 Transient Records Interview Last updated 3/97 by Mark_H, HTML by Seth Three of us set the company up - Lawrence Cooke, Simon Moxon and me, Russel Coultart. Simon doesn't have anything to do with the actual running of the company though. We have Tony who works with me on the day to day running of the company and label whilst Lawrence and I work on the A&R side of things. So what is your history and how did the label actually start? Lawrence and Simon had been going to parties for ages...... Little People parties, Gumbo parties and had been around that scene for a long time and Lawrence and I had started making music together as I used to be a recording engineer. I was working in a studio in about 92 and Lawrence was bringing in all this music tagged "goa trance" and a lot of it was new and good and I had never heard the style before. So we tried to make our own music together we had our first single as Disco Volante called "Disco Volante" which came out on Sub Culture Records which was my old label. We had another record out soon after called Dark Blue Sky which incidentally has just been remixed and is coming out again on a new label called Silver Planet. As Lawrence and I worked together we realised that we got on well and enjoyed the same kind of music so we decided that we wanted to run a label with one of our aims to put out really good compilations. Why did you want to run a label rather than just make the music? I wanted to release my own stuff and have control of what we were doing and I actually enjoyed the work as well. Obviously you have control if the label is your own but it's very much the case of "if you have the time". I mean now I just have not got time to make records because I am too busy running the label! In many ways it backfired but what it has done is it has given us enough money to go into better studios for when we actually record own work. Anyway we managed to scrape some money together to start up and put together our first compilation, Transient 1, and released El Metro by Disco Volante on 12". We didn't then really know what the hell we were doing and thus started from there. Transient 1 was very much a hard house and trance compilation but you have since moved to psychedelic territory..... would that be fair to say? Oh definitely! yes that has been a conscious change for us to move in that direction. If you look at some of our earlier releases you will find they were very much in the hard house style and we are still interested in that style. But we have become known predominately as a psychedelic trance label and it is increasingly difficult for us to release hard house style on our label and we must take notice of these commercial pressures i.e. the market just does not like it if you are known for one thing and you release another style. So what we have done is set up another label called Automatic which is going to be run as a completely separate label with a totally different identity to release more commercial trance and hard house. Who's going to run that? Oh ourselves although it's not going to be anywhere near as labour intensive as Transient and will probably only release about 6 singles in the first year and maybe one album. Transient next year (97) has 6 albums scheduled for release that's 3 artists albums and 3 compilations, which is a lot, and around 12 singles. Are you clear on which artists are going to release next year for single artist albums on Transient? We have EON (Element Over Nature) who is Kris from Syb Unity Nettwerk, we may also be signing Slide and Lunar Asylum but that is not confirmed yet. We want also to do a Disco Volante album so it is probably amongst these guys is who the single artist albums are going to come from. We have also just signed a new artist from Poland called Tomek who records as Promesa. I am really interested in getting and developing new artists rather than just using the same guys over and over. Psychedelic trance is getting a lot of publicity and paradoxically some see this as a problem .... do you see this as a problem? I think there may be some "inner circle" snobbery here. I've seen it before. This is the second exciting movement I have been involved with as I was involved with the acid house scene and that was very very small and underground and when that blew up some people we saying "oh it's ruined it". Well it may have ruined it for those very exclusive few but what right have those few to have something so good yet not share it with others? That's exactly how I feel about the psychedelic scene. It's such a good scene why should those inner circle keep others from experiencing it because it's so good. What do you think your best releases are to date? Mahedeva by Astral Projection, although not a new track, it was my favourite ever record on the scene and I was just so pleased when we got the rights to release it as a single. We had the track on the Transient 2 compilation but I wanted to put it out as a single as I thought it had a lot of potential as a crossover into the main dance scene. That was manifested in reality as Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling were playing it at house clubs. I think our first 12" we put out El Metro was well...... there is just something about that track... I mean I know I made it but it was not just our mix it also had on it the Cosmosis remix and the Head Doctors remix. That 12": has been out twice, it was our 1st and our 8th release. I think that track set the direction of the label and it had over crossover potential. It was being played at Trade and Return to the Source (RTTS) at the same time. It also made a few compilations. I presume you don't have worries about putting out remixes of tunes as Transient put out Mahedeva as a remix as well as the original mix? Oh no worries, if the record's good and the remix is good then I would consider it without hesitation. I mean if the Overlords remixed Gods Eye On Goa and we put it out again I would be over the moon. Future plans now, where do you see yourselves in say a years time? Oh we see ourselves still right at the forefront of the developing psychedelic scene with the other labels. I want to be signing and developing new artists not just for one off singles but for albums. I think that there is potential for the people and movement to grow and for crossover. Someone IS going to crossover to more commercial lands and that may upset the purists who only want 3 people to listen to the music whilst sitting in a dustbin but people make music because they love it. If people make money out of it and can quit their jobs and concentrate on making further music then there should not be a problem. I would like to be around to help people do that. Is record distribution a problem? Yes it is. When we started we used one company, Total Records to distribute our albums, and another, Flying Records to distribute our singles. With the first album, Transient 1, Total did a fairly good job, bearing in mind we were a brand new company, selling over 5000 copies of the album. However on Transient 2 they were a disaster area nearly bankrupting us in the process. On the week the second album was released they had sold under 2000 copies, luckily we were able to sell another 2000 copies that week through other companies. Total just did not care, we were small and unimportant for them. Flying also did a very good job on our first few singles, but sales slowly declined to the point where we were losing money on each single, no good for us and no good for the artists. The big problem with distribution is to find a distributor who believes in your product and wants to work with you rather than seeing you as just another one of their list of labels. We have now changed our distribution system for both singles and albums. We now sell in the UK through SRD who we feel understand the music and care about helping us to grow. They also distribute Blue Room, Platipus and Flying Rhino. We handle our own export, selling to companies abroad and companies in the UK who export records. So far the system is working very well now that we are in control of the sales rather than relying on Total or Flying to sell for us. If you step up to a bigger distributor do you have to give them a bigger cut? Actually no, not in our case, in fact we get more per sale as the distributor can reach more people and thus sell more records. That is good for us and great for our artists as they are on a profit split with us. So why not take a quantum leap and go to a massive distributor like Sony? It's not feasible yet because the label's not that big nor is the scene. It's about stepping up the ladder. So what you are saying is, bottom line if it's in the shops it will sell. Yes. The problem we had was that we spent a lot of money advertising but people could not buy the records. The the adverts would come out in the mags plus reviews so people were aware of them but they could never find them to buy them. Unfortunately people go into record shops and if they cannot find your CD they buy someone elses. What are your feelings about psychedelic trance... is it going to get more popular? It is going to disappear up it's own arse unless it changes direction very quickly in my opinion. In what way? It needs to reassess itself to where it is going it I think in the last 6 - 12 months it has become very very narrow. There are some good signs and some good and very interesting tracks being made but what I feel has happened is that a year or more ago there was a lot of experimentation i.e. you could go to a party and hear a much broader spectrum of music than you hear now. It seems now that each track has to follow a similar vein. So the future may not be good if people listen to psychedelic trance and think I can make that, jump on the bandwagon and produce a record which has all the right noises in, all the so called psychedelic trance sounds, filters etc. but that is devoid of feeling. That is music by numbers and it appears to be happening today. I find formulaic music so tedious and boring and it has to change if the scene is to grow. So what are Transient doing about it? We are trying new artists, being experimental and really now we are taking risks in not putting out records that just sound the same as the other records on the scene. The "all sounds the same" has and is a criticism of the scene and to some extent it has become true. I mean it is possible to go to a party and not tell from one hour to the next when the record has changed. Now that is great for people on acid but not everyone is going to these parties to take acid. I am not into this music only being made for people who are in a particular state of mind. Have you got any influences for your label i.e. DJ's artists, A&R men other labels etc.? I have always respected Perfecto Flouro and another label called Jackpot, an epic house British label. These labels are not too defined and have a slightly broader spectrum than some psychedelic labels. I mean I do not consider that Transient are part of the inner circle of psychedelic trance labels and none of us want that to be. And we don't want to be releasing stuff that is totally inaccessible unless you are on acid or part of the inner scene or in a particular enviroment. How does your A&R work? Lawrence and I have regular A&R meetings once every week or two weeks because we get so many tapes sent in now. I sift through the tapes find out the ones that I consider are worth listening to further and give them to Lawrence. He then takes them home, listens to them and tells me what he considers are the best ones. He makes I suppose what is the final A&R decision. We get about 5 or 6 demo tapes a week and a lot of it is good, unfortunately a lot of it is very average. Have you any advice for artists wishing to release? Don't put on your favourite records and copy them. That does happen and you can actually hear it in some tracks. We constantly listen to music in the studio but what we try to do is to be influenced by them rather than copy them when we make our own music. We do not hear a lot of psychedelic trance on the radio do you have any comments on that? It's nightclub/party music and you don't hear a lot of genuine nightclub/party music on the radio apart from your inane garage and swingbeat stuff. Even on specialist dance radio stations like Kiss you don't hear a lot of this stuff. I do think it is time that Kiss had a specialist psychedelic slot on their station. You have got some Kiss DJ's playing about 4 hours of the hard techno music but no hours playing at all of psychedelic stuff. The only outing we have is Danny Ramplings Euromix on Radio One and he does not play psy trance every week. That's it on a national level although there may be some played on a local level. I have noted that Danny Rampling actually supports Transient by playing your stuff a lot on his show ... why? Although I know Danny he is too big a DJ to play stuff just because it is released by his mates. It may help me get my foot in the door but he will only play it if it is a good tune. I have seen it before, I mean if I hand him a record and he listens to it he may say "I don't like it and I will not play it" end of story. I don't know him very well I mean we are not buddy's or drinking pals but I have known him some time. Are Lysergics necessary for people to enjoy the music to it's full potential? No not at all. It's like saying E is essential to experience house music or weed is essential to experience trip hop. Good music will shine through whether you are drunk, stoned, tripping.... it will just shine through. Sure, anything sounds different on acid or mushrooms but I do not think it is essential. In many ways if you listen to a track on LSD and then without it is like listening to two different tracks each with it's own experiences... and those experiences may not be able to be linked. The music press not so long ago and even now to a certain extent slag off the genre...... comments Mixmag hates psychedelic trance. Unfortunately the staff writer and album reviewer hate it with a vengeance. I have spoken to him about it and that is the way it is going to stick. Mixmag are not interested but I think their goa bashing has slowed down to a degree. DJ have come on in leaps and bounds not only have we seen some big features of late but they are even going to have their own techno/trance page. Their techno page was written by some avent guard techno people from Holland but they are now going to have this page taken over by someone from England who is into trance. If the page works as a techno/trance page they are then going to split it and have a trance page which is what the mag needs. DJ mag have been very supportive and of course Wax mag. Muzik have always supported the scene having a trance page from early on. What is it about a track that makes you think "yes that is for our label?" It's the "X" factor and that is it bottom line really. Is it easy for you to choose which tracks go on your compilations? No it is not. I would say that 90% of the stuff that is submitted to us is not worth listening to again. The remaining 10% we really have to really really pick carefully what we want. The "X" factor is the thing. It's not necessarily complex sounds that do it. What does psychedelic trance do to you personally? is that something that you can explain? Hah! well umm not really. It is so dependant on my state of mind. I am not a particularly big party goer so I listen mainly at home or in the office. At parties I like seeing it all going on around me. I am not a big acid taker either ...... but, well err ... this weekend coming..... (laugh). Do you think the Eastern links attached to the genre by some is just new age bollocks or is it valuable? Umm.. I find it a little bit pretentious personally but I can see where it comes from. When you spend a lot of time around on the scene there is a somewhat spiritual element in some of the people .. it clearly exists ..... but I am not one for your chakra journeys and so on.. I err on the side of this is a load of bullshine I suppose. I was at the RTTS when there was that chakra journey and I guess there was about 10 people who knew exactly what was going on but there was 3000 other people just having a good party and that is all that they wanted. There was not some big spiritual thingy going on here. That is my own feelings. We have never gone for the spiritual thing. We may have had a buddha on our album sleeve or whatever. I see this as just really good music not a spiritual thing. Is vinyl quality a problem? Oh yes we have experienced problems. We used one company to distribute our records who also arranged the pressings as well and their vinyl looked, felt and sounded really cheap and horrible. Now we use a French company called MPO who use really good quality vinyl for the pressings. It looks and feels like a quality record like the things you remember as a kid i.e. difficult to bend. We have though, however, noticed that some of our past records from MPO sounded a little dull. We found out it is the process that they used called polishing off (the lacquer) was making some pressings slightly dull. They polished off with a cloth which removed some of the really high frequencies so the records are less likely to jump but it also removes the overall brightness of the record. Of course this totally ruins the point of having a high quality and expensive cut and we use one of the most expensive cutting houses in London because we want high quality reproduction. We are getting them to stop this practice now. I am superfussy about the quality of our product. Any opinions on whether your albums should be mixed or unmixed? Oh definitely unmixed. Is that just vinyl or CD's? Both. The reason for that is because Transient 2 was mixed, one of the first psy trance albums to be mixed, and we did get a lot of people liking that but we get a lot of DJ's buying our records and as we have on our compilations a lot of exclusive tracks the DJ's want to buy the CD and record onto DAT so they need a start and end. A number of DJ's also use CDR mixers and need the gap. We may only leave a very slight gap of 1 second but it will be there from now on unless it is a specific release mixed by a DJ or something. How much influence do you have over your artists? We rather largely leave them to it although we will always maintain the ultimate A&R right. For instance if an artist presents a track which we feel is not strong enough we won't put it out. But we do not interfere with the composition. Artists are told to do what they do and we discuss the final track and whether it is suitable for us. Do you guide artists for future albums/12"? No it is totally up to them. I don't think you can interfere with what your artists are doing. Artists are artists and it would be like saying to a painter "I really like that piece but could you paint a picture with loads of sheep in it" (laugh). Bigger labels with no real interest in the scene just pumping out compilations of released stuff... have you any thought on that? Like the dreadful stuff that we have seen of late! some of it is absolutely crap and does smack of cashing in on the scene. However the Rumour Records "Goa Trance" series may not be the cutting edge of psychedelic trance but, I think, that series has helped rather than hindered as it has brought the music out a little more to the front to more people. The bottom line is that people want to buy the music but it is still not very accessible in the shops. I mean some of these labels ring in and ask to be sent all of our records and it seems they just put together a bunch of stuff which sounds similar without knowing what the hell is going on. Awful. Didn't Rumour copyright the name "Goa Trance"? No that is not true. I phoned Rumour and asked them. What they did is put it as a trademark so to speak. So, another label like ours could not put out a compilation called "Goa Trance" but I could use the words in any advert ..... not that I would because the tag "goa" is like swearing to some people! What is the future of the impromptu party? They are going to get bigger. At psy trance parties the energy is so fabulous and I see a lot of young people there who know little else. Why will these people choose to then go off to a house type party and become a fashion victim? The overriding feeling you get when you go to a psy trance party is that fashion is not part of it. In many ways it is a much more open scene that welcomes people from many different backgrounds. It doesn't matter if you are in a wheelchair or blind or what colour you are and it is just tremendously open which is really exciting for a lot of people. They don't have to wear silly baby doll dresses or don't eat for 3 days so they look good etc. and because of that it has really massive potential. At house clubs, because of the fashion element many people go but feel outside still and of course there is this silly pressure to look great and beautiful which is nonsense. Psy trance parties are all about having a great time full stop. How do account for the fact that Transient, which is a relatively small label gets so much publicity? We work on that really hard and we spend a lot on advertising. For example another comparably sized label put out a compilation recently and our advertising budget was 4 times theirs. We get a lot of press but that may be peoples perception because they often see the name in adverts. We have had an advert in virtually every edition of Musik this year even when we have not had an album out. I feel it is important. We also make the effort to speak to people and we try to be really on the case. Of course we also release good records and that helps (smile). What are your labels future plans? Well as said we have split into Transient the psychedelic label and Automatic the Commercial Trance/Hard House label and this is important as people perceived us as a psy trance label and when they bought a Transient record they want psy trance not Butler and Wilson etc. So we will run these totally independently. Have you any other comments? I have got some very strong views about how I see that the scene could turn very inward looking and I feel that these have been covered in this interview. It is worrying to me that it appears sometimes that the scene is very narrow and that every record has to sound virtually the same to attract respect. I want a scene that is changing and exciting, willing to take risks. I want DJ's to have the balls to mix in some other music during a 7 hour party to send the floor to different direction every now and then. I must admit I don't like to go to parties where I have never heard any of the records because they are exclusive dats. I like to know some of the records. I find that creates peaks in the night and I like to have highs and lows. Let's hope the scene remains evolving and hope that snobbery does not creep in. We are supposed to be having fun at the end of the day it is not about saying "I have 17 dats full of tracks that you have never heard before!". That is real nonsense. Thank you Russel. Transient Records have a web page currently under construction (Transient.Com). For now you can reach Transient Records via email at: Music@Transient.Com © 1998 Cosmosis & Innerverse |