Sacred Bones release has an elaborate limited edition vinyl version that retails for $25 on the label’s website, excluding shipping, while standard LPs go for $15 and CDs sell for $12 or $13.

“A lot of what we do is based on the physical product, being able to hold the object and have an actual, visceral experience with the piece of art,” Brode says. “An MP3 is the exact opposite of that. To us it’s soulless.”

Sacred Bones’ warehouse, in the basement of Academy Records

If Braaten and Brode are cold on digital music consumption, they’re even colder on trendy, ancillary revenue streams. Sacred Bones is in the record business in the traditional sense, with no current holdings in or aspirations toward a merch, touring or publishing empire. For the foreseeable future, the label plans to live or die by its sole and essential product.

“I think it’s pretty dark when labels take a percentage of what their bands make on the road,” Brode says of so-called 360 deals. “We’re not gonna start taking a cut of our bands’ fucking merch money.”

As is sometimes the case, Sacred Bones has so far managed to win plenty of business just by being true to itself. The label’s anti-commercial leanings have already drawn the attention of major national brands, including Target and the ABC series “Grey’s Anatomy,” both of which have licensed syncs of Sacred Bones songs (by Moon Duo and Zola Jesus, respectively). The fauxhemian apparel chain Urban Outfitters recently joined the choir of SBR believers when it began carrying several of the label’s LPs on its store shelves.

In August, the next band to get the Sacred Bones treatment will be the Tempe, Arizona-based Destruction Unit, the project of former Jay Reatard guitarist Ryan Wong. Braaten describes Destruction Unit as “desert punk,” which Brode explains means “really aggressive psychedelic music.” As a member of the Sacred Bones family, Wong will enjoy the same careful treatment and extended network of friends and crash pads as every other artist on the label, regardless of whether or not he ever appears in a national ad campaign or on the cover of a magazine. Just by agreeing to have each other’s backs and put out a new record, all parties have already made one another’s dreams a reality.

Independent Study: Fool’s Gold Records

by Sheme Jobs

Label: Fool’s Gold Records
Founded: 2007
Location: Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Number of Employees: 6
Next Release: Danny Brown, Old, August
Distributor (Digital): Seed
Distributor (Physical): Various
Twitter: @FoolsGoldRecs
Website: FoolsGoldRecs.com

“Independent Study” is a new column that will profile a different independent label every other Tuesday. Its focus is on companies less than a decade old that are defining the DIY era.

To find Fool’s Gold Records, follow the rubber ducks. The six-year-old company’s headquarters, where six full-time employees report for duty in graphic tees and skinny jeans, are in the back of a retail store with mahogany shelves stuffed with snap-back caps, t-shirts, high-end headphones, iPad sleeves, vinyl LPs, cozies, wristbands and rubber duck figurines — the latter being the official mascot of the Fool’s Gold DJ duo Duck Sauce (they “float for reals,” according to the company’s website). Everything in the store is impeccably branded and obviously labored over, from the prismatic merch to the street-luxury décor featuring custom Victorian wallpaper emblazoned with the Fool’s Gold insignia. Since Fool’s Gold built the dual storefront and office — located on a main thoroughfare in Williamsburg, Brooklyn — in 2011, it has stood as a kind of physical embodiment of what the company does best: package and sell signifiers of cool.

“Everything we do is an extension of our own personalities and tastes,” says Nick Catchdubs, co-founder of Fool’s Gold with the DJ and producer A-Trak. “I’m into tank-tops right now, so I would like a tank-top that’s Fool’s Gold. We are our own fan base.”

Fool’s Gold is primarily a record label, but over the past six years it has evolved into an amorphous lifestyle brand. The company is known for its prolific collaborations with apparel and other non-music companies, and for its live events, which include the annual Labor Day festival “Fool’s Gold Day Off” and the traveling dance party “Fool’s Gold Clubhouse.” Across platforms is an ethos of stylish irreverence.

The front part of the Fool’s Gold office is a retail store, where the label sells much of its merch.

Scene ‘Kids’
A-Trak and Catchdubs met in 2006 as DJs who found themselves playing the same parties in clubs around downtown New York. At the time, Catchdubs was unearthing undiscovered music in his day job as an editor for The Fader magazine, and A-Trak had found minor celebrity as a world champion DJ prodigy who toured with Kanye West. Immersed in a community of likeminded artists and musicians, the two men, then in their late 20s, sought an outlet for the dance and hip-hop driven scene around them that didn’t exist at the time. They started Fool’s Gold Records in 2007 and tapped the street artist Dust La Rock — who had designed the fliers for the same parties where they DJ’d — to serve as in-house art director. La Rock created the label’s famous logo and post-modern, graffiti-inspired artwork that has defined its aesthetic ever since.

“It was a period where there was a lot of new, refreshing music coming out and we found ourselves surrounded by all this talent that didn’t have much of a voice,” A-Trak says. “In the late ‘90s I had run an indie hip-hop label with my brother called Audio Research, so I already had this reflex to press something up and put it out if someone around me was making something cool.”

The first Fool’s Gold releases were “Control” and “Pro Nails,” the debut, dance-friendly singles from Chicago-based rapper Kid Sister. The fledgling label got a major boost when West decided to add a verse to “Pro Nails” and featured the song on his influential 2007 mixtape Can’t Tell Me Nothing. A subsequent video for the track, in which West appeared, was played on MTV.

Fool’s Gold’s biggest breakthrough, though, came later that year with the signing of a then-unknown rapper and singer named Kid Cudi. In early 2008, the label released Cudi’s debut single, the buoyant paean to altered mind states “Day ‘N’ Nite,” which would eventually go on to sell over two million copies in the U.S., peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100.

“It started the same way everything started, with us wanting to put out this song that we liked by this guy that we knew,” Catchdubs says of the signing. “You can’t predict what will be a hit, but if you’re putting out music you like by an artist you like, no matter what happens you’ll be satisfied.”

The innerworkings of the Fool’s Gold offices.

The Fool’s Gold Touch
From the beginning, Fool’s Gold the brand was as refined and recognizable as any of its artists. The founders were inspired by the alternative rap labels Stones Throw and Rawkus Records, which cultivated reputations as tributaries feeding a specific segment of music culture. Fool’s Gold, for its part, became synonymous with party-first genre-mixing at a time when dance music and hip-hop were becoming the de facto soundtrack of the youth.

“They were really at the forefront of pushing those two genres together,” says Josh Young, aka J2K of DJ duo and early Fool’s Gold signee Flosstradamus. “They were always a bit ahead of the curve because they were willing to take risks on records that other labels wouldn’t take a chance on.”

Maintaining that reputation as a taste-making entity is a top priority for the label, which regularly taps its favorite artists of the moment for inclusion on compilation albums or to perform at free parties sponsored by the likes of Bushmills, Adidas and Scion.

“People know what to expect from us, and our artists are very much branded as Fool’s Gold artists,” A-Trak says. “It’s been very important to us to create mental associations where when people think of Fool’s Gold, they think of the first event where they saw Juicy J in New York, or their first time hearing Danny Brown.”

The company has a penchant for mascots, from the rubber ducks to Mr. Goldbar, a foam costume character with white Mickey Mouse gloves and the Fool’s Gold logo for a head who is a staple at the label’s events. Most Fool’s Gold artists have their own battery of logos, stickers and apparel that helps to set them apart even in a crowded field.

Perhaps the greatest testament to the Fool’s Gold brand to date is the resurgence of Danny Brown, a licentious rapper from Detroit known only in underground circles before signing to Fool’s Gold in 2011. The label worked with Brown, then 30, to relaunch his career via a free album, XXX, a grassroots promotional campaign and subsequent tour. A-Trak, Catchdubs and co. personally curated everything from the album’s tracklist to its t-shirt-ready cover art, and the release catapulted Brown to his current position as one of hip-hop’s most closely watched rising stars.

“We are essentially a branding and marketing company,” A-Trak says, adding that the label has considered starting its own creative agency. “I think one of the things that Fool’s Gold does best is figure out how to present something — everything from the wording, to the look, to who the right people are to get it to. All of that comes naturally to us.”

As active DJs (A-Trak is on tour 200 nights a year, Catchdubs spins nights and weekends), Fool’s Gold’s founders have a built-in platform for discovering new artists.

“I listen to new music all day long, and out of that a small handful of songs will go into the ‘Listen again’ pile and an even smaller handful than that will go into the ‘Let’s talk about it’ pile,” says Catchdubs, who heads up A&R for the label. “Because we’re on the road so much, we can drop in for a meeting with an artist in their hometown, or play their track at a club and see how people react to it.”

Fool’s Gold signs artists to two-page contracts of varying term length and generally splits revenues 50/50 after expenses are recouped. The company does merch deals with many of its artists, touring deals with some.

“In a lot of cases when we sign these artists, we’re presenting them to the world,” A-Trak says. “So we get them on a lot of shows, we get their merch out there, we present their music to the right people. In more and more cases we get involved in a lot of those activities.“

As the label’s footprint has grown, it has begun to attract artists who were themselves influenced by the Fool’s Gold sound, creating a kind of feedback loop. After he signed a recording contract with the label, the Vancouver DJ and electronic producer Sleepy Tom revealed that years prior he had played the role of Mr. Goldbar at a Fool’s Gold party.

The Duck Pond: The Fool’s Gold Records storefront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

A Tailored Approach
Unlike many of its peers, Fool’s Gold doesn’t have a contract with a physical distributor. The company releases all of its records digitally through Seed Worldwide and partners with physical distributors, including Fat Beats and Traffic, only on select releases. The strategy helps control costs and forces the company to think about each project individually.

“Some bigger labels are run by old people with a cookie cutter mentality who still have the same numbers in their head from 10 years ago of what first week sales should be,” says A-Trak. “But we don’t have any ingrained numbers or processes. If our objective on a given release is to sell through 1,500 pieces of vinyl, then we’ll press 1,500 and not 5,000. We’ve always played it very safe as far as projection and budgeting.”

“All of our releases do fine without ever sending us into debt,” adds Catchdubs. “We’ve never had something bomb and then said ‘Oh shit, we need a hit!’ in order to make up for all these CDs that we were sitting on. Everything is thought out and managed according to the scope of the specific project.”

The company is perhaps less conservative when it comes to the merch side of the business, which now generates as much profit as does record sales. The Fool’s Gold web and retail stores are well stocked with t-shirts, hats and accessories priced between $25 and $50 each (the rubber ducks retail for $20). One of the company’s most successful products, a slim-cut leather jacket made in collaboration with Member’s Only, sold out at $775.

Catchdubs says he doesn’t see the merch business as underwriting the music one, but rather looks at both as two sides of the same coin.

“It’s not that we’re inoculated against dipping sales because we sell merch,” he says. “For us it’s more like we sell sweatshirts and we also sell records.”

In the back office behind the retail store in Williamsburg, Fool’s Gold employees work cutting promo videos and updating the company blog in a cozy space buttressed by boxes of clothing (they take turns manning the register up front). The label has a stacked release year, with new full length albums coming from Danny Brown, Duck Sauce and recent signings Party Supplies and Grande Marshall, a producer and rapper respectively. If things go well, the company is considering moving from the retail location to a larger, less cluttered office.

“We want to get to a place where we can hire someone else because there’s room to put them,” Catchdubs says. “There’s only so much Tetris you can play in a space like this.”