Category Archives: Interviews

Columbus Discount Records, currently the most prolific label in town, is releasing three new seven inches tonight at Carabar. Complete show details here. I sent Adam Smith, co-founder of the label, a few questions to get up to speed with the label.

MP3: Van v Art by Necropolis

Robert Duffy: Now that the glow of SXSW is a month behind you, how do you feel about the whole experience was for you and your bands?

CDR: Well, we put in the application for the showcase figuring nothing would come of it. We were really pretty surprised when they gave us one. We went down there with the attitude that we were probably gonna fuck it all up and it was gonna be a total disaster and we were gonna learn from the disaster and hope all of the bands on our label didn’t tell us to fuck off by the end of the night. It turned out not to be a disaster.

The fact that it wasn’t a disaster was 100% because of the how awesome all of the bands were. It didn’t have much to do with CDR doing anything. I mean, El Jesus was better than Deerhunter, NOP was better than the Black Lips, the Pockets were better than Citaaay (or whatever they’re called) Necropolis was better than somebody I assume. Horseshit, TNV, RJD2, Teeth, All of the Columbus bands were the best band in the world at that thing. It’s hard for a label from Columbus to really fuck up with Columbus being what it is at the moment. We already got a list of a million things we want to do better next year. You’ve really got to do it once to understand how to do it, but it went really well.

The big thing Bj and I took from SXSW is a better understanding where we stand in the big, bad indie rock world, or at least an understanding that we needed to do some serious thinking and figure out where we stood. I sort of got off the van and looked around and thought “There are a fucking billion record labels in the world, what is the point of CDR?”

I began to think of the whole thing as a slider and on one end is music as the bare human creative impulse and on the other end is music as a product. Every notch on the slider is a set of processes and compromises that moves expression away from the ideal but provides resources. At SXSW we saw people on either end of the slider going about their business and it really it hit us like a ton of bricks. After SXSW we realized it was important to figure out where we were on the slider and then to figure out where we want to be on the slider and then figure out a way to run CDR accordingly. In the month or so since SXSW we’ve come to a lot of conclusions about what we are doing and why we are doing it and how we’ve done it in the past and how we want to do it in the future. I mean, I know that sounds really obvious and simple, and we probably should have realized all of this all along, but that’s what we got out of the thing.

RD: What’s with releasing all these seven inches at once?

These singles are getting released together because they work well as a series. We spent about a week running around town with a Tascam 4-track recording the bands as they rehearsed, no overdubs no mixing fuckery. So we ended up with sort of a bands in their natural environment series. That wasn’t intentional; it just ended up that way because everybody wanted to take something new down to Texas. We didn’t get much warning about the showcase so we were under this insane time frame to get three singles recorded mixed and manufactured, so we ended up with these three singles with a similar feel.

RD: How’s the new studio space on Parsons coming along?

CDR: For anybody reading this that doesn’t know what Duffy is talking about, we’re working on moving CDR into a 3,000 sq/ft space on Oak and Parsons. The upstairs are offices that we are sharing with Manup and the downstairs is a huge recording space.

Soooo, it’s coming along, slowly, but surely. The office for both labels are up and running. We’re 90% done preparing the recording space. A little sound treatment, hang a couple doors, move our shit in and it’s done. All of our friends and the dudes in the bands have been great about pitching in and helping out with the work, but the space was completely fucked when we found it so it was a lot more work than we thought it would be. It almost quintuples our recording space so it’ll be worth it when it’s done. While we’re finishing the move we are remaining in operation at the “not falling into the basement, I swear” Washington Beach locale.

RD: You’ve mentioned on the message board re-releasing some old school Columbus music. What’s the story?

CDR: We don’t wanna let too many cats out of their respective bags, but this summer will see the first of those re-releases, “Tom’s Tall Tales of Trauma”, by Tommy Jay of Mike Rep & The Quotas/Ego Summit fame. It was originally a cassette only Oldage/NoAge release. Will Foster let us borrow the tape while we were working w/ the Guinea Worms and we basically freaked out over it. It’s about 25 years worth of Jay/Rep/Squidfish 4-track recordings starting in the early 70’s. It’s all freaked out shit, some of it is pretty folky, some is proto-punk. We’re doing a vinyl release as well as a CD release with bonus tracks, including some True Believers material (more classic Jay/Rep stuff). I could do a whole interview about the process of getting this together, but suffice it to say, this record is a real testament to the cultural tradition of Columbus punk rock. It should also be said that working with Tommy and Mike to get this project together has been a very rewarding and kind of mind blowing thing.

There are some other things in the works, but we don’t want to say too much about them yet, for fear of being boned by our own hubris.