Resavoir
Reservoir; "Future"; from International Anthem Recording Co.
Withther the record label? Rather than this write-up being a memory-laden retrospective of what a particular album means to me, I see this as unpacking the power of this older mechanism of sorting and organizing music, in an age that has mostly dispensed with that very same cultural power.
Today, everyone wants to be a DJ, and no one wants to work in A&R (artists and repertoire). The means for a person to signal their taste by reordering songs in a spreadsheet have never been more accessible. And yet, people (by and large) are listening to the same things—there’s not a large proportion of users on streaming platforms that are interested in seeking out new performers and cultivating a relationship with them, to help them grow a career and make a life.
In our contemporary moment of passive users and preference-selection algorithms, platform consolidation and private equity music intellectual property purchases, the tastemakers who sit on the margins of the music industry can carve a vital space their listeners by helping to build and augment their music catalogue. I trust the small labels that I listen to today just like the ones I explored and mapped out in my youth—Impulse!, Blue Note, Constellation. A good record label is consistent because of their curatorial acumen, but still gives an opportunity to surprise, to educate, to delight. I can guess 70% of the vibe of the music of 1970’s Strata-East based on the other records I’ve heard from them during that period, and the other 30% might be a total bust, or it might help me find one of my favorite records of all time.
International Anthem Recording Company (IARC) is no exception to this rule. If I had the cash, I would purchase everything they’ve released in two copies: one for me, one as a gift to a friend. They only release music from forward-thinking, deeply collaborative musicians that break new ground, which I learned through my deep-dive into the music of Alabaster DePlume, seeing that he was a mainstay of the recording company.
Resavoir is a discovery I made exclusively because of my trust in IARC’s curation and selection. I purchased a surprise selection of new releases from them, only to find the foreboding cover for this record enveloping me as soon as I opened the package, drawing me into the sublime like a Rothko painting. I was ready to get weird.
The music inside the grooves was lushly orchestrated cosmic music, but a certain kind of succinct, not unlike Fantastic Planet’s soundtrack. The folks that came together to make these tunes weren’t afraid to be strange with their sonic palette, prodcing pieces that envelop the listener and hearken back to electric Miles or a P-Funk block party. However, instead of jamming it out for fifteen minutes, a half-hour, they keep the compositions tight. In that way, the compositions on this record remind me of some of the beats from J Dilla or Madlib; they know when the idea has run its course instead of forcing it into hackneyed repetition—letting a melody that could be repeated endlessly over changes hang in the air for a second, and then onto the next track.
I will certainly listen to more of Resavoir’s music, but what I’m responding to in Resavoir, and in IARC more broadly, isn’t nostalgia for a pre-streaming past. When people reference nostalgia, often it is lazy, inarticulate writing—it’s an empty ache, a feeling that something is different; we want the tension resolved by going back to the way things were. Instead, I feel relief from Resavoir and from IARC—relief that someone else is willing to continuously show up and say “this art matters; it’s worth your time”. In a world that never stops offering more, that kind of constraint—the refusal to overextend, to overproduce—feels radical. And it’s similarly radical to borrow the forms of the past and iterate upon them instead of playing into popular tastes.
Verdict: Keep
Do you trust anyone’s taste enough to pick up an album without listening to it first?