Starting a record label is a huge investment – of time, money, blood, sweat and tears. You have to be pretty stupid or pretty masochistic to get yourself involved.
Matt Werth is a masochist all the way; he seems to derive serious pleasure from all that pain. While most of his contemporaries were smoking bongs and navel-gazing, Werth channelled his high-school boredom into releasing punk records. His arrival several years later in New York – via Philadelphia – prompted him to found a new imprint, Rvng Intl., indulging his increasing interest in dance and electronic music. To begin with, the main strand of Rvng’s output was the Rvng of The Nrds series, with artists from near and far – including The Flying Squad (Tim Sweeney), Wade Nichols (Todd Terje), Greg Wilson, Pilooski and Jacques Renault – contributing re-edits of obscurities and forgotten gems by the likes of Wire, R.D. Burman and Munich Machine. A significant cut above the usual mutant disco fodder, these 12″s were clad in distinctive artwork from Kevin O’Neill and sounded, without exception, killer; but Rvng was never going to restrict itself to re-edits. Running alongside the Rvng of The Nrds was the Rvng presents Mx series, a run of eccentric mix CDs that peaked with mind-bending entries from Purple Brain and JD Twitch, and since then Rvng has brought out two original releases, Pink Skull’s Endless Bummer LP and These Are Power’s Candyman EP.
But the focus of our attention today is Frkwys, a division of Rvng which sprung into life last year. More than a mere sub-label, Frkwys’ stated ambition is to bring together “contemporary artists and their progenitors by way of remix, reinterpretation and original collaboration”. The first 12″ release on the label, perversely entitled Frkwys Vol.2, featured two remixes of Jon Fell Ryan’s much-loved experimental troupe, Excepter. The Brooklyn band, who have released their last few albums on Animal Collective’s Paw Tracks, surrendered the stems for their tracks to Carter Tutti and JG Thirlwell. Carter Tutti is of course the duo of Chris Carter and Cosey Fanni Tutti, founding members of Throbbing Gristle and all-round electronic envelope-pushers (can you believe this was made in 1983?), while JG Thirlwell is best known for his grandstanding industrial recordings as Foetus, and more recently the Morricone-influenced instrumentals he makes under the name Manorexia.
As if all this cross-generational collaboration wasn’t extraordinary enough, Frkwys is an interesting business proposition in and of itself, being based around a 100-strong base of subscribers who help to finance its releases and feed back with ideas for projects they’d like to see happen. This additional funding allows the label to compensate all artists involved upfront, and also enabled Vol.2‘s amazing packaging: a tip-on style jacket wrapped in black leatherette and overlayed with “family portrait”-style photographs of Excepter, Thirlwell and Carter Tutti.
This month sees the release of Frkwys Vol.3, an album-length collaboration between ARP & Anthony Moore, comprising seven modern minimalist instrumentals and one vocal track born out of sources old and new. It features reworkings of original and unreleased 1960s material by Moore, and contemporary pieces by ARP (real name Alexis Georgopoulos). The project came about as a result of Georgopoulos’s love of Moore’s 1971 album Pieces From The Cloudland Ballroom, a record once described by Alan Licht as neither “a Krautrock or artrock LP but a bona fide minimal classic”. When Moore heard some of ARP’s own music, he claimed to be “struck by a powerful sense of familiarity, a recognition of certain musical values close to my own heart being explored by someone else”.
The upshot of this instinctive connection was the coming together of Moore and Georgopoulos at Atlantic Sound’s Brooklyn studio in September 2009, where they recorded Frkwys Vol.3 with a 24-track, 2″ Studer tape machine. A range of instruments and strategies were employed in the making of this soaring, contemplative record, including tape loops, cello, violin, piano and analogue synthesizers. Fans of Arthur Russell, Steve Reich and the more pensive, organic end of kosmische music will find much to admire here; and of course it all comes in sumptuous tip-on packaging replete with family portrait and spot-on design from Kevin O’Neill.
ARP is one third of experimental ensemble The Alps, who have released records on labels including Type, Smalltown Supersound and Root Strata. In 2007 he released a fine solo album for Smalltown, entitled In Light. Anthony Moore, meanwhile, played a significant role (primarily as keyboardist) in the groundbreaking English avant-rock group Henry Cow, which was formed by Fred Frith and Tim Hodgkinson in Cambridge in 1968. The duo performed music from Frkwys Vol.3 live in New York last month, by all accounts a very special evening.
You can tell by now why we’re so interested in Frkwys, right? FACT got hold of the eternally busy Matt Werth to talk about the label, its origins and his plans for its future….
Anthony Moore and ARP by Jody Rogac
First of all, please tell us a bit about yourself – who you are, and what your life in music up to this point has been…
“I’m an 8 year NYC transplant from Arkansas via Philadelphia. I moved to Philadelphia when I was 18, leaving a punk rock record label I’d run through high school and seeking asylum in a city inherently exposed to more music because of its locale.
“Once arrived, I gradually moved beyond the selection of Spacemen 3 and My Bloody Valentine records I transported with me to the grittier sounds of mid-90s Philly noise & psyche a la Siltbreeze (The Dead C, Harry Pussy) and, for the first time in my life, electronic music.
“After finishing college in Philadelphia and playing in several bands, I moved to New York for even broader exposure to music. Rvng released a couple mixtapes prior to my move but really grew legs after the first or second year I was settled here.”
“There are still a lot of incredibly smart and passionate artists left under the mutable and mutant skin cells of NYC.”
To what degree to you consider Frkwys (and Rvng) to be a product of New York? Spiritually and culturally, I mean…
“Thus far, only one of the six artists we’ve involved for a Frkwys edition are based outside of NYC. I don’t need to convince anyone that NYC is a cultural nexus where creative movements both large and small resonate on a worldwide level. I’m just fortunate that I can draw from this truth for inspiration, especially for a project that involves an intense knowledge and respect of music tradition. There are still a lot of incredibly smart and passionate artists left under the mutable and mutant skin cells of NYC.”
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