[0]I make no secret of my analog nostalgia. I'm a Mexican kid from East of LA, and my childhood was not as awash in digital enhancement as it is today. I remember days watching hand-drawn cartoons on a mirror-projector big screen, renting fuzzy video tapes from the local hole in the wall every weekend, and listening to tape-saturated dirty raps after my parents went to sleep every night. Much of my "musical upbringing" happened on a record player. My dad is a recovering vinyl addict; every week he would walk down to Poobah Records to buy a couple of LPs. Well, over the weeks and the years, his collection began to fill out: prog-rock (lots of Yes!), sixties hippie-shite, ZAPPA!, a few bits of jazz, disco, heavy metal, power pop, punk, movie soundtracks, drippy singer-songwriters, and tons of R&B. It seems to tail off with a handful of terrible ‘80s pop records and virtually comes to a dead halt mid-80s, just about when the second kid was born (me) and vinyl reached the end of its reign as the industry standard. As a whole, my dad's collection is a pretty impressive survey from the zenith of full-length vinyl production. I could swallow up huge chunks of an artist's discography on vinyl in a single sitting, though I never really appreciated it. By the time I got to college, the 192k rips of classic rock songs drunken frat boys and timid nerds would glorify at all hours of the night in the dorms were boring to me at any volume. I spent too many nights tying to sleep with Led Zeppelin on ELEVEN, feeling marginalized and left to aurally starve. Luckily, I've always found a narrow path where many share my obsession for the analog artifact over the digital-replica. I'm no ungrateful Luddite - you won't find me smashing looms anytime soon - but I think there is something special about listening to a strange tape in the privacy of your bedroom, or spinning a side on vinyl with those little crackles and subtle distortions. It's hard for me to gauge an artist's career until I hear them on wax. So my column, named after my favorite 12" by MF Grimm on the long-deceased Fondle ‘Em records, is dedicated to the labels and artists who still show a commitment to the analog in the face of its lost necessity. Producing music on analog formats, especially vinyl, is a highly unprofitable business, so I want to show my personal appreciation for these formats. I'm sure many other fans value vinyl more than I, so I hope to encourage this Renaissance of private press labels to continue down the groovy path.

Up first is one of the most infamous analog specialists operating without a budget:

Los Angeles-based Not Not Fun has become something of a blue chip company since its inception back in 2004. Unfortunately, they're not getting write-ups in Spin or becoming the subject of gossip fodder on Pitchfork, but the label's track record for sell-outs on their limited-run releases may be the highest west of the Mississippi. Their success is based around a cross-genre, cross-platform love fest for some of the wildest strains of underground expression burrowing in deep these days. There isn't a format too niche for this private press, offering their unique take on DIY hand made analog production as it burns bright years beyond its practicality. CDRs are the new blood of the independent-minded (cheap, quick, and widely accessible) and pro-pressed CDs are still the industry standard, so the commitment of Not Not Fun to analog formats is truly astounding. Let's just mention the high-quality tapes by the dozens, from the hulking C-90s to the throwback cassingles (even a pro-pressed tape planned for the future), and only briefly look over the list of two full runs of the Bored Fortress 7" subscription series, 12 pieces of vinyl pitting 24 of the best units in today's experimental scene with their (il)logical counterparts. Even with all that put blithely aside, the legacy of Not Not Fun on full-length wax is staggering, a heroic effort of independent ingenuity and passion for seriously strange sound-craft.

[0] I got a chance to talk with label head Britt about the brief but amazing history. "Manda and a friend started the label, officially, in February of 2004 with me in the ‘tentative assistance' capacity. But within a month or so I was onboard full-time..." And this husband and wife dream team out of Eagle Rock, CA has been slaving over the sounds with a work ethic more suited to the sweatshop than a short-run label. With only two-and-a-half years behind them, the catalogue is already reaching up into triple digits. Even if this was a straight CDR label that would be impressive, yet each release is like a love letter to the artists who provide material and the fans that voraciously collect each hand-crafted artifact. Hand-screened, hand-painted, wrapped with beer cans and ribbon, random junk collages... their very first tape compilation actually offered a free tape deck with purchase (but please don't bug them about that!). Couple this with some heavy neon/day-glo/juxtaposed color schemes, and you've got a hundred-plus releases worth the random distro hunt. For anyone who likes buying random bullshit at Mexican swap meets, I've got the label for you.

Though there's no way to discount any format they produce, the Not Not Fun LPs are what stand out to me. As a vinyl addict, they perfectly play to my obsession. And as a fan of obscurities, the label gathers some of the oddest yet most accomplished nice-guy freaks around. The strange thing about pressing wax is that, in both sound and preference, vinyl has become associated with lo-fi, independent music, though the means of pressing vinyl remain a product of industry. While you may find a few companies busting crazy lathe cuts (for crazy prices) once in a blue moon, LPs on private press labels like Not Not Fun still need to be shipped to processing plants, so, unlike CDRs or cassettes, the manufacturing of these artifacts is completely out of their hands. The process for an amateur operation can be slow and confusing according to Britt. "In the beginning we had to just ask around friends/acquaintances for random tips and info and you end up writing a lot of checks for steps you don't entirely understand, and the whole process can be a little overwhelming. But, like anything I guess, you do it 25 more times and it comes to seem not so complicated. Now we know what steps to INSIST on and which can totally be ditched (even if a plant technically ‘advises' customers to)."

Yet, when the vagaries of the production cycle are dealt with, the imperfect nature of this physical format and its means of shipping play a role in the quality of the release. "Vinyl's a tricky format, especially if you're even slightly obsessive or a perfectionist, cause there's often slight scratches on reference lacquers, or test pressings can sound off, or a plate gets damaged en route and messes with the audio. It's a very physical process so naturally it's a million times messier than replicating digital files on spindles of pristine compact discs. Luckily we're not really audiophiles and have zero problem with lo-fi vibes so vinyl always rules to us and is totally worth the extra effort."

Much of the label's early catalogue showed a definite love for the lo-fi So Cal locals very much in the tradition of the first/second wave of underground labels. "I know Manda worshipped all the late 80s/early 90s K and Kill Rock Stars 7 inches...but I think the appeal was more the DIY style than the actual vinyl (though they go pretty hand-in-hand I suppose)." Staying local barely seems possible for a label in the internet age. Moving product through mail-order has brought the label to the attention of many like-minded artists from across the globe, yet locating material outside of the internet can be a lot more challenging. "Unfortunately most underground vinyl stuff is very limited, so unless you're connected to that world for some reason it can remain pretty hidden...not much rare vinyl shit just shows up on some record rack in a store (despite the most heroic efforts on the label's part!)."

I seem to be among the fortunate few who can buy one of these records at a store. I first came across Not Not Fun vinyl at Poobah Records. The store had moved a few miles away from the location my father frequented, and I had recently moved back to San Gabriel (5 miles east of LA), mere miles down the road from their stockpile of strange oddities for reasonable prices. With the extra cash from my public workers paycheck and the disturbing realization that I'd become my father, I immediately picked through the well-stocked experimental section for the choicest goods to blow my brain clean of unoriginal thought. You'd think that in 2006, after years of television media and a mind-blowing internet info barrage, watching Mike Tyson bite off a dude's ear and even once listening to a 70-minute album by Masonna, I would no longer be surprised by anything. But I was totally spooked and in awe of that Haunted Castle/ Grey Skull split 10" hidden in the miscellaneous stack.

Just the cover, man that fucking cover just pops with the sleeve as a cut-out skull and the fake spider webs and plastic spider! How could the music be anything but noise! And though I'm not quite as gung-ho about the plethora of generic pedal noise outfits out there these days, I had no hesitation in buying up a record like this. Haunted Castle has since become a favorite of mine with a strong chain of tape releases last year, especially the split tape with Robedoor on NNF and the one-sided collab they did for Arbor. They are definitely one of the most original units blurting out jagged-yet-droning noise jams these days. Regrettably, I've yet to hear any more from Grey Skull. Their side is pretty cool, but not something that really stuck to memory.

The LP certainly wet my appetite for further NNF releases. And as I toured the record stores of Southern California, Not Not Fun vinyl kept popping up around me. I would later run across a copy of Abe Vigoda's "Sky Route/ Star Roof", a nice 12" full of ADD-inflected noise-rock. It was in the stacks Rhino Records in Claremont, famed home to lo-fi loyalists the Callaci brothers (aka Refrigerator). While I don't bust out such Chino reppin' skittery-rawk madness too often these days, it's a dope piece of grey marbled vinyl for the collection; I especially love the silkscreen covers that display James Bradshaw's bare line art.

[0] While Not Not Fun definitely shows love to the youth wave brigade of fucked up So Cal rock bands, their vinyl catalog tends toward the darker, as for instance the stoner folk vibes of Madison, WI's Davenport, whose NNF LP I got from some mail-order I can't remember. This album is as dark and psychotic as the blood red vinyl and the psycho-killer collage covers. It seems like, when I was barely getting a sniff of all these different crews and scenes, Not Not Fun was hastily cutting, gluing, and stuffing for their cause-definitely the case with the recently repressed Magik Markers LP Feed the Crayon (which I believe I snatched-up at Mad Platter over by UC Riverside). This LP is prime. Amazing. And I'm not going to say anymore on that; I'll wait here while you go get one of the few remaining copies...

Poobah's has the most consistently interesting stock of unknown labels like NNF, and with me dropping my meager earnings there so often, I've been fortunate to learn about various not-so publicized goings-on. The shop has been known to cater to LA hip-hop/electronic DJ sets on the weekends (pretty cool even if that's not to your taste), as well as the odd LAFMS-member performance - Poobah's being their famed meeting ground in the days of yore. That was probably around the same time my dad was shopping there, come to think of it, though probably not in the same dimension. Anyway, Ron, the owner, had let me know that he was hosting a free GHQ performance on a Sunday afternoon; I must have said something like "Get the fuck out" or "hell yeah" or "dude," something surely inane as I'm not the most eloquent speaker. I don't have to tell you that Marcia, Pete, and Steve Gunn proceeded to create amazing layers of reverb-drenched electric guitars, playing deeply American music - even with a harmonica at one point - that somehow connects the dots all around the world in a way that only the best drone can. It was fucking amazing to see them on the balcony, in their own world. But I was shocked to find I was the only person in there who actually came to see the show. Well, me, and two other people: some dude and some girl who I stood behind and completely ignored, two seemingly anonymous figures who turned out to be the NNF brain trust and who would go on to release the fine California Night Burning Dreams, a blue-marbled record by GHQ featuring recordings from that same tour.

[0] And while listening to a record isn't comparable to seeing these players live, the sets on California Burning show the crew at the height of their improvising prowess. Acoustic guitar patterns lay down the pace while electric guitar drones beneath and over, smooth waves of feedback and light distortion, all cued up with a percussive drive that enters the tracks at key moments. All four pieces (including the fantastic three-inch CD that comes with the record) run off different cues that unite different moods and tempos, from blown-out atonal cacophony to the spacious fret wanderings. As with GHQ members' other projects (Double Leopards, Spectre Folk, the Vanishing Voice, Zaimph), there is a touch of mystery and mysticism in their sound. Even when it moves into ecstatic realms, a place of ego-loss or ego-subversion, reaching for something different than the sum of its players, its dissonance does not reach the white-knuckled noise of their other projects, nor does it have the immensity of sound. GHQ records succeed or fail on their minimalist nuance, and California Burning is among their most successful collections, an essential document from a highly-inspired trip through the West Coast.

GHQ are a unit made for vinyl consumption, and when you're dancing in the lo-fi side of town, a whole lot of great units deserve a couple miles of grainy grooves to run across. "Format is as much an aesthetic choice as silkscreening vs computer printing, or hand-drawn vs stamped, or anything else like that. I don't really think that's debatable. Enshrining an album on vinyl or cassette or CD (or reel-to-reel even) inevitably makes a statement about that particular music... bands and labels who choose to ONLY utilize one format are clearly saying something aesthetically. To us though, every format has merit. Just depends on the context." For some, recording on vinyl puts them into the continuum of past artists they admired as a child; other artists don't play toward the nostalgia, but rather the texture and sound of vinyl, really focusing on the physical, lo-fidelity nature of the recordings with the belief that this enhances the experience of the sound they produce. "Occasionally bands/artists have been like ‘here's our music...we recorded it SPECIFICALLY to be pressed on vinyl.' Family Underground did that....same with the new Inca Ore LP. Sometimes you can hear that quality in the music and sometimes it's just subjective hyperbole on the artists' part, but I like the idea regardless."

[0] But can a sound like the Family Underground's really owe such a huge debt of success to the format? It's hard to tell. Their NNF album Riven is indeed a monster, and if you're at all familiar with the crew, it doesn't deviate too far from what you've come to expect: massive, Mesozoic noise-drones. It's definitely worth the cash even if you already have a ton of their releases, because this is an amazing piece of vinyl (though to be honest, I think a few of their CDRs sound better). The experience is always dependent upon the material. Few of us are in the position to really compare the same material on different formats. Label operators usually have a deeper perspective of how material sounds on digital versus analog formats. "To my ears, MOST music sounds better on vinyl, but there's certainly a gradient within that opinion. There's been a number of instances where I didn't really 150% fall in total love with a recording until I heard the reference lacquer/test pressing...the recent Mudboy record was like that for me. Hearing it loud and slightly scratchy and deeply analog just made it burn with such a deeper energy than the CDR demo. The Heavy Winged ‘We Grow' LP made a similar leap for me... those songs explode so much more colorfully on the turntable."

And these two records represent two completely different sounds. The Heavy Winged LP, We Grow, is perhaps more volatile than anything the band has recorded thus far - two heavy-ass jams housed on a nice piece of dark blue vinyl that shine a light on some of the best aspects of the band's sound, drum bashing and electric fret scorch that's just unrelenting. For a band that can encompass cool-out grooves, stoner drones, and metal head guitar runs, the vinyl format works with the referential nature of their style. Meanwhile, Mudboy's LP Hungry Ghosts! These Songs Are Doors may be one of the crown jewels of the label's ingenuity in both music and packaging. The cover is blindingly psychedelic, laser-cut with fiery, serrated designs on front and back using the sleeve as an extra layer of coloring. This is actually my first experience with a Mudboy album and man does it fuck me up. While some songs have a deep, dub-influenced percussive style, others work under his idea of "dark cinema" to incredible effect (read the recent Mudboy interview on Foxy Digitalis [1] for more on that). Droning notes color the backdrop as more abrasive sounds attack the senses with all kinds of echo-drenched vocals agitating the frontal lobe, creating a sound that's shamanic without sounding typically ritualistic; the organ solos from those giants he modifies are truly awesome. The record can be spacious but dense, soothing and terrifying, usually within the same song. Each side is a beautifully complete experience, that when taken as a whole, becomes a radio-play for the FX-pedal generation.

[1] I've barely scratched the surface of NNF here - check out the label's catalogue [2] to see everything I couldn't mention (that's quite a lot). But I know that these records will outlast any of the hundreds of CDRs I have bought over the last couple of years. Time and effort spent on the hunt for vinyl can only deepen our appreciation of its worth. Yet, while I'm putting out a twenty and some gas money, the labels put out at least a hundred times more effort, and they can definitely end up losing a lot more than that. "When you press vinyl yourself, and understand what a brave/risky move it is to embark on, it's hard not to respect the labels out there who keep it alive and push weird projects on to wax...these days for vinyl I always love/follow Ultra Eczema (no one even comes close to Tyfus' art-packaging), Woodsist, Weird Forest, Animal Disguise, Qbico, S-S... and I'm really glad when larger labels like Load and Holy Mountain and even Sub Pop and Drag City bother still doing vinyl versions of their big albums when they can afford it...it's important somehow. The thing you can't take away from vinyl is that the shit LASTS. I can dig up some DESTROYED-looking copy of Blizzard of Ozz from a Goodwill - a copy that's seen a solid 20 years of total environmental assault - and when I throw it on, the riffs still just RIP out of the speakers. On the other hand, CDRs I've owned for 4 days sometimes won't play anymore if I've dropped it on the ground or something. I need something that can withstand some life abuse. Cause life is brutal!!"

Vinyl will prevail, in spite of the seeming odds. Imagine this scenario: NNF recently pressed up three-hundred and fifty copies of the recent Feeders of Ravens LP by San Francisco harsh kill-jazz noisemongers Ettrick. Now, you've got to believe that there are at least two-hundred people out there who will cherish this record for the rest of their life, and it's totally worth the comparatively paltry price if you dig heavy bass drums and free jazz (I know I do). But I'm already seeing some reviews dismiss it as a cross-genre novelty, which could leave maybe one-hundred and fifty copies on uncertain terms. I'm sure some of those will be stored away forever by record hoarders who maybe like the cover and don't mind the couple millimeters space it takes up on the shelf; it's hard to reduce vinyl like this to puerile commodity status, but maybe a hundred people who buy this record will, seeing it just as a collector's-item investment. So that leaves fifty spare copies floating around in distros and mail-orders, or in a box at the Bored Fortress, to some day be sold en masse to record graveyards or the Salvation Army and once again become an anonymous artifact. Then one day, when vinyl once again faces extinction and a future obsessive record archeologist digs through stacks of generic vinyl crates, he will dig up a destroyed copy of Feeders of Ravens, perhaps expecting some dynamic Nordic heavy metal riffs. And that person will put that record on their player and... who knows? Maybe these kinds of sounds won't be so shocking in the future. Maybe NNF will be known, reviewed on Pitchfork or its future equivalent, celebrated on Rolling Stone covers with bright pink T-shirts and all, and that archeologist will realize he just hit pay dirt, with a beautifully preserved rarity from a label in its prime. Maybe the digger will have stumbled upon one of the most obscure records imaginable and his friends will never be able to find it and love it themselves, so that collector will learn to love it and jam it loud like some declaration of independence. Vinyl will prevail because the experience is unique, self-evident and perfectly imperfect, a task for posterity worthy of all purveyors of sound.

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