I take music way too personally, I know this. Before I learned that a person could have never heard of Hawkwind and still have a valid point of view, I based friendships entirely on musical taste. I’m much better now, but sometimes a vestigial habit crops up — like approaching a new record by an artist I like with skepticism out of a deeply rooted fear of disappointment (I trace this back to the scarring moment in eleventh grade when REM officially started sucking).
However, nothing touches off these music-related fears and excitement quite like the prospect of an exciting record label. Falling in love with a record label is even riskier than falling in love with a band — it’s an affair with a whole sound, with a group of people, with Something That’s Going On. It’s inevitably a losing gamble, because more likely than not, a good record label will end up breaking your heart — usually by going bankrupt.
Because my relationship with music is so emotionally fragile, it’s the record labels that fly low and burn steadily that hold my attention. These are hard to find, but they’re there. And to them, I am forever loyal.
The latest record label I’ve gotten heavy with is Fonal Records in Finland. Started in 1995 by Sami Sänpäkkilä [also a musican and filmmaker], Fonal has issued a consistent string of interesting, beautiful and mindblowing releases by Finnish artists and has been a portal for glimpsing the varied and luminous underground rock scene in Finland. Fonal reminds me of one of those awesome foreign trips where your host is warm and enthusiastic and takes you to all his favorite places, introduces you to his friends and you not only have a head-spinning time, but you end up with a lifelong network of cool people in your life. We’ve never met, but me and Sami Sänpäkkilä? We’re in deep.
Fonal isn’t anchored to any one scene or sound — the bands come from cities all over the country, some of the bands sing in English, others in Finnish and several don’t sing at all — but somehow the label presents a unified front.