It takes guts to start a record label, given the current state of the music industry. It takes even more to start one up that specializes in vinyl and aims to operate as a nonprofit.
None of the above daunted Bunny’s A Swine’s Candace Clement, who boldly launched TinyRadars this year in Northampton. To celebrate its creation, Clement is curating TinyRadar’s Bookmill Residency in Montague, a series of monthly shows featuring “bands that love music, the Bookmill, each other, and you.”
Clement drew inspiration from some of indie rock’s finest labels as she formulated her attack.
“There’s a little bit from lots of them in there,” she explains. “The local orientation of Dischord, the family of transitioning musicians from band to band that you saw in Teen Beat, the early heydays of Kill Rock Stars—it was easy to feel like you were somehow connected to people even if they were thousands of miles away. Growing up, labels were a way to uncover a whole scene of musicians that held similar beliefs or created complementary work. They were really important for me as I was discovering music. I hope that we can, in some small way, provide some sort of documentation for what was happening in the Northampton area music scene in 2011.”
All releases will be available as a digital download or on vinyl plus digital download. Clement says she’s a big fan of digital music, and as someone who frequently carried around a 200-disc CD binder, she was thrilled when portable MP3 players hit the market. But she believes it was critical to offer a physical component.
“Digital has all these great features: it can exist in multiple places at the same time, it can travel the globe basically for free, it lowers the barrier to both recording and releasing music,” she says, “but digital things disappear easily. And the more we move away from doing things like printing books or pressing records, the more we are just relying on the servers of giant companies to store that information for us. What happens when they go away? What kind of record are we actually leaving behind for the future? You can’t exactly hold an MP3 in your hand. Artwork exists in a different way on a record. Plus, vinyl is just really fun to collect.”
TinyRadars kicked off with two releases in October: a Graph seven-inch and the full-length All Day, Alright from Clement’s Bunny’s A Swine. Clement says that members of both bands were integral in getting the albums out and the label off the ground.
The Bookmill series will feature area bands as well as friends that Clement has met touring over the past few years. She says that the goal is to have every show feature something “a little bit different or surprising.” To set the tone, the first show, on Dec. 3, will feature Bunny’s A Swine playing a mostly acoustic set and the debut of Animal Mother, the solo project of Bella’s Bartok’s Asher Putnam.
Future shows will feature collaborative performances by bands, improv and “even more surprises.”
“We want each show to be something really special because we feel like we owe it to the Bookmill,” says Clement. “The place is so special that we’ve got to keep up.”
For more information, visit www.tinyradars.net.
