LABEL SPOTLIGHT: Dais Records
Shortly after this pack-leading record label's 15th anniversary celebrations, we sat down with co-founder Ryan Martin.
A forgotten box of tapes. That’s all it took as a first step for a snowballing chain of events to bring us, sixteen years later, to a world where most of us who are into forward-thinking, groundbreaking alternative music can’t really imagine without the presence of Dais Records anymore. The tapes in question belonged to the legendary Genesis P-Orridge, contained previously unheard early material, and a simple “why don’t you put them out?” nod by the revolutionary English musician (and poet, performance artist, visual artist, and so much more) was the spark for Ryan Martin and Gibby Miller to start a record label, “sort of accidentally,” as Ryan hilariously recalls in this in-depth interview we were lucky to have had with him recently.
It’s been quite a ride in these last fifteen years for the two of them and for this beautiful monster they created which seems to have developed its own will and personality during this time, and artists such as Iceage, Drab Majesty, Choir Boy, Youth Code, HIDE, Tor Lundvall, Cold Cave, Adult. and so many others might have not reached us in the same way that they did through Dais’ expert hands. They have also become a major source for amazing reissues of crucial, landmark records by artists such as Coil, Psychic TV or William S Burroughs among others.
We sat down with Ryan, interrupting the always consuming process of a move across the country (he is joining his Dais co-founding buddy Gibby Miller in L.A. after many years living in New York), a few months after the label celebrated its 15th anniversary, to find out how this experience has shaped his life and work, and exactly what it takes to be constantly on the cutting edge of the musical, artistic and cultural discussion that is sometimes so fleeting and ever-changing in today’s blink-and-you’ve-missed-it landscape.
First things first, since we caught you during that move – what happens now that you’re moving to L.A.? Will New York music suffer? [laughs]
Ryan Martin: [laughs] Definitely not! New York music has been a juggernaut, for the past hundred years and it definitely isn’t going anywhere. But seriously, I don’t think much is going to change. When me and Gibby started the label people thought we were pretty crazy for doing it in this bi-coastal sort of way, that we worked virtually. When we started doing that, having everything set up in virtual servers and things like that, fifteen years ago that was a pretty tough concept to get your head around. Everyone was like, you don’t have an office, dusty shelves, all that? No, we never have. And now everyone uses Dropbox and virtual whatever and Zoom and all these things, and we have been doing that for our entire existence and it’s been fine. I just think it will be nice for both of us to be in the same city. There’s something about being there in person that it’s kinda tough to describe, but I feel that when me and Gibby are in the same room together we are able to bounce off ideas better. It’s easier to throw things out in the air more quickly, rather than trying to get in touch with one another. I mean, we talk every day and we have done so for fifteen years, so it’s not a drastic change, but things will just be quicker and easier. Also, most of our employees, at least the majority of them, are in New York still. Vinnie and Nathaniel and some other people still live in New York – and oddly enough, I don’t even see them in person all that much. It’s New York, you get lost. [laughs]
Your origin story, as it were, is a little different from the typical record label beginning, isn’t it?
Ryan: Me and Gibby were actually discussing a lot of that a couple of months ago because it was our 15th year anniversary and I was out in L.A. for a couple of shows we did, and we were talking about how things were so different from what they are now, fifteen years ago. But yeah, how it started, it was fairly unusual when compared to the typical kind of origin story for a record label. Most people are just like, yeah, I saw a band, I want to put out music, it’s pretty clean cut. I was not planning on putting out anything, there was no real plan, and it happened sort of accidentally. I was working with Genesis P-Orridge at the time, I was cataloguing their archive for an acquisition thing, and I found all these boxes of tapes, and while going through them I found some really early tapes, from the late 60s and early 70s. A couple of these recordings that I found there, I had read about them, but most I had no idea what they were, and there was no documentation about what they were, so here I was just staring at boxes of these tapes… Then I found an acetate of Genesis’ first record, which Genesis did mention in interviews before. When they asked what your first recording was, she was like, it was actually me and my friends, we were seventeen. It was made in their parents’ attic, it was called Early Worm, and she made one copy of one acetate cut, it was like a metal disc acetate. And not only did I find that, I found the original master tape that she mailed in to make the cut acetate, which is what you want. I was like, wow, cool, someone should put these out! And Gen just happened to be standing there when I was saying that, and I was thinking that someone else should put it out when I said it, but Gen was like, “you should put it out!” I was like, I don’t know anything about doing a record label. And I got this whole like “well, I didn’t know anything when I started doing industrial records, so that’s no excuse!” And so, I was like, okay, and moved along with my day.
Gibby, who had lived in New York, moved to L.A. prior to all of this happening, but we stayed in touch and we talked all the time. This was around 2007 and I had just begrudgingly gotten a cell phone, I didn’t want one but was kinda forced to get one. [laughs] I happened to talk to him that week, and I told him about that story, and he was like, you’re kidding me! I was more trying to tell him about the tapes, and how cool that was, but what he heard in the conversation was, Genesis told you that you could put it out and that it was okay? What?! I was like, yeah, she did say that, but isn’t it cool that I found these tapes? [laughs] After that, I kinda forgot about it, but then I remember being out late one night, and being woken up by a phone call the next morning when I was trying to sleep in. It was Gibby, calling me from L.A., and he was like, “hey, I’ve been thinking about what you said. We could put this out, and maybe we can start a record label, and maybe we can put out some more things,” and yeah, he already had a whole game plan. Even the record label name, he came up with that and with everything else. I was just like, man, I stayed out late last night, I just want to get some sleep, let me call you back in a couple of hours. I still wanted to ask Gen again, and this was a lot to take in all at once. So I went back to sleep, and then I called him up again, later and we talked a bit more. I said I liked the name, and he already had everything in motion, ready to hit the ground running. I’m like, okay, let me double check with Genesis about using these tapes, because that was said sort of in passing, at least I thought it was, so… I was going to see Gen in a day or two, and so when I was there I asked again, and Gen was like “yeah, I said you could, why would I say that if I didn’t mean it?” It was like, “duh, why are you asking me again?” [laughs], so I just went, okay! I have this friend in L.A. and I think we’re starting a record label! And Gen was like, “okay, do it”, in that sort of “yeah, do it, stop talking to me about it” kind of way. So I called Gibby, I told him it was okay, and at that time me and him came up with a rough list that we never really broke down, not that I can remember, of other stuff we could do afterwards. If we’re going to put out one thing, we might as well put out a second, a third and a fourth thing, right? So we just started talking about that Early Worm record first. It’s something really cool, really fascinating, there’s only one copy, and the whole origin story of the record is pretty mindblowing, especially with what evolved out of this person after that. It had also been discussed in interviews before, so it wasn’t something coming totally out of leftfield. It seemed like a good gateway into figuring out how to do a label. We hit the ground running.
The label kind of guided itself, in a way. We were always at the helm of it, but we never forced anything, we never wanted to put out anything we didn’t stand behind. We never wanted to put out a record for money.
- Ryan Martin
Did you have any help during those initial times?
Ryan: I remember talking to three people in particular who helped me with those first steps. Like, here are the things you need to do, here are the people you need to contact, things of that nature. One of them was this guy Nemo Bidstrup, who ran a label called Time Lag, I haven’t spoken to him in years now, but I emailed him and he was really helpful. Another one was Pieter Schoolwerth, who did Wierd Records, he was really helpful in those first stages, and the other was Dominick Fernow, from Hospital Productions, he was a good friend of mine – still is. The three of them were the people who were most decisive in telling us a lot of stuff we didn’t know at first, and it’s great that they weren’t gatekeepers or anything, they just showed me their contacts, they were very helpful and supportive. So after that, we were like, okay, what do we put out next? [laughs]
We just started hitting up our friends, people we knew, friends of friends… We always stayed within people in our orbit when it came to finding new music at first. Especially in New York, a lot of the new music that was coming out locally was not really my thing. There were things that I liked happening, but no one was paying any attention to them, no one was giving them their credit or their due. Simultaneously, in L.A., where Gibby was, there was this whole wellspring of incredible bands, a lot of wild things happening, but again, there wasn’t any kind of firm documentation. People were putting out things either by themselves or on these kind of loose labels, there wasn’t any label focusing on it. We didn’t think about doing things that way, but it’s what happened, it’s how it evolved. What it evolved into, it was nothing that we thought it would ever happen. We went down into other realms, and down a lot of different roads and avenues over the last fifteen years that we never predicted. The label kind of guided itself, in a way. We were always at the helm of it, but we never forced anything, we never wanted to put out anything we didn’t stand behind. We never wanted to put out a record for money.
Are there any details from early days that sound crazy to you now?
Ryan: In those early days, everything was hand-numbered, for example, which I don’t miss doing! [laughs] By the third or fourth release, we had to do a repress, and at that point, we were like, we don’t repress things! It’s all hand-numbered, yada yada. And it’s like, yeah, but you’re having records that you’re selling out in a day, and people want them, and it’s new music, so… that view was kind of short-sighted. We switched the model a little bit from that and we adapted. It was still fun though, it was exciting to get the sleeves and hand-number them and everything.
The label has been described as genre-agnostic. Have you ever discussed, not specific bands, but the sort of genres you would like to tackle? Or is it more of a feeling kind of thing?
Ryan: Not really, no… It’s funny, when I meet people, especially people that are not really heavily involved in music, when they find out I co-own a record label, the first question I get is always “so what kind of music do you put out?” And I’m like… I hate being the “oh, a little bit of everything!” type of person, because that’s really a cop out, but it really is like that. There are a lot of labels, and I’m a huge fan of a lot of them as a consumer, that really focus in on a genre. Which is great – if I want to hear, for instance, ambient piano works, I know where to go, and these labels really hone in on it. But with us, there is no one thing, there is just… It’s really hard to describe, it’s an unspoken aesthetic that me and Gibby unintentionally created. We didn’t sit there and make a master plan for any of this. Someone will now point things out in our history and we’ll be like, yeah, I guess that’s what happened here, good observation! As I said, we never forced anything, in a way we let Dais have its own life, and that worked out. I mean, are Drew McDowall and Drab Majesty the same genre? No, not at all, but they seem to work together, they go together.
There’s a certain amount of degrees of separation between them, at least. But they’re connected somehow.
Ryan: Yeah, exactly. Does SPICE go with Coil? No, not really, but… it makes sense. It’s almost like… You know, I was having this discussion with Nicky Mao, who does Hiro Kone. Having her records on the label was really great, as it was great to see her at the 15th anniversary of the label, because her music, you might think it should typically be on these more purist electronic labels that put out that kind of thing, but I think it makes a lot more sense with us. There’s a lot of people who follow our label who really love some other bands like Drab Majesty and Choir Boy and that kind of stuff, but who actually do also really like a certain kind of electronic music and dance music and everything. They’re just not following those more genre-specific… and I hate the word “scenes”, but it’s kind of unavoidable here, and so, there’s all these people that love this kind of stuff but it’s never put in front of them. They never know it’s there and there’s so much going on and so much music and so much content available, that it’s difficult to discover some things on your own. I personally look to labels or publishers for that very reason, I don’t have time to sift through things like I used to. The world’s a really busy place. So I rely on those people to put things out for me to peek my head into. We did the same thing, and with her music, seeing her perform at the anniversary to this packed, sold-out venue and have all these people completely locked into it… They were there, they were present, just loving what she was doing. It couldn’t have been better, and these were all people who maybe would have never listened to her music if it hadn’t come out through our label.
You wouldn’t believe what people are open to. You’d be really surprised how open minded people are, especially when it comes to new music.
- Ryan Martin
Does it surprise you when artists cross audiences, as it were, like that?
Ryan: You wouldn’t believe what people are open to. You’d be really surprised how open minded people are, especially when it comes to new music. When it’s presented in a certain way, and when the quality is there, people will jump around genres they would not be actively listening to. It’s all in how it’s brought to them, and that’s a huge responsibility for labels. There are a lot of great labels out there who do the same thing, who jump around genres and styles and people come along with them for that journey – Sacred Bones is a great example.
Is there anything as a jump too far?
Ryan: Well, we jump around a bit but we don’t get too out of scope. We’re not going to be putting out something that feels like, “what the hell?” Why put out something that’s out of character, right? Everything on the label, me and Gibby have to be totally on board with it. Even if there’s something Gibby’s into but I’m not really feeling it, we don’t go forward with it, and vice-versa too. Because there are a lot of aspects to it. Even if it’s something sonically makes sense, it might not be a good fit. Sometimes we get those suggestions, people that go like “hey, listen to this, I sound just like A, B and C on your label,” and I’m like, well, I’ve already got A, B and C, I’m looking for X, Y and Z now! We want other things that make sense on the label but are different, that make it eclectic.
Sometimes we get those suggestions, people that go like “hey, listen to this, I sound just like A, B and C on your label,” and I’m like, well, I’ve already got A, B and C, I’m looking for X, Y and Z now!
- Ryan Martin
Did you ever develop any method for finding out that kind of stuff?
Ryan: We looked to friends, mostly. Basically what was in front of our face. Just yesterday I was walking home and I saw a familiar face on the sidewalk that I hadn’t seen in years, and it was an old band mate of mine. Aside from that, he was also the bass player in a very early Dais release, called Twin Stumps. We only put out one record, really early days. It was really great to see him. I was talking to him, and after he walked away I was thinking about that Twin Stumps record... Everyone I remember at the time was talking about this band that was playing in basements and stuff – the first time I saw them was indeed in the basement of a friend’s home. But everyone in New York hated this band. They suck, they’re terrible, they’re this, they’re that. And I’m like, well, if everyone hates them, sounds like I’m going to go help them a lot, I have to check them out! So I saw that they were playing just down the street, at that friend’s apartment basement, and I went down to see them, and they were amazing. They were absolutely incredible, I can’t say enough amazing things about them.
I actually adore that band, and that record might just have been the first Dais record I ever got. They kinda disappeared though, didn’t they?
Ryan: Oh cool! That’s awesome! Yeah, they went on to do other things. All four members are still around. Michael, the bass player I was just talking about, he joined a band I was in years later. I hadn’t seen him in five plus years, he moved away and we just randomly met on a street corner last night. I still see everyone around, but that band was a project of these artists, you know? The singer is an incredible painter, his Instagram is pretty wild. Zach Ziemann, the drummer, is a visual artist, Allen Mozek, the guitar player, is a writer and I heard from him recently. He started a really great tape label years ago that I don’t think he’s doing anymore, and he had a really incredible, difficult forward-thinking musical project called Good Area, which was really amazing too. They all splintered into other things and just had the two albums. At the time, people in New York weren’t really receptive to this kind of music, you know? This was in the days when… oh man, what’s that kind of music that I’m really not a fan of, what is it called… oh witch house! Do you remember that?
Unfortunately, yes. [laughs]
Ryan: Yes, it wasn’t really my thing either, but it was everyone else’s and people were really consumed by it. So bands like Twin Stump fell by the wayside. All the music writers were talking trash on this group, so I was like, cool, I’ll put out a record by ‘em! [laughs] But I genuinely liked them. Can’t tell you how many times I saw them live, they were absolutely amazing. That was a really nice thing, to go against the grain of what was happening then. When you could still do that. I don’t know if that’s so much a thing nowadays, it’s much harder to gauge what’s happening now. The lines of genres got all blurred, which is awesome, I think that’s a really great thing about the younger generations who grew up with the internet. I’m in my 40s, so I didn’t really start getting active on the internet until my 20s, but they grew up with it, and everything’s a blender, a mishmash of genres, styles, aesthetics, which I think is incredible and I’m getting turned on to new mind blowing music every day. I link it back to that – they didn’t grow up with rigid lines, with having to stay in your lane, which is stupid and I’m so happy these generations just threw all that out.
It seems fitting that your first release was, in a way, something that existed already. To this day you take great care in that sort of release, be they reissues or compilations or things like that, right?
Ryan: Absolutely. I love working on reissue projects personally, because before we started the label, I remember going over to Gibby’s place across the street, and he’d come over to mine – this was before he moved to L.A., of course – and we’d play each other all kinds of weird old records. I remember playing him Tony Conrad Dream Syndicate stuff, because he had never heard it before, the Table Of The Elements stuff had just come out, so I made him copies of that. This was stuff that was hard to get at the time, there was no Discogs, and maybe you could get some of it on eBay, but generally it was difficult. I didn’t have any money back then, I was just a kid and there were weeks when I just had ten bucks to eat, we’ve all been there in our younger years, but I remember going into the record stores, and if I had any leftover money, that’s where I’d spend it on. I remember seeing all the records on the walls, all the expensive stuff they got hanging up, and seeing all this stuff I would kill for… I thought that I’d kill for those records, but that I’d never have 100$ to spend on a record. Who has that kind of money to buy a record, I thought, right? Reissues were happening, of course, they were happening the whole time, there’s always been that concept especially with major labels, but there wasn’t a huge focus on it, that was just starting to happen. Labels like Vinyl On Demand or Minimal Wave popped up at the same time, and they were really focused on reissues. They were really curating their catalogue and putting a lot of care into it, and I loved what they were doing, that was great to me, because I could finally afford the music. I mean, I like having original editions, that’s nice, but all in all, I listen to music and accessing the music and having a physical copy of the music I love is the nice part. Sometimes reissues are better than the original, too. They sound better, they have all these cool photos you’ve never seen before, essays and everything. These labels were doing a really incredible job with this and I really loved it, so when we do reissues I really want to go into that, pull together as much as we can into it and really take a lot of care. Just make sure that it makes sense with what we’re doing at the time, which obviously changes over the years. One other thing is that with reissues in particular it seems that we really get in the weeds, we get really granular with how it’s presented, what it’s going to look like and all these different things. I mean, you can reissue anything. Why should people care about this one that we’re doing? Why should someone that’s into all the bands in our label care about this old thing from 30 or 40 years ago? You have to get the “here’s why” across to people.
Can you point out a few releases that you would consider as crucial for the development of the label?
Ryan: I don’t really have favourites, but there are releases that I felt were turning points. Some of it has to do with the release itself, but some of it is also about where we were at as a label and that release timed up with that, we made a little turn on that road. There’s been a few of those. Obviously the first one, you always remember your first. Early Worm, because I’ve been chasing the high that we got when we got those records in the mail. I have pictures of my whole living room floor, of all these boxes of the Early Worm records piled up on my floor, it was so exciting. I feel like the first Youth Code record was also a big turning point. I felt that’s when things really started to coalesce with the label, and specifically with what was going on in Los Angeles. It was a kind of a cultural change thing, we were a part of it, and they were too. Something different was happening at that time and it’s going on to this day, and that was a giant springboard. It was really great to be around for that, to witness it. The first Iceage record was a bit of a turning point, there were a lot of lessons learned with that one. Not things that we didn’t know, but that we maybe didn’t want to know. It kind of forced us to take the label a little more seriously – just business things, like contracts and stuff like that. We had a choice to make at that point with that record and we made the choice to grow and take it more seriously. Working with Drab Majesty was another turning point, I feel like that we definitely started growing together, the label and that project. It wasn’t planned that way and it sort of happened, we can see it now when we look back. Working with Drew McDowall was another turning point, it moved the dial a bit when it came to the presence of electronic music on our label. Working with Drew and establishing his solo works was a really formative thing for us, as a whole. Not just his first record, the whole thing. We even met a lot of other people that we work with through him, and that was a big change.
What about disappointments?
Ryan: Hmmmm…. No! I can’t think of any! I really can’t.
Really? That’s a big thing, after sixteen years, isn’t it?
Ryan: It is, isn’t it? I’m trying to think… I still talk to everyone, I think I do. If I don’t talk to anyone is just because we’re all busy and we have lives and now we’re older and people have kids and stuff.
You have no “enemies”, then.
Ryan: No, not at all. Not that I can think of. It’s been a pretty smooth ride. I always try to keep cool with everybody. It’s easier to have friends than enemies.
The label has its own life, its own thing outside of me and Gibby, and we just have to make sure the label is always listening. I think that’s why we never got stuck in a genre, or in an era, and ended up sounding dated.
- Ryan Martin
You have enough challenges as it is right now, I suppose, right? Is the crazy state of the world affecting you?
Ryan: Yeah, for sure. I think a lot of it is logistical stuff, mostly. I never thought I’d be dealing with the kind of shit I’m dealing with now. But yeah, obviously it’s a different cultural climate now than it was fifteen, sixteen years ago. People’s interests, even just aesthetically and in music, keep changing what it feels like every week. [laughs] But that’s good, it never stagnates, people evolve, it’s a great thing. It’s just a matter of keeping up with it. There are challenges, but as a label you just need to be very flexible, especially now. During Covid it was crazy, we had to be very, very nimble. Delays, logistics, we had to do phone calls all the time, all these manufacturers, shipping companies, figuring stuff out. We had to be very creative when people couldn’t tour, everything. But hey, it worked. I feel that it worked okay, and it kept us on our toes. On top of being flexible, you need to be open. Open and listening to what the conversation is as a whole, and not be dismissive of people or ideas or what’s happening in the world. You can disagree or agree with something, but listen. Listen to people and what they have to say. There’s a reason why people are happy, upset, annoyed or excited, and you gotta listen to them. Take it in, actually hear what they’re saying and let that sink in a bit. Maybe it’ll change how you do things, for the better. Part of growing up as a human being is just that – growing. Becoming a better person. And it’s the same with the label. The label has its own life, its own thing outside of me and Gibby, and we just have to make sure the label is always listening. I think that’s why we never got stuck in a genre, or in an era, and ended up sounding dated. I always want to be paying attention to what people are talking about in culture, in music and in art, and I want the label to be a valid representation of that.
How special was that anniversary show that you’ve mentioned a couple of times?
Ryan: Very much so, because it was a reality check. To me, in my head, sometimes it can feel like it was fifteen years ago, it’s just this little thing. And then I got there and it was like, whoa, who are all these people? Most of them I’ve never seen them before in my life. That’s great! It’s not just my friends showing up, and that’s a great feeling. I went to a Choir Boy show, it was kind of the first show post-pandemic, it was a really big venue here in New York. It was close to sold out. I went by myself, I figured I’d see a bunch of friends there… and I didn’t run into anyone I knew there. I kept walking around the venue, going like “I gotta know somebody here!” [laughs] It was packed and this is not a small place, there’s multiple floors, and I didn’t see one single person I knew. That’s when it hit me, this is awesome. It means we’re reaching people. All those people were there to be there. They were hardcore Choir Boy fans, they knew all the songs, they were loving it. And the only people I knew were the bands playing! We reached all these people, and they’re all strangers. Seeing random strangers enjoying this thing that we helped bring to life with the records was amazing.
This sixteen year old teenager of yours will soon reach adult age – how do you see the future of Dais? Do you guys think about that often?
Ryan: We have thought of it, and at this point, it’s like any parent. You have your gripes and this and that, and you’re too busy and all these things, but at the end of the day, when you put your head down on the pillow, I couldn’t imagine not having it around. It’s been such a huge part of mine and Gibby’s lives for so long, that for all the complaints we have about this and that, every day it feels like it’s worth it. Hell yeah, I hope we’re still doing it five, ten, twenty years from now, as long as we can. We have a responsibility to our artists, some of them have been able to quit their day jobs and make their living as musicians, because they get royalties and they tour and they don’t have to work that shitty nine-to-five anymore. We feel very duty-bound to keep that going as much as we can to support that. We love it. For all the stress that it can cause, because it’s a lot of work, we love it. We assembled a great team, we have great people that work with us that are really crucial to it and who have found their own footing in it. We’re learning from one another all the time.
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