\ \ _ _ _ \ \ _ __ ___ ___| |_ __ _| | __ _(_) ___ \ | '_ \ / _ \/ __| __/ _` | |/ _` | |/ _ \ \ \ \ | | | | (_) \__ \ || (_| | | (_| | | __/ \ \ \ \ |_| |_|\___/|___/\__\__,_|_|\__, |_|\___| \ \ \ \ \ |___/ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ _ \ _ \ _ \ \ \ __| | ___ | | __ _ | |__ ___ _ _ ___ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ / _` |/ _ \ | |/ _` | | '_ \ / _ \| | | |/ _ \ \ \ \ \ \ | (_| | __/ | | (_| | | |_) | (_) | |_| | __/ \__,_|\___| |_|\__,_| |_.__/ \___/ \__,_|\___| \ \ \ \\ \ \ \ \\ \\\ \ _=_ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ \ ||_|| _____ _____ ||_|| ||||||| \ \ \ \ \\ \ _________ |____|| ||_|| ||||||| |_|_|_|_|_| \ |:::::|:| ||_|| ||||||| \ \ \ \ __ __ |_|_|_|_|_| _ |:::::|:|__||_|| |||||||__ \ \ \ | | | /_| . |_\ | | |:::::|:| ||_||___||||||| | \ \ \ \ \ | | /__| . |__\_| |_||:::::|:| _||_|| ||||||| |__ /\|_| /___| . |___\ \ |:::::|:||.....| __|||||||/ \/\/\ /\/\ /|\ | \ /___ | |____\ |:::::|:| @@@@|||| | | | | | @@@@@@@@@@@@@@ | \/ \ / \ /\/\ /\/\ @@@@@ @@@@@ @@@@########### @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@|@@@@@|@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ ______ _ __ _ _______ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _____ _ _ _ _ _ _ --- -- ___-- - -__ __ _--- - ____---__ _ ___ --_ __ __ __ _ ---- _ _ _ __-- ---- __ _--- _____ --- -_ ___ - - -_ _ __. _ ___ skyline of Abidjan Written by Z. v. Z Shadow Wolf CyberZine met online with Tristan Koreya, who runs “Nostalgie de la Boue”, an intriguing and renegade music label and blog of the same name based in Abidjan Côte d'Ivoire, specializing among others in industrial, ambient, noise, musique concrète, and field recordings. The label features both well-known and less well-known artists, as well as around 136 releases, including two excellent compilations titled “rien ni personne”. The blog and related label are titled after a :zoviet*france track off the album Loh Land (1987), which in turn is a reference to the expression coined by mid-nineteenth century dramatist Émile Augier, meaning an attraction to depravity, crudity or something vile. SWCZ: First, thank you for accepting to virtually meet with us for this edition of the Shadow Wolf CyberZine! I came across your net-label Nostalgie de la Boue on Bandcamp as well as your blog of the same name while looking up artists. Could you tell us a bit about Nostalgie de la Boue, both the label and the blog? TK: In the mid-2000s, I started to rethink about everything that had been produced in the 1980s and 1990s in the field of industrial/post- industrial and experimental music and I wanted to create an archive web site, but I didn’t do it because I didn't have the technical skills to do so – it remained at the idea stage. During the summer of 2007, I was delighted to discover some blogs that offered free downloads of rare and exhausted cassette or vinyl rips: the first one was Mutant Sounds, the second one The Thing On The Doorstep, and others later on. I started downloading what I was interested in and quickly I had a pretty accurate view of everything that was available on the Internet. So I decided to create my own blog to put online cassettes or records that I hadn’t seen anywhere else on the Internet, after understanding that it was technically very simple. The name of the blog, “Nostalgie de la Boue”, is the title of a track by :zoviet*france:, one of my favorite bands, on the album “Loh Land” (Staalplaat, 1987). Being French, this song title in French intrigued me and pleased me, I memorized it. When I looked for a name for the blog I created at the end of 2007, I thought about it. I then searched the Internet and learned that this expression, which does not have a very precise or clear meaning in French, is used as it is in English. Literally, “nostalgie de la boue” can be translated as “nostalgia for mud”. According to some definitions found on the Internet, the expression means: “a desire for or attraction to crudity, vulgarity, depravity, etc.”; “an attraction to what is unworthy, crude, or degrading”; “a yearning for something base or vile”; “longing for an uncivilized, savage and indulgent life”. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, it also means: “A longing for sexual or social degradation; a desire to regress to more primitive social conditions or behaviour than those to which a person is accustomed”. A slightly different definition is given on another site: “‘Nostalgie de la Boue’ means ascribing higher spiritual values to people and cultures considered ‘lower’ than oneself, the romanticization of the faraway primitive which is also the equivalent of the lower class close to home”. So all this fits well with the spirit of the blog. When I created Nostalgie de la Boue, there were already many blogs that inspired me. My favorites were: Atlantis Audio Archive, Because God Told Me To Do It, Continuo, Dualtrack, Mutant Sounds, No Longer Forgotten Music, Phoenix Hairpins, Shards Of Beauty and The Thing On The Doorstep which no longer exists but was in my opinion the best of all. Among the blogs I discovered or that appeared after I created mine, I especially appreciated those that offered original rips or took into account what was already available on other blogs. Indeed, in the early years, there was a spirit of community between blogs. We were connected and each one followed what the others posted in a cumulative logic. This spirit has been lost with more and more blogs focusing on quantity without taking into account what others post. Some repost rips from other blogs or peer-to-peer sites without citing their source and without worrying about what else exists. I do not recognize myself in this spirit, even if it probably meets the expectations of many users. As for Nostalgie de la Boue, for a few years now, I can no longer make rips myself because I live most of the time in Africa, far from my collection of cassettes and records. That’s why the majority of rips posted on the blog now come from external contributors, which is interesting for both me and them, because some people like to rip and share some tapes or records from their collection without wanting to run a blog. It is also another way to maintain the spirit of exchange. The net-label started a little by chance, as part of the blog. In 2011, Canadian musician Al Conroy, who performs under the name Not Half, offered me to post on the blog the recording of one of his recent concerts. On the cover he designed for this post, he added the reference ndlb#1. It gave me the idea to ask other artists to send me unpublished recordings, recent or old, to make a series. That’s how it started. The first releases were only published on the blog, among the other posts. But after having published several of them, I decided to create a net- label on Bandcamp to better highlight them. I gathered the first releases and started looking for more. For the blog, the objective was to exhume rare and unavailable releases, so it has always been and will remain dedicated to old things, whether it is cassettes, vinyls or CDs. For the net-label, it’s different, since artists are invited from the beginning to propose recent recordings if they want, new or rare, but also because I gradually decided to open it to artists of the new generations. Indeed, during the first years, the idea of the net-label was to propose releases by artists working in the field of industrial/post-industrial and experimental music for a long time, who therefore belonged to the older generations. These releases could be recent or older recordings, unpublished or re-released classics. It was later that I decided to open the net-label to artists of the new generations. On the other hand, one principle has not changed since the beginning: I want to propose a great diversity of styles, because I don’t like the idea of a label locked in a too limited musical identity. Finally, regarding the financial aspect, at first I wanted the net-label to only offer releases for free download, as on the blog. But on Bandcamp, beyond a certain number of free downloads offered, the page manager must pay to get a new credit for free downloads to offer; so with the money earned through voluntary payments, I can finance the free downloads offered. Moreover, the fact of making it possible to pay by the “name your price” option also allows you to upload longer tracks; it was one of the artists from whom I had to release a long track who advised me to switch to this option. SWCZ: You are a digital-only label, in an era where vinyl and cassette are still very much in demand. Could you tell us about your choice of running a digital-only free download/name your price label? TK: As I mentioned earlier, the creation of the net-label is born within the blog; it is as an extension of the blog that I chose to create it. So I never asked myself whether I would create a physical products label or a net-label. In fact, I plan to do physical releases in the future. Physical products and digital files are often thought in opposition, as if they were two competing formats. This is partly true, since we have seen a significant decrease in sales of physical formats since the emergence of digital formats, but I would like to point out that this observation is only partial, particularly in the specific field of industrial/post-industrial and experimental music. First of all, I think that the multiplication of blogs that have exhumed past cassettes and records since the 2000s has largely contributed to the renewed interest in these products and, paradoxically, to the taste for the physical formats, limited editions, special packaging, etc. Moreover, I think that the fact that tapes or records are available online does not prevent, and sometimes even helps, that they are sold in physical formats. I will take the only example of the French band Vox Populi! Its founder, Axel Kyrou, has always been grateful to blogs for excavating his music at a time when he thought it had been forgotten and no one was interested in it anymore. Under his encouragement, many Vox Populi! albums are available online on blogs or net-labels, especially Nostalgie de la Boue, which does not prevent them from being re-released in physical formats and still selling very well. There is therefore sometimes a certain complementarity between physical and digital formats. We can think of the relationship between these two formats at another level, that of the taste for the material object, in particular concerning the physical format that most closely resembles the digital format: the cassette. To some extent, the relationship to digital files is comparable to the relationship to cassettes on which vinyl records (or other tapes) were recorded and then erased to record others. Likely, there is a similarity at the level of labels. The physical products to which net-releases most closely resemble are cassettes: with very few means, recordings of unknown artists made at home with limited equipment can be released. However, there are also important differences, the main one being the dematerialization of music. As cheap as it was, the tape had a physical existence and usually took place in a collection of material objects like it, alongside vinyl records and CDs. In addition, it was often produced in limited editions: it was therefore not only an object, but also a rare object, sometimes with special packaging, which reinforced the value given to it by its owner. This dimension is obviously absent from the relationship to digital files: it is much more difficult to develop a fetishistic or materialistic attachment to a collection of digital files than to a collection of cassettes, vinyl records or CDs! It is also that the files are perishable: you can easily lose an entire collection of digital files in the single crash of a hard disk for example. This strongly modifies the relationship to the musical medium: the relationship to the perishable digital files is finally closer to the relationship to streaming listening than to the relationship to the collection of cassettes, vinyl records or CDs. Moreover, by moving from the cassette to the digital file, we lost part of the exchange dimension and especially the materiality of these exchanges that passed through the postal mail. But there is still an important dimension of exchange related to digital files, for example between people who make rips and those who download them, whether on peer-to-peer sites or on blogs. However, this dimension is also lost as the supply increases. All you have to do now is connect to the Internet and help yourself. On this point, the situation has changed a lot in recent years, even if we confine ourselves to the field of industrial/post-industrial and experimental music: a decade ago, we could try to get all the rips of cassettes or vinyl records available on peer-to-peer sites or on blogs, but today it has become almost impossible because there are so many. SWCZ: I find interesting for the compilations you indicate on your blog how the digital tracks can be burned onto CDRs. How do you see the CDR format in the realm of being a digital-only label? TK: When online releases and net-labels appeared in the 2000s, it was the time when I made many copies of CDs on CDrs. As a result, I also systematically burned on CDrs everything I downloaded from the Internet, and I was annoyed when the releases were not designed to fit properly on a CDr. It was following this experience that I organized the compilation “Rien Ni Personne” so that it could be burned on CDrs. It was also because I thought the quality of the compilation would have deserved it to be released in physical format, and that was one way to get closer to it. That said, I don’t like the CDr format, because it is too often of poor quality. Similarly, although I am very attached to the cassettes of the past, I do not like the revival of the cassette and I never buy recent releases in this format. I would love to and I plan to transform Nostalgie de la Boue into a physical products label, but it would only be to release CDs and vinyls. SWCZ: The label features well-established and lesser known artists, with a broad range of sound and types of releases described on the website as “experimental and unconventional musics”. Some of my personal favorites are the albums by Mireille Kyrou/Vox Populi!, Bourbonese Qualk (live), German Army, the two compilations released on the label titled “Rien Ni Personne - a french compilation”, vols. I and II+III (comprising 91 and 184 tracks respectively!) and the latest release by Stradivarius. What are some of your personal favorite releases on Nostalgie de la Boue or some of your personal highlights in terms of working together with artists and bringing their music out on the label? TK: There are several releases that I like very much, but the one I prefer is undoubtedly the compilation of French artists “Rien Ni Personne”, which is also the one that has been the most successful. As I said earlier, after creating the net-label, I gradually wanted to release artists belonging to more recent generations, but I realized that I was lost in the current scene, including that of my own country, France. So I thought I would design a compilation that would provide a panorama of this scene. I had in mind some cassette compilations dedicated to France in the 1980s and I wanted to make a compilation in the same spirit, but with the current artists and means. The compilation was designed almost exclusively using Facebook. First, I sent invitations to artists I knew or identified, many of whom were from the 1980s generation. Then, little by little, I tried to get to know and contact other, younger artists, and I realized that there was a considerable amount of them. That’s how I finally ended up with 91 tracks. But the story didn’t stop there, because many of the artists I had identified didn’t contribute to the first volume of the compilation and, after it was completed and released, I discovered many more. So I decided to launch a second volume that gathered more than twice as many tracks as the first volume! I decided to stop there so as not to tire the public. However, I then made another compilation dedicated to the city of Bordeaux alone, and again I was very surprised by the large number of contributors. This shows that the number of people working today in the field of post-industrial or experimental music is much higher than in the 1980s or 1990s. This is why the market for physical products has become saturated and net-labels have developed in parallel, and again why we must avoid thinking of these two categories in opposition. Check out the Nostalgie de la boue blog here and label here! http://nostalgie-de-la-boue.blogspot.com/ https://nostalgiedelaboue.bandcamp.com/ ----------------------------------------------------------------------- * * * * * * * * \\\\\ * ///// * \\\\\ ///// * \\\\\ //// \\\\\ ///// \\\\\ ///// \\\\\ //// \\\\\ /////\\\\ ////\\\\\//// \\\\\ ////// ///// \\\//// \\\\\ ///// \\\\ //// \\\\\// ||||\\\\\////// |||//// ||\//// \\\\\///// //// \\\\ /////\\ |||| \\\\\//// |||/// ||//// * /////\\\\\ \\\\ //// \\\\\ \\|||| /////\\\\ |||\\\ ||/// ///// \\\\\ //// \\\\ ///// \\|||///// \\\\ ||| \\\ ||// ///// \\\\\ \\\\ //// \\\\\ //|||\\\\\ //// ||| /// || * \\\\\ ____\\\\\ \\\\/// //// // ||| \\\\\ \\\\ |||/// || \\\_____________\\\//____///__// |||| \\\\\ \\\\|||// || * \\_______________//_____//______||||___\\\\__\\\|||/____|| \_______________________________|||_____\\____\|||______| || || * * * ||_____________|| * * |_______________| * Algae Graffiti in Alien Language by Verner Trescott