PLEASENCE RECORDS FIFTH ANNIVERSARY with SOUPCANS, NEW FRIES, ZONES and BLONDE ELVIS at Smiling Buddha (961 College), Friday (October 16), 9 pm. $10 at the door. pleasencerecords.com. See listing.
Five years ago, James Lindsay came into a lot of money after renovating and selling his mother’s house after she passed away. He quit his job and spent a year reading, writing, learning how to cook and going to hear weird punk bands and arty electronic acts in DIY spaces.
“Then one day I was having dinner at Deirdre Sullivan’s house and she stated her intention to release a 7-inch by our favourite band at the time, Induced Labour,” says Lindsay over the phone. “I was immediately like, ‘I want to do that with this money. Let’s give it a shot.’”
Half a decade later, their label, Pleasence Records, is still a going concern, with releases by Moonwood, Germaphobes, Blonde Elvis, Zones, Eucalyptus and Sexy Merlin on the horizon. Lindsay and Sullivan specialize in undiscovered bands with hard-to-define- sounds, though their favourite music is post-punk, which Lindsay points out is a genre broad enough to include The Human League, Joy Division and Destruction Unit.
They modelled Pleasence after local label Telephone Explosion, which five years ago had just released a Ty Segall record complete with an explosive release party at Rancho Relaxo. Buzz Records and Daps had also just begun, and Lindsay recalls how Denholm Whale from Buzz met up with him for a supportive chat over coffee.
“It was a very warm, casual, loose atmosphere at the time,” Lindsay recalls. “Everyone’s taking it more seriously now. There’s more at stake, I think. And everyone’s more professional. We kind of grew up together and figured stuff out. We’re more mature and businesslike. That’s not a bad thing. It’s been five years of learning how to sell a record.”
So how do you sell a record in this digital age?
“It’s difficult. It’s constantly changing,” says Lindsay, who releases music on vinyl, cassette, digital and CD (the latter of which he thinks is due for a comeback). “We really were that naive at the beginning, thinking the music would be enough to sell it. That we could go into record stores and leave them there and people would give it a chance.
“But it’s not that hard either. Some records are sold by the band working really, really hard, like the first Soupcans record. Other times we get the right press. It doesn’t even have to be huge, like Pitchfork we sold a ton of Slim Twig’s A Hound At The Hem. And I was selling the first Das Rad EP to Norway and Sweden. It was picked up by the right blog over there.
“It’s a bit of weird voodoo behind the entire process.”
carlag@nowtoronto.com | @carlagillis
