Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Our Noise The Story of Merge Records the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small by John Cook Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small by John Cook. There is a certain innocence contained in Our Noise that simply cannot be faked. In short, it’s the story of a group of kids in North Carolina that simply got together and made some music; nothing more, and nothing less. Some of them knew how to write songs, some couldn’t even play an instrument, but friends (and friends of friends) inevitably got wrapped up into Mac McCaughan’s crazy world of off-kilter rock, all of them forming bands and making singles that had no potential to get played on any radio station whatsoever. Then again, making “hits” wasn’t the point: they were making music for fun, and Merge Records — which distributed all of the 7″ singles from all these side-projects — was a label that was born more out of necessity than anything else: when a small group of those North Carolina bands decided to release a bunch of their songs together in a cheaply-made box set called evil I do not… (featuring the likes of the Angels of Epistemology, Wwax, and the Slushpuppies — the latter of which was McCaughan’s first band), they formed a small one-off label called Palindrome Productions. Shortly thereafter, Mac’s friend (and later Superchunk bassist) Laura Ballance got in on the act as well and, with little fanfare, Merge Records was born. Our Noise is an oral history of Merge Records, featuring interviews from its founders (McCaughan and Ballance), it’s numerous signees (featuring members of Lambchop, Spoon, the Arcade Fire, and more), and various admirers and business partners (like Dischord Records founder/Fugazi frontman Ian MacKaye). Author John Cook alternates his chapters between recounting the history of the Merge label and then profiling one particular band. In a short amount of time, the main players are firmly established: Mac is a svengali-like figure, gathering likeminded rock types around him while being in it primarily just for the music; Laura — by contrast — has a knack for the business side of things, capable of keeping people on budget even during the most dire of times. What’s most fascinating, however, is the ebb and flow between Merge and Superchunk. After writing a ridiculously catchy rock stunner called “Slack Motherfucker”, Superchunk’s profile gradually grew, initially through the rabid early-’90s zine culture but also by larger mainstream outlets, as well. Our Noise goes to great lengths to establish the importance that Nirvana’s Nevermind had on the music industry, pushing alternative rock into the mainstream and giving a platform for lesser-known indie rock acts like, well, Superchunk. “Slack Motherfucker” lead to bigger-selling albums, magazine cover features (from the likes of NME, no less), and an increased awareness (and bank) for all of Merge’s signees. Though “signee” is still a loose term. Part of what makes the Merge story so charming is simply the fact that for the longest time, Mac and Laura tried to be the label made up entirely of friends, often getting acts to “sign” to the label through the simple act of oral agreement, less they become to “business-like” in the eyes of their peers. Such naïve, optimistic behavior wound up getting the better of Merge in the long-run, however, as the buzz-band… And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead wound up jumping to a major shortly after their first Merge release — and leaving Mac and Laura in a position where they positively could not do anything to legally stop them. It’s these simple up-and-down stories that wind up making Our Noise a fascinating read, both from the perspective of how the music industry has changed to how art simply gets made. No better story exemplifies this than when Mac & Laura wound up stumbling into a relationship together… only to break up later on. After getting their Superchunk records distributed through Matador through several years (the story of how labels like Matador, Touch & Go, and Sub Pop had unofficially “banded together” is another great historical footnote as well), Mac and Laura decided to move Superchunk operations entirely to Merge just in time for 1994’s Foolish , which is commonly known as Mac’s “break-up album”. Mac goes to great lengths to make the reader understand that Foolish wasn’t about his breakup with Laura, but also concedes that no matter what he says, that’s how people will interpret it (no doubt helped by the cover art — a self-portrait of Laura looking outward with a dead bunny hanging on the wall behind her). Laura wound up turning off her earpiece during the subsequent tour because Mac’s lyrics would make her cry. Then the irony hit: it became one of Superchunk’s best-selling releases. This leads to what is easily the greatest strength of Our Noise : you don’t have to be familiar with Superchunk, the label, or even any of the bands on the label to enjoy the stories told within. You don’t have to know Britt Daniel’s personal history to relate to how he wound up getting major- label cash to become an alternative rock star, only to suffer from terrible reviews and downright depressing sales figures when all was said and done. Elektra Records manager Ron Laffitte wound up coming to the band’s rescue, getting them taken care of while Daniel and drummer Jim Eno wound up recording A Series of Sneaks , an acclaimed classic-rock throwback album that — despite stellar critical notices — still got not promotional push from the label as promised by Laffitte. The group got dropped, the band felt betrayed, and Daniel and co. responded to the whole situation by releasing a 7″ on Saddle Creek called “The Agony of Laffitte”. Though intended as a bit of a bitter kiss-off, that little song is what ultimately gave the group the publicity they had long been missing out on (multiple media outlets using it as an example for those “what’s wrong with the music industry today” pieces). They eventually got picked up by Merge — a label that giddily supported them through the thick and thin — all leading up to when 2007’s Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga came out, where — lo and behold — it debuted in the Top Ten of the Billboard album chart. Though there’s nothing wrong with Merge taking some time out to celebrate its 20th anniversary of existence, the one main drawback of Our Noise lies in the fact that it sometimes can be a bit too self-congratulatory. A description of former Butterglory frontman Matt Suggs’ solo disc Golden Days Before They End goes on the heavy editorial bent by saying that it’s “as visceral and punishing a document of a failed relationship as Blood on the Tracks “, a statement that gets lost in its own sense of grandeur. Instead of mentioning how a positive Pitchfork notice wound up raising the profile of the Arcade Fire’s 2004 debut full-length Funeral , Cook goes one extreme step further by re-publishing the review in its entirety within Our Noise , a self-serving pat on the back that is both excessive and unnecessary, especially considering that the historical Merge photos, faxes, pull-quotes, and handwritten newsletters displayed through the pages prove far more intriguing. Yet even with a few editorial misgivings, Our Noise really takes hold because what’s contained within meshes perfectly with its title: it is truly our noise, something that is not defined by any one artist, album, or song. The Merge Records “scene” is not as much a fad or style as much as it is a community, established by a series of artists, labels, and friends that come together to celebrate the very best music that they’ve ever heard. Perhaps no better line sums up the feeling than this quote from Jenny Toomey about the “outsider scene” that some perceive indie-rock to be: “There’s a great line in a Destroyer song: ‘Formative years wasted / In love with our peers, we tasted / Life with the stars.’ I couldn’t have found language more clear about that whole idea of what we ere doing. The twenty people who understand what you’re talking about are the twenty most important people in the world. Maybe that’s the difference between professional culture and outsider culture. Our antennae were tuned very specifically for like minds, as opposed to sending out a single to convert people. There are some kinds of art that are trying to find their peers, and there are other kinds that are trying to make peers.” For still being in the game after putting out two decades worth of classic albums (including such standard-bearers as the Magnetic Fields’ 99 Love Songs and Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea ), it’s obvious that Merge — with its success and its struggles — is still wanting nothing more than to make some peers of its own. In our rushed digital age of today, there’s something profoundly sweet about such a simple sentiment. Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small. As usual, my reading life in 2009 was split into comics, which I read voraciously and with a eye toward timeliness, and everything else, which I read haphazardly and with an eye toward pleasure. Start with the everything else. Plans to review the Broadway production of Alan Ayckbourn’s The Norman Conquests sent me to my old copy of the plays, still battered from when, in college, I tried to convince a theater company to let me direct a cast of undergrads in a farcical British trilogy starring a middle-aged British sexaholic. Thankfully for everyone, I was turned down, but re-reading the plays again was a pleasure. In performance, Ayckbourn’s dialogue and construction seem effortless, but on the page, you can tease out the keen sense of narrative that makes these plays so satisfying. My first real job was at the Bull’s Head Bookshop in Chapel Hill, just after I graduated from that college, and my boss — Erica Eisdorfer, still to this day the best boss I’ve ever had — released her first novel this year, The Wet Nurse’s Tale. I am happy to report that it is great: funny and rousing and just a little bit sexy, despite all that nursing going on. Susan Rose, the novel’s earthy, determined heroine, sets herself apart from other costume-drama heroines with her first words, bellowed out while delivering her first baby: “It’s like shitting a pumpkin, it is!” The years I was living in Chapel Hill were the peak of the indie-rock bumrush the local music scene received in the wake of the town being declared “the next Seattle.” (I remained mostly unaware of the frenzy, happily reading books and putting on plays.) But Our Noise:The Story of Merge Records, a big, lively, comprehensive oral history by John Cook, Mac McCaughan, and Laura Ballance, tells the story of how one small local record company managed to withstand the tidal wave of big-label attention and focus for twenty years on what it did best: 1) Putting out albums by great bands like Superchunk, Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, and the Magnetic Fields, and 2) Not being assholes. Our four-year-old has very specific tastes in books, and each night picks a title out of a rotation of maybe ten, total, that we read over and over and over. A lot of the books do not hold up to rereading if you are not four: Purplicious, for example, is no Pinkalicious. But a hand-me-down from my old bookshelf, Richard Scarry’s Favorite Storybook Ever, is so packed with detail and charm that it never gets old, and for that I’m grateful to Scarry and his anthropomorphic animals (and their bananamobiles). Now, comics. For anyone who reads and writes about graphic novels, the year’s big dog was Asterios Polyp, David Mazzucchelli’s long-awaited story of a New York architect whose buildings have never been made and his desperate journey into Middle America. And it was as good as advertised: intricate, funny, lovely to look at, and as carefully assembled a comic as I’ve ever seen. I hope Mazzucchelli doesn’t take ten years to make his next book, but I’m grateful that the ten years it took him to create this one were well-spent. An autumn trip to Montreal led me to a number of the city’s great comics stores, where awesome Francophone bandes desinées line the shelves, making me wish I still remembered my AP French. At Librarie Drawn + Quarterly in Mile End — the bookshop run by Montreal’s terrific art- comics publisher — I picked up the one of Michel Rabagliati’s series of autobiographical comics that I hadn’t yet read, Paul Has a Summer Job, and devoured it that night in our hotel room. Like all of Rabagliati’s books, it takes the quotidian details of life — in this case, a summer spent as an underqualified counselor at a Quebec camp for underprivileged kids — and transforms them into lovely, perfect stories. Bonus points for the most touching ending I’ve read in years. Although it was nominated for an LA Times Book Prize, Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole flew under the radar a little bit; it was officially published by Top Shelf last year but (due to shipping problems) not actually in stores until the winter. It’s a wildly imaginative and thoughtful story of two stepsiblings linked by affection and incipient schizophrenia, pushing against the doctors and loved ones who only want to help them. Powell vividly draws swarms of cicadas, talking elves, and grumpy pills with teeth, but at the heart of this gorgeous story are two teenagers trying to work out when everything will finally get better — just like we all felt once. It was my favorite book of the year. Our Noise : The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label that Got Big and Stayed Small. Merge Records defies everything you've heard about the music business. Started by two twenty-year-old musicians, Merge is a lesson in how to make and market great music on a human scale. The fact that the company is prospering in a failing industry is something of a miracle. Yet two of their bands made the Billboard Top 10 list; more than 1 million copies of Arcade Fire's Neon Bible have been sold; Spoon has appeared on Saturday Night Live and The Tonight Show ; and the Magnetic Fields' 69 Love Songs is a contemporary classic. In celebration of their twentieth anniversary, founders Mac and Laura offer first-person accountsÑwith the help of their colleagues and Merge artistsÑof their work, their lives, and the culture of making music. Our Noise also tells the behind-the-scenes stories of Arcade Fire, Spoon, the Magnetic Fields, Superchunk, Lambchop, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Butterglory. Hundreds of personal photos of the bands, along with album cover art, concert posters, and other memorabilia are included. Отзывы - Написать отзыв. LibraryThing Review. A really, really good book on a do-it-yourself record company that didn't know how to do stuff, found it out themselves and are still alive and kicking, despite all kinds of problems, including being . Читать весь отзыв. LibraryThing Review. made me want to start a record label and goto shows again. good story, good pictures, a bit heavy on superchunk. cool stuff to say about magnetic fields Читать весь отзыв. Другие издания - Просмотреть все. Об авторе (2009) John Cook is a reporter for Gawker Media and has worked for Radar magazine and the Chicago Tribune . Mac McCaughan plays in Superchunk and Portastatic (guitar and vocals), and founded, with Laura Ballance, the Merge Records label in 1989. He lives in Chapel Hill with his wife and children. Laura Ballance plays bass in Superchunk and formed with Mac the Merge Records label. She lives in Durham with her husband and daughter. John Cook (with Mac McCaughan & Laura Ballance): Our Noise. The independent record label Merge Records was founded in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in the late ’80s, primarily as an outlet for 7-inch singles by the indie-rock band Superchunk. While the music business as a whole is at the lowest ebb it’s seen since the advent of mechanical reproduction, Merge has thrived, largely because it’s maintained modest, realistic expectations. If Merge is working with a band with a miniscule fan base, the label tries to keep the budgets low enough that everyone makes at least a little money. And when one of its acts breaks big—as has been the case for bands like Spoon, The Arcade Fire, Neutral Milk Hotel, and The Magnetic Fields—the label’s overhead has remained low enough and its accounting straightforward enough that the musicians get to keep more of the profit. Merge’s story is a case study in how a small business can expand without losing its ideals. The oral history Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records, The Indie Label That Got Big And Stayed Small —well-assembled and strung together by critic/reporter John Cook—tracks Merge’s organic evolution from the early-’90s indie-rock boom through the subsequent bust. The book isn’t just the story of David outmaneuvering Goliath. Although Cook collects plenty of horror stories from the heady post-Nirvana era—when major labels threw money and promises at anyone in a flannel shirt—he doesn’t over-romanticize the indie model, either. Our Noise shows how big sales can crush a small operation just as easily as no sales. If a 10,000-copy pressing sells out, does a label press 10,000 more? How many potential sales might they lose if they don’t? How much inventory will they be stuck with if they do? Those honest questions (and the actual numbers attached to them) are part of what makes Our Noise more than just another trip down punk-rock memory lane. Superchunk frontman Mac McCaughan and his bandmate/business partner Laura Ballance are very upfront about the bands on the label that don’t sell as well as they’d like, and they speak bluntly about the mistakes they’ve made as a band and a label (and as exes). Mostly, McCaughan and Ballance seem to have made a go of Merge because they know their limitations. Major label or no, Superchunk was unlikely ever to sell more than the mid-five-figures. If a band does that on a major, it gets dropped. If it does that on its own label, it can make enough money to buy a house and put out modest-selling records by its members’ favorite bands. Our Noise makes McCaughan and Ballance’s choice seem not just noble, but sound. The Indie Label That Gave Us Some of Indie Rock's Greatest Hits. In the summer of 1987, two teenagers—Mac McCaughan and Laura Ballance—met while working at Pepper's Pizza in Chapel Hill, N.C. They were both fans of the hardcore music scene, and a few years later they'd become the founders of one of the most influential labels in indie rock: Merge Records, which has released albums by Arcade Fire, the Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel, Spoon, and Superchunk (McCaughan and Ballance's own band). This rich piece of music history is told in Our Noise: The Story of Merge Records, the Indie Label That Got Big and Stayed Small, out in stores this week. The book, by Gawker Media reporter John Cook with McCaughan and Ballance, follows Merge from its beginnings through the recent success of Arcade Fire. It's made up primarily of interviews with those who were involved, mixed with some narrative reporting, and it fits neatly with other books that chronicle the origins of American music scenes, such as Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk , and Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes From the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991. In many ways, it picks up where those books left off. Punk rock gave birth in the '80s to hardcore: a fast, angry, and largely anticorporate strain of punk typified by bands like Minor Threat that set up their own labels on their own terms—Ian MacKaye, the group's frontman, even says in Our Noise that he figured out how to make a homemade record sleeve by pulling apart a real record sleeve and retracing it on an 11- by 14-inch piece of paper. These bands gave McCaughan and Ballance a blueprint for how they could start a label without money. Even when Superchunk and Merge gained more attention and everything got more complicated—they began selling LPs, not just 7 inches, and needed hundreds or thousands of copies, not just a few dozen—Merge maintained a more small-scale, personal way of doing business. They avoided legal contracts, put out records they liked and not just what they thought would sell, and split profits 50-50 with the artists (the industry standard paid to bands was 12 percent). That model attracted bands with similar mindsets, if not always similar sounds, and Merge found plenty of artists who shared their way of thinking. They became something like a lifeline for bands that made great music but didn't necessarily fit into the mainstream. It's hard to imagine Neutral Milk Hotel, for instance, being able to record and release their glorious mess of an album In the Aeroplane Over the Sea on a major label. The album was regarded as a curiosity when it first appeared in 1998, but it's since become a classic—in 2003, the music magazine Magnet called it the best album of the '90s, putting it ahead of releases by Radiohead and Nirvana. For a major label, issuing such a strange record would be a huge risk; for Merge, it was the thing to do. Thanks to labels like Merge and Matador—the hugely influential label that put out albums by Pavement, among others—and the boom of the blogosphere, indie rock is no longer strictly for outsiders. Earlier this year, the third record by the unconventional, decidedly unmainstream band Grizzly Bear debuted at No. 8 on the Billboard chart, putting it in the top 10 alongside the likes of Eminem and Hannah Montana. That position isn't unprecedented for an indie band, but it certainly wouldn't be as likely without 20 years of effort by people like McCaughan and Ballance.