20/07/2024
1. Today is the 10th birthday of Oxtail Recordings, which has me thinking about the early days. I started the label in 2014 not long after moving to NYC from Delaware, and I was living with my friend who was crucial to getting the label off the ground. We were both high on the big city life and getting sucked into the new-to-us world of experimental and ambient music. We spent countless hours in the (windowless) living room of our apartment listening to records and tapes, trying to understand the transmissions and the people that were sending them.
2, 3, 4. Owen put together the original Oxtail logo based on my sketches and designed the first few batches of tapes. He taught me how to lay out artwork for printing and how to cut and score j-cards. The label might not have ever happened if it wasnât for his friendship and support.
5, 6. Initially I assembled everything by hand and dubbed tapes on a daisy-chained stack of used cassette decks that all ran at different speeds which drove me insane.
7, 8, 9. I launched the label in coordination with the Mope Lounge tour I did with , and we recorded material for the third Oxtail release on that tour. Mope Lounge was self-releasing tapes and booking our own shows and I think that experience made me realize that I could, and should, start a project to turn the one-offs into a body of work.
10. The first Oxtail release was my just-moved-to-NYC meltdown tape Meeker, the name of the street (Interstate highway off-ramp, more accurately) directly outside my bedroom window, whose sounds are brick-walled into the recording, and whose soot settled into a gritty black layer on everything I owned until I learned to keep my windows closed.
11. So it makes some kind of weird full-circle sense that I release my latest album, Leaving/Returning, on the labelâs 10th anniversary. This one trades the hyper-local concerns of Meeker for a much more expansive view, both sonically and conceptually. These days I live in Sydney, and much of the album was recorded during, and inspired by, long-haul air travel and the associated headspaces. âOxtail Worldwide,â I suppose you could say.