This is Night People Records.  They aren’t just awesome, they are so eye-wateringly awesome I am tempted to give up on the label business altogether and take up knitting.

I’m a pretty phlegmatic kind of a person most of the time, and there are very few labels who generate any kind of real envy in me, but these guys definitely manage it.

Johnny from Fence and Stuart from Chemikal Underground are such lovely guys I could never be that nice if I took classes, never mind the respect I have for the labels they run.  Empty Cellar release The Sandwitches, Pillars and Tongues and early Sonny and the Sunsets stuff, and Full Time Hobby have both Micah P. Hinson and Timber Timbre on their roster.

But for all this, nothing quite matches the levels of delight and abject jealousy I felt when I opened up my first order from Night People. Jesus Christ and the Opossums their records are lovely!

From a musical point of view I guess you’d probably have to call the label experimental.  That doesn’t really cover it though, because they run from electro-pop to indie rock to noise pop to more or less anything.  There is a lot of experimental music on the label, but seeing as how one end of their spectrum is relatively conventional I quite like the fact that the other end is far too much for me to really handle.

The label’s founder, Shawn Reed, started the label as a means to self-release his own material back in about 2003, but the project has since become rather massive, as you can see from their back-catalogue.  But as well as having the courage to invest time and money, over a long period of time, in music that really isn’t very commercial, there is more about Night People to incite my burning label envy.

That image is a closeup of the Peaking Lights EP Space Primitive. It’s a vinyl pressing of an EP originally released on cassette, and there are only three songs on the record, so Reed took the opportunity to press a one-sided 12″ record and screen print a design on the other side.  It then comes in a plastic sleeve with a single sheet of card bearing a screen print which complements the design above.  See what I mean when I said ‘eye-wateringly beautiful’?

Peaking Lights – Lifed

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When I received it, Space Primitive was in a package of three records, all of which are equally gorgeous.  Below is the artwork for Blunt Instrumental by Tyvek (another design with a beautiful screen print on the actual record) and then a split 12″ by Wet Hair, Shawn Reed’s new band, and Naked on the Vague.  These too, as you can see, are works of art in themselves, even if the music was shit, which it most emphatically isn’t.

It’s all a hugely DIY operation.  Most of the bands in question have no more than a MySpace page, which these days betrays not just a slight lack of commercial ambition, but an utter lack of interest in the internet as a whole. Also, Reed does all the screen printing himself, and in an interview with Altered Zones described the operation thus: “dude, I’m not like, Insound. I am one dude in a house in Iowa”.

Tyvek – Robots, Dogs

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For ‘one dude in a house in Iowa’, though, his output is just plain fucking incredible, frankly.  Apart from the record above you can buy all sorts of screen prints from Night People, as well as a somewhat bewildering quantity of cassettes.  American boutique labels seem to have gravitated towards a tape and vinyl only model some time ago actually, a trend the persistence of the CD market in the UK seems to have rather retarded.  You can see it happening here, but it’s still a pretty slow process.  And if you thought the artwork on the tapes was any less special than the vinyl, just have a look at the array of examples on this post on The Cat’s Pyjamas – fucking incredible!

So, I think you all understand the label envy now.  One dude in a fucking house in Iowa.  Christ he makes me feel like I am woefully underachieving!

Wet Hair – In the Garden of the Pharoahs

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Naked on the Vague – Cryptic Tonsil

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