Thurston Moore: Interview
This guy needs no introduction. Seriously. All you need to know is that this interview eventually became a feature on his label, Ecstatic Peace, which you can find linked from a couple fo months back. Enjoy.
Austin in Austin: As detailed in the book Our Band Could Be Your Life, Sonic Youth and yourself in particular, were so instrumental in bringing attention to these young indie rock bands and essentially creating the Seattle boom. How would you relate what you did during that time with what you’re doing now through Ecstatic Peace!?
Thurston Moore: I’ve had Ecstatic Peace since 1982 or something. For me, it was never a label where I was trying to support or generate any kind of scene. It was basically just my desire to document music that I thought was interesting that wasn’t getting documented. Usually when I do a record by a band, I hardly ever do a follow-up record with the band because they usually get picked up by other labels. For me, that’s the success of it anyways – creating some sort of profile for a band that gets other people interested. It doesn’t happen all of the time, but generally I like to kind of move on to something else. Right now we’re become more professional now that we’re going through Universal. I have to have contracts with bands, giving me the option of having 2-3 record deals for these bands which is kind of weird. I think the band looks at that and is like ‘great, we’re going to do two or three records.’ Well, not necessarily, you never know. This is all kind of new for us to do it in this fashion.
AIA: Ecstatic Peace seems to take on so many projects, especially in the last year that it’s difficult to even keep up with how much it’s done.
TM: Well, yeah. The commitment to different records takes place on different levels. For some records, I’ve had the master tapes for the last five or six years, that sort of thing. The record label to me was something that I did as a vanity label.
AIA: Even so, if you’ve been running Ecstatic Peace since 1982, why is just now beginning to make a name for itself in terms of national noteriety?
TM: Because I did a deal with a major label to utilize their distribution as an independent. I was getting a lot of music sent to me that really warrented some kind of place in the sort of retail scene of independent rock. Stuff that’s not so challenging as most of the stuff I like to normally deal with, just great rock ‘n’ roll records like Black Helicopter’s new record, Awesome Color’s record, those records I thought could really work in that sort of situation. I wanted to sort of start building some capitol to start investing and promoting these bands a bit further instead of me just handing it out to whoever. I’ve never really done much press beside putting a little ad in the back of Wire Magazine or something like that. It’s a fine line. I want the label to be a successful forum for bands like that, and hopefully it can be something that leads the label into other ventures.
I’m into exploding the whole notion of what a record label is. Especially now today with digital media and ability to do things on the internet with visual media. I’m really interested in pursuing more of that and doing some more book publishing. I want to get more of a literary leg up so to speak. But it’s all in due time. I’ve always taken baby steps in my approach to the label and now, after meeting with all of these corporations and people in the record industry to see if anyone would want to invest in Ecstatic Peace- basically investing in me ‘cause they know me from Sonic Youth which has enough of a profile for them to warrant getting involved- that was kind of a big deal.
AIA: How does that deal work? Do you have to reach an agreement as to which bands are going to be released on or through Universal?
TM: Basically there’s three levels. With Be Your Own Pet it was essentially a joint venture with Universal, where the record goes through the Universal distribution system. Bands like Awesome Color and Black Helicopter, we sort of signed them to a pretty modest deal. We put there records exclusively through Fontana Distribution which is a distribution outfit spearheaded by Universal that’s a concentration fo independent labels distributed through them. It’s a pretty active distribution network. And then for a lot of the records that we do, that we’ve done, which is music that really doesn’t stand a chance of selling more than a couple of thousand copies at the most, some of the more experimental stuff, the more noisey stuff. Anything that we do under 1500 copies we either sell ourselves or sell to smaller distributors.
I’m able to release records on any level and that’s really exciting for me. I’ve always tried to put out records that were contemporary in the sense that in my opinion they were what was interesting happening primarily in the underground. Even Be Your Own Pet, with all of the hype and buzz they got in the press, I still sort of saw them as this band that was just bustling around in the Nashville underground. They were playing a decidedly, more challenging faction of garage rock where they were being informed by things that were outside the steer of the typical garage rock genre. Thigs that were much more avant-garde. But I never really thought about them as some big time band that I should try and put out on Ecstatic Peace. I thought that it would be a great thing to be a part of now that I had this new relationshi with Universal. It really made sense to me plus I really liked them. I couldn’t have put their record out any other way because they kind of demanded and commanded more attention that I was able to offer.
What I’m trying to do with Ecstatic Peace is blur the distinction between a band like Be Your Own Pet and more experimental music like Dead Machines, Wolf Eyes, or Hair Police. These bands that are sort of more radical, underground experimental noise bands and stuff like that or even quieter, somber music. We’re putting out a record by Matt Valentine and Erika Elder, MV + EE with the Bummer Road, which is a really amazing record when it comes out because for me it’s the most significant release in terms of what people are looking at as this new freak-folk genre or whatever. Matt Valentine is kind of a flashpoint for that scene and in a way that’s not really known that much in the media. It seems like the media has really latched on to the most identifiable proponents of it. So I’m really excited to put this record out.
AIA: Do you fear at all that some of your bands on Ecstatic Peace may be a little bit weary or regretful about their association with a major label?
TM: There’s something not very cool about being on a label with an association to a major label. That record industry shouldn’t be any different than any other industry that has a workforce. I refuse to unassociate myself with a major label just because people have a history of getting ripped off by them. I never took too much credence in that. It’s usually a much more complicated situation than saying major labels rip people off. You have to know what you’re getting into and know enough about it that you conduct your business in a manner that has some sort of knowledge and ethics to it. I’m not going to blame the record industry for crimes of the past, because the record industry is always made up of industry and the maverick of that pedigree used to go through generational changes, but these days it sort of goes through annual changes. It completely turns into a new face annually and gets more and more hectic to the point where the whole industry is in a state of transition to some whole other new paradigm. It’s a complete shadow of what it was in reality, even ten yers ago. For someone to say that have a problem with a major label, it’s like, based on what? Based on an apparatus that doesn’t exist anymore? I understand the politics of it certainly and it can be a fearsome situation certainly. When we decided to sign to a major label, our whole thing was just being very aware of what we were going into and what was going on with accounting. We were always very aware and very cautious of where money was getting spent and who’s money was getting spent. You can read these nightmare tracks of ex-rock ‘n’ rollers writing books about not knowing what was going on, but that’s there own fault. You have to be cautious, but that’s the same way you have to be in any industry you work in. For me, people being able to advacne in any industry, is the nature of the workforce. I don’t seeing people getting promoted in other industries being called sell-outs; that’s specific to the record industry. I think it’s a bunch of bunk.
AIA: How much of your Ecstatic Peace can you trace back to your success with Sonic Youth and your successful transition to a major label?
TM: It’s due almost entirely to the success of Sonic Youth and whatever sort of profile I have in the mainstream, how ever far that extends. It allows me to be able to walk into a Universal Records and say I’ve done this sort of bedroom label since 1982 and I’d like to take it another label and have them be interested. It’s all due to whatever I’ve established as an artist. I could never have done it otherwise. Historically, vanity labels that get involved with major labels go belly up. I know that going in there. We’re very modest in our finances. The day of a major label giving a label like Matador a few million days as collateral to work with is over. It’s over. Unless you’re a hip-hop label that’s a genre of music that still sells millions of records. There’s only a handul indie rock bands that have sold millions of records in the past few years. Even a band like The Flaming Lips, they’re doing pretty well, but there not doing teenage-emo well.
AIA: Was there a single event that made you want to take Ecstatic Peace to the next level?
TM: That’s a good question. The only thing I can think of is putting a band like Black Helicopter into my CD player kind of unexpectedly, and hearing this raocous rock ‘n’ roll music that every Joe in America could dig so I want to give them access to every Joe in America. That’s what gave me the passion to do it in a way.
Ecstatic Peace has always been viewed as a pretty radical label and I thought, what could be more radical than putting it in a commercial context without deradicalizing the content that much.
AIA: That’s an interesting way to put it. I know a lot of music gets sent to you but I know you also discover music like Be Your Own Pet, on your own. How do you go about finding new music?
TM: I’m insane. There’s a whole community of avant-garde cassette labels, not just here in America but around the world, and I confer with all of them. I constantly purchase anything they do on cassette. I'm interested in the different disciplines and strains that continue and develop.I draw the line on the CD-Rs, I just can’t afford it. That’s even more insane than my own insanity, but what I’ve noticed is that when I do order cassettes people throw in CDs anyways which is kind of nice.
I’ve always been really into archiving. I’ve always been a book collector, a record collector. For me, it’s an archivisit’s obsession in a way. But I’m also really interested in the different sort of disciplines and strains that continue and develop as underpinnings to whatever is happening in the mainstream music scene. For my money, what’s going on in the underground of music right now is far more broad nd wide and interesting, than it’s ever been. It’s just amazing. It has it’s own mainstream in a way that’s completely subterranian to the other mainstream. It’s this whole other world. In a way, that’s what Sonic Youth came out of and we never really had an ambition to leave it either, so we never have.
AIA: How does something like the Notekillers album relate to you as an archivist?
TM: The Notekillers are specific to me as an archivist cause they are a band that released a seven-inch in 1978 that to me, was one of the most iteresting records of that eras. It’s one of many, but to find out that this band had other recordings at the time, I was only too happy to collect every bit of it to put out. It took a long time; it took years for me to put that record out. To me, it’s like nothing’s fast enough. The whole industry of archiving releases is so huge right now. There’s labels that are specific to putting out lost psychadelic records or whatever. That’s a current phenomenon, though it’s been going on for many years. It’s gotten to the point where people are able to just put out some lost acetape of some acid folk band from Buffalo, NY in 1967 that only had one recording from a radio station or something like that but it’s an amazing document of the era. The label will put it out, track down the band, interview them and put out this little package. For me as an archivist, it’s a wonderful thing, but it’s such a marginal factor in the whole world of music. Yet it continues to thrive. You can really thrive in little ways, but a lot of little ways, which makes one big thing. Ecstatic Peace has been like that we’ve put out a lot some really arcane relases where it creates one whole that is really big in peoples’ minds. There’s very few people out there that own ever Ecstatic Peace release out there that sees the label for what it is. It’s just Thurston or whatever, it’s an extension of him as an archivist of him as an archivist and a musician.
AIA: How is it possible for someone to really break into the underground scene when there’s so much out there that you don’t really know where to begin?
TM: You can’t buy into it. It’s like punk rock; you either are of the mind or you’re not. You have to devote yourself to it in a way. You can be a part-time punk. There’s a lot of bullshit detection that goes on in that scene, you get called out pretty quick.
AIA: Now that you’re signing bands to multiple album deals, do you feel like you’re becoming more of a mentor to these bands than just an archivist?
TM: We have to have paper on these bands. I don’t think that’s going to have to much affect on the type of music we’re putting out. Next year we’re putting out a Lee Ronaldo record, I’m doing a record. We have a couple of things on deck that we’re really hoping to get things going with that I can’t really mention yet. It’s weird so our first big summer out, which is a pretty shitty time to do it, we put out three records by artists that nobody had ever heard of before. In a way, the activity that we’ve had this first year, it’s sort of necessary to figure out what exactly we’re doing and what we want to do. It’s still a learning process where we figure out what we want to do.
Weird little things influence me in terms of how a record label can exist. I read something Dylan said the other day about downloading, where he said basically ‘Why shouldn’t people download it? The music’s not worth a damn anyways.’ He wasn’t talking about the quality of the music; he was talking about the format that they’re getting when they download it. It’s this squashed mp3 crappola. We spent how many decades developing stereophonic sound into this wonderful thing to completely decimate it. It’s gone, it’s completely fucking gone. It’s turned into this bullshit medium of iPods. Which for the sake of convenience is a wonder, but it sounds like HELL. Every audio engineer out there worth a grain of salt is in misery because it’s a travesty. But, people don’t care. It’s like politics, you can look at what’s going on, see how bad things are and in general, people are going to look away. They accept authority deliverance.
AIA: What can you tell me about the solo record you hope to put out through Ecstatic Peace?
TM: I’ve been trying to put out a solo record ever since I did one in the 90s, and usually what happens is that a lot of the material I have I transmute it into new Sonic Youth stuff. This allows me to do it in a way that’s good.
AIA: Anything that’s going to surprise some people?
TM: I don’t know. Like the Sonic Youth records I’m just going to let it take shape. I don’t want to preconceive too much of what it is; I don’t have the time to preconceive it. Although it’s so formulated in my psyche in a sense, that I’ll be curious to see how it manifests. It’s like making a sandwich.
Austin in Austin: As detailed in the book Our Band Could Be Your Life, Sonic Youth and yourself in particular, were so instrumental in bringing attention to these young indie rock bands and essentially creating the Seattle boom. How would you relate what you did during that time with what you’re doing now through Ecstatic Peace!?
Thurston Moore: I’ve had Ecstatic Peace since 1982 or something. For me, it was never a label where I was trying to support or generate any kind of scene. It was basically just my desire to document music that I thought was interesting that wasn’t getting documented. Usually when I do a record by a band, I hardly ever do a follow-up record with the band because they usually get picked up by other labels. For me, that’s the success of it anyways – creating some sort of profile for a band that gets other people interested. It doesn’t happen all of the time, but generally I like to kind of move on to something else. Right now we’re become more professional now that we’re going through Universal. I have to have contracts with bands, giving me the option of having 2-3 record deals for these bands which is kind of weird. I think the band looks at that and is like ‘great, we’re going to do two or three records.’ Well, not necessarily, you never know. This is all kind of new for us to do it in this fashion.
AIA: Ecstatic Peace seems to take on so many projects, especially in the last year that it’s difficult to even keep up with how much it’s done.
TM: Well, yeah. The commitment to different records takes place on different levels. For some records, I’ve had the master tapes for the last five or six years, that sort of thing. The record label to me was something that I did as a vanity label.
AIA: Even so, if you’ve been running Ecstatic Peace since 1982, why is just now beginning to make a name for itself in terms of national noteriety?
TM: Because I did a deal with a major label to utilize their distribution as an independent. I was getting a lot of music sent to me that really warrented some kind of place in the sort of retail scene of independent rock. Stuff that’s not so challenging as most of the stuff I like to normally deal with, just great rock ‘n’ roll records like Black Helicopter’s new record, Awesome Color’s record, those records I thought could really work in that sort of situation. I wanted to sort of start building some capitol to start investing and promoting these bands a bit further instead of me just handing it out to whoever. I’ve never really done much press beside putting a little ad in the back of Wire Magazine or something like that. It’s a fine line. I want the label to be a successful forum for bands like that, and hopefully it can be something that leads the label into other ventures.
I’m into exploding the whole notion of what a record label is. Especially now today with digital media and ability to do things on the internet with visual media. I’m really interested in pursuing more of that and doing some more book publishing. I want to get more of a literary leg up so to speak. But it’s all in due time. I’ve always taken baby steps in my approach to the label and now, after meeting with all of these corporations and people in the record industry to see if anyone would want to invest in Ecstatic Peace- basically investing in me ‘cause they know me from Sonic Youth which has enough of a profile for them to warrant getting involved- that was kind of a big deal.
AIA: How does that deal work? Do you have to reach an agreement as to which bands are going to be released on or through Universal?
TM: Basically there’s three levels. With Be Your Own Pet it was essentially a joint venture with Universal, where the record goes through the Universal distribution system. Bands like Awesome Color and Black Helicopter, we sort of signed them to a pretty modest deal. We put there records exclusively through Fontana Distribution which is a distribution outfit spearheaded by Universal that’s a concentration fo independent labels distributed through them. It’s a pretty active distribution network. And then for a lot of the records that we do, that we’ve done, which is music that really doesn’t stand a chance of selling more than a couple of thousand copies at the most, some of the more experimental stuff, the more noisey stuff. Anything that we do under 1500 copies we either sell ourselves or sell to smaller distributors.
I’m able to release records on any level and that’s really exciting for me. I’ve always tried to put out records that were contemporary in the sense that in my opinion they were what was interesting happening primarily in the underground. Even Be Your Own Pet, with all of the hype and buzz they got in the press, I still sort of saw them as this band that was just bustling around in the Nashville underground. They were playing a decidedly, more challenging faction of garage rock where they were being informed by things that were outside the steer of the typical garage rock genre. Thigs that were much more avant-garde. But I never really thought about them as some big time band that I should try and put out on Ecstatic Peace. I thought that it would be a great thing to be a part of now that I had this new relationshi with Universal. It really made sense to me plus I really liked them. I couldn’t have put their record out any other way because they kind of demanded and commanded more attention that I was able to offer.
What I’m trying to do with Ecstatic Peace is blur the distinction between a band like Be Your Own Pet and more experimental music like Dead Machines, Wolf Eyes, or Hair Police. These bands that are sort of more radical, underground experimental noise bands and stuff like that or even quieter, somber music. We’re putting out a record by Matt Valentine and Erika Elder, MV + EE with the Bummer Road, which is a really amazing record when it comes out because for me it’s the most significant release in terms of what people are looking at as this new freak-folk genre or whatever. Matt Valentine is kind of a flashpoint for that scene and in a way that’s not really known that much in the media. It seems like the media has really latched on to the most identifiable proponents of it. So I’m really excited to put this record out.
AIA: Do you fear at all that some of your bands on Ecstatic Peace may be a little bit weary or regretful about their association with a major label?
TM: There’s something not very cool about being on a label with an association to a major label. That record industry shouldn’t be any different than any other industry that has a workforce. I refuse to unassociate myself with a major label just because people have a history of getting ripped off by them. I never took too much credence in that. It’s usually a much more complicated situation than saying major labels rip people off. You have to know what you’re getting into and know enough about it that you conduct your business in a manner that has some sort of knowledge and ethics to it. I’m not going to blame the record industry for crimes of the past, because the record industry is always made up of industry and the maverick of that pedigree used to go through generational changes, but these days it sort of goes through annual changes. It completely turns into a new face annually and gets more and more hectic to the point where the whole industry is in a state of transition to some whole other new paradigm. It’s a complete shadow of what it was in reality, even ten yers ago. For someone to say that have a problem with a major label, it’s like, based on what? Based on an apparatus that doesn’t exist anymore? I understand the politics of it certainly and it can be a fearsome situation certainly. When we decided to sign to a major label, our whole thing was just being very aware of what we were going into and what was going on with accounting. We were always very aware and very cautious of where money was getting spent and who’s money was getting spent. You can read these nightmare tracks of ex-rock ‘n’ rollers writing books about not knowing what was going on, but that’s there own fault. You have to be cautious, but that’s the same way you have to be in any industry you work in. For me, people being able to advacne in any industry, is the nature of the workforce. I don’t seeing people getting promoted in other industries being called sell-outs; that’s specific to the record industry. I think it’s a bunch of bunk.
AIA: How much of your Ecstatic Peace can you trace back to your success with Sonic Youth and your successful transition to a major label?
TM: It’s due almost entirely to the success of Sonic Youth and whatever sort of profile I have in the mainstream, how ever far that extends. It allows me to be able to walk into a Universal Records and say I’ve done this sort of bedroom label since 1982 and I’d like to take it another label and have them be interested. It’s all due to whatever I’ve established as an artist. I could never have done it otherwise. Historically, vanity labels that get involved with major labels go belly up. I know that going in there. We’re very modest in our finances. The day of a major label giving a label like Matador a few million days as collateral to work with is over. It’s over. Unless you’re a hip-hop label that’s a genre of music that still sells millions of records. There’s only a handul indie rock bands that have sold millions of records in the past few years. Even a band like The Flaming Lips, they’re doing pretty well, but there not doing teenage-emo well.
AIA: Was there a single event that made you want to take Ecstatic Peace to the next level?
TM: That’s a good question. The only thing I can think of is putting a band like Black Helicopter into my CD player kind of unexpectedly, and hearing this raocous rock ‘n’ roll music that every Joe in America could dig so I want to give them access to every Joe in America. That’s what gave me the passion to do it in a way.
Ecstatic Peace has always been viewed as a pretty radical label and I thought, what could be more radical than putting it in a commercial context without deradicalizing the content that much.
AIA: That’s an interesting way to put it. I know a lot of music gets sent to you but I know you also discover music like Be Your Own Pet, on your own. How do you go about finding new music?
TM: I’m insane. There’s a whole community of avant-garde cassette labels, not just here in America but around the world, and I confer with all of them. I constantly purchase anything they do on cassette. I'm interested in the different disciplines and strains that continue and develop.I draw the line on the CD-Rs, I just can’t afford it. That’s even more insane than my own insanity, but what I’ve noticed is that when I do order cassettes people throw in CDs anyways which is kind of nice.
I’ve always been really into archiving. I’ve always been a book collector, a record collector. For me, it’s an archivisit’s obsession in a way. But I’m also really interested in the different sort of disciplines and strains that continue and develop as underpinnings to whatever is happening in the mainstream music scene. For my money, what’s going on in the underground of music right now is far more broad nd wide and interesting, than it’s ever been. It’s just amazing. It has it’s own mainstream in a way that’s completely subterranian to the other mainstream. It’s this whole other world. In a way, that’s what Sonic Youth came out of and we never really had an ambition to leave it either, so we never have.
AIA: How does something like the Notekillers album relate to you as an archivist?
TM: The Notekillers are specific to me as an archivist cause they are a band that released a seven-inch in 1978 that to me, was one of the most iteresting records of that eras. It’s one of many, but to find out that this band had other recordings at the time, I was only too happy to collect every bit of it to put out. It took a long time; it took years for me to put that record out. To me, it’s like nothing’s fast enough. The whole industry of archiving releases is so huge right now. There’s labels that are specific to putting out lost psychadelic records or whatever. That’s a current phenomenon, though it’s been going on for many years. It’s gotten to the point where people are able to just put out some lost acetape of some acid folk band from Buffalo, NY in 1967 that only had one recording from a radio station or something like that but it’s an amazing document of the era. The label will put it out, track down the band, interview them and put out this little package. For me as an archivist, it’s a wonderful thing, but it’s such a marginal factor in the whole world of music. Yet it continues to thrive. You can really thrive in little ways, but a lot of little ways, which makes one big thing. Ecstatic Peace has been like that we’ve put out a lot some really arcane relases where it creates one whole that is really big in peoples’ minds. There’s very few people out there that own ever Ecstatic Peace release out there that sees the label for what it is. It’s just Thurston or whatever, it’s an extension of him as an archivist of him as an archivist and a musician.
AIA: How is it possible for someone to really break into the underground scene when there’s so much out there that you don’t really know where to begin?
TM: You can’t buy into it. It’s like punk rock; you either are of the mind or you’re not. You have to devote yourself to it in a way. You can be a part-time punk. There’s a lot of bullshit detection that goes on in that scene, you get called out pretty quick.
AIA: Now that you’re signing bands to multiple album deals, do you feel like you’re becoming more of a mentor to these bands than just an archivist?
TM: We have to have paper on these bands. I don’t think that’s going to have to much affect on the type of music we’re putting out. Next year we’re putting out a Lee Ronaldo record, I’m doing a record. We have a couple of things on deck that we’re really hoping to get things going with that I can’t really mention yet. It’s weird so our first big summer out, which is a pretty shitty time to do it, we put out three records by artists that nobody had ever heard of before. In a way, the activity that we’ve had this first year, it’s sort of necessary to figure out what exactly we’re doing and what we want to do. It’s still a learning process where we figure out what we want to do.
Weird little things influence me in terms of how a record label can exist. I read something Dylan said the other day about downloading, where he said basically ‘Why shouldn’t people download it? The music’s not worth a damn anyways.’ He wasn’t talking about the quality of the music; he was talking about the format that they’re getting when they download it. It’s this squashed mp3 crappola. We spent how many decades developing stereophonic sound into this wonderful thing to completely decimate it. It’s gone, it’s completely fucking gone. It’s turned into this bullshit medium of iPods. Which for the sake of convenience is a wonder, but it sounds like HELL. Every audio engineer out there worth a grain of salt is in misery because it’s a travesty. But, people don’t care. It’s like politics, you can look at what’s going on, see how bad things are and in general, people are going to look away. They accept authority deliverance.
AIA: What can you tell me about the solo record you hope to put out through Ecstatic Peace?
TM: I’ve been trying to put out a solo record ever since I did one in the 90s, and usually what happens is that a lot of the material I have I transmute it into new Sonic Youth stuff. This allows me to do it in a way that’s good.
AIA: Anything that’s going to surprise some people?
TM: I don’t know. Like the Sonic Youth records I’m just going to let it take shape. I don’t want to preconceive too much of what it is; I don’t have the time to preconceive it. Although it’s so formulated in my psyche in a sense, that I’ll be curious to see how it manifests. It’s like making a sandwich.
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