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Since its inception, Ron Morelli’s label has released music from new or under the radar artists. The Redacted Files marks a change in that approach, with L.I.E.S. putting out its first record from New York techno veteran Adam X under his ADMX-71 guise. Hopefully it’s the start of the label’s patronage of established producers pursuing side projects. After all, there is a limit to the amount of lo-fi, tape-frazzled house any label can put out.
The Miami-based L.I.E.S. and Apron correspondent mixes up a bunch of techno and electro.
If ever there was a label susceptible to the concept of familiarity breeding contempt, it’s L.I.E.S. For the past eighteen months, hardly a week has gone by without Ron Morelli’s label announcing a new project or release. It is not unfair to say the notion of L.I.E.S fatigue has become a real thing. This is because the incentive to check out one of its new releases is diminished by the fact that if you ignore it, another new L.I.E.S. record will be along soon enough to engage the listener.
Jorge Velez has seen his share of different terrains. Growing up around the blue-collar textile factories of New Jersey and the still-hopeful, pre-economic-crash American industrialism of the ’80s, Velez explained the importance of the smells, sights and sounds of those work floors to Juno Plus back in 2012. But despite the unique location of his upbringing, and a lifetime of travel (including a European tour with an experimental band he was part of in the pre-MySpace era), Velez’s music doesn’t seem restricted by real places. Instead, he seems most inspired when he’s conjuring spaces from the dark recesses of his mind. Take the Hassan LP on L.I.E.S, which found Velez weaving a wholly-imagined soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist – a film about an order of Persian assassins in the 13th century. Velez admits that it wasn’t created with a physical landscape of any kind in mind, but instead as a tool to get the listener immersed deep inside whatever landscapes their brains served up.
The musical project of Luke Wyatt is once more blessed by his skilled filmmaking with a typically trippy video to the recent L.I.E.S. cut.
It looked like a stack of hay bales. Not quite an oblong, protruding jankily at the corners, the mush of 300 high-rise buildings seemed somehow organic, amorphous, threatening to expand beyond its boundaries. No one would design something like this. And, in fact, the Kowloon Walled City wasn’t really designed at all. It was almost certainly the largest ‘outsider architecture’ project in modern history, housing 33,000 residents in just 0.01 square miles, in a series of buildings designed and constructed entirely without regulation.
The amount of new music currently being released is verging on the unquantifiable; in any given week there is on average around 150 new twelve inches classed as deep house alone. As if it wasn’t hard enough to keep up with all this music, new labels have continued to pop up throughout 2013, with some presuming all it takes to successfully cloak themselves in authenticity is an increasing reliance on well-worn terminology and a sizeable PR budget.
That’s obviously not the case, but if not that, then what are the criteria for a record label to stand out in this well populated climate? A label with a strong sense of curation, a distinct aesthetic and conviction in the music they release tends to be key, all of which breed expectation in those that follow the label, and which encourages the artists involved with the label to dig deeper into their creative processes. The people behind the labels listed below certainly fall under this category, and regular readers of Juno Plus should find the ten inclusions make for perfect sense. As well as reflecting the overall enthusiasm for techno, house and more experimental flavours that have felt so prevalent in the underground this year, these ten labels came with a strong work ethic and a genuinely passionate view of music which has made it a pleasure to show them our support.
Stream “Missing” from the soon to arrive Dream Of The Walled City album.
Ron Morelli is known as the driving force behind the ultra-prolific but always engaging L.I.E.S label. The challenge now facing the straight talking DJ and occasional producer is to step from behind the shadows of the behemoth he has created and to carve out his own identity. Surfacing on Dominick Fernow’s Hospital Productions label, Spit is Morelli’s own statement, but it is one that remains inextricably linked to the aesthetic that underpins L.I.E.S.
The New York-based producer will follow up releases for Avian and The Corner with a mammoth six-track EP for Ron Morelli’s label.
Highlights of a prolific year and unreleased material feature on their forthcoming second 2-CD compilation.