From the record counter to a digital label

For nearly a decade, beginning in the late 1990s, I moonlighted at Disc-Go-Round Cumberland in Atlanta. It was one of the happiest periods of my life. I loved the place and I loved the people. The customers were there to relax so you saw folks at their best: tipsy on a lunch break, jazzed on a date, or red-eyed & tripping on a listening station. It was an agreeable arrangement. The other nice part was that you got to listen to music all day. I attempted to listen to a new album every hour for eight hours a day which was ear-opening. We had over ten thousand titles and they were weird titles, which attracted customers from all over town. Everyone from T-Pain to Deerhunter to Patti LaBelle shopped in our store. They came because of the owner Pete, who knew and knows more about music than anyone. So the best part about Disc-Go-Round was definitely Pete, and it was through Pete that I developed my taste for the obscure and my love of sharing music with others.

A digital imprint

I had long entertained the idea of starting a record label though the expense of manufacturing and distributing physical records put the enterprise well beyond my means. By the early 2000s, however, something remarkable was happening. We were listening to more music discovered through Napster than we were pulling from the shelves. I remember being especially taken with Greg Davis publishing field recordings on his website, and later with CON-V, which demonstrated that an independent digital imprint could retain all the familiar dignity of a record label: album artwork, liner notes, catalog numbers, and carefully considered releases. The record could survive without the physical object.

HOMOPHONI emerged from this period of experimentation. What began as a modest experiment gradually became a catalog of work by musicians whose ideas, sensibilities, and peculiar approaches to sound I admired.

The record could survive without the physical object.

A catalog of unusual music

The music itself is not especially difficult to describe, though it can be difficult to classify: electroacoustic improvisation and composition, ranging from the wild and abrasive to the delicate, contemplative, and occasionally sublime. The catalog contains work by artists I have encountered, performed alongside, corresponded with, or simply held in considerable esteem. There has never been much of a commercial proposition behind it. I love albums, I love discovering unusual music, and I take great pleasure in helping other people discover it. These days the site is dormant but I never rule out hearing something I want to share.

In many respects, HOMOPHONI is simply a continuation of those happy years behind the record counter, except that now nobody needs to buy anything.