Regional Bears is an experimental tape music label based out of London, UK, run by Louis Golding. RB’s MO since establishing itself around three years ago has been simple: Every couple months release a batch of three cassettes in editions of 100 each of only the finest sub-underground audio belch, and let God sort ’em out. The catalog speaks for itself and if you’re the sort of person drawn to this stuff then I’m sure names like Yeast Culture,  Darksmith and Idea Fire Company get you plenty moist in the knicker-regions already. The label has also served as a reliable outlet for newer and more mysterious one-off projects emanating from the furthest depths of the international sonic basement (a sultry place, being very near to Earth’s core). Its activities reflect the interests of ‘Mutually Assured Marginality’ to an almost comic degree, and thus it seems only natural to be subject of the first in an ongoing series of interviews we’ll occasionally be issuing as part of our monthly column. Louis and I spoke over the expanses of time and space a few weeks ago to discuss the origins of both the label and his own enthusiasm for strange sound, his avid tape collecting habit and plans for the future of this first rate enterprise. Read below:

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Mutual Assured Marginality: Regional Bears arrived, seemingly out of nowhere, in 2017 with a blackhumour tape, and branched out rather quickly to a notable outpost for a particular strain of fringe sound. What was the impetus behind the label? What was your personal interaction with the ‘underground’, as nebulous a term as that may be, prior to operating the label? 

Regional Bears: Prior to the first tape I hadn’t really been involved in anything with underground music other than just as a listener, but I guess I was increasingly communicating with a lot of the artists I was listening to, and a lot of the labels. So I guess just getting more involved speaking with people about their work, and the Instagram account was actually sort of a part of that, just posting photos of tapes and people like William Ransone were following and we got talking that way…

MAM: OK, so that’s @loooooooooooops, for anybody that doesn’t know…I did have a question about that but we can talk about it now.

RB: Yeah, so it meant that artists who I’d been interested in for awhile suddenly felt a lot closer, and kind of reachable. And also at the time, well I still am, but at the time I was really keen on that kind of 80s/90s mail art cassette culture and the idea of taking part in a scene, it’s useful to have some sort of capital to exchange for that. So it felt like an achievable thing to get involved with, and I was already in touch with Fraser [Hall, of blackhumour] and he’d been really generous in sending a lot of unreleased material for me to listen to. So I just said “Hey listen, I think I’m doing this” and he’s just really easy to get material from. So he was up for it and it went on from there.

MAM: Yeah so I guess this does relate to one of the questions…I’ll just ask it now…about personal taste and collecting. Like you said you had the IG acct. and were just a big fan of this stuff, and that was basically a conduit for getting involved via releasing it. So first of all, how did you get into this kind of material initially? What was your gateway into this area of rather subterranean sound work? 

RB: I guess by about my mid 20s I was really bored with “music”, which I’d been a big fan of most my life, or at least since I was a teenager…song based stuff like Pavement, Dylan, the Velvet Underground…that sort of thing. And I still like all that stuff but I was definitely listening to songs for a very long time and it’s like with anything, just a case of diminishing returns after a while. So I was super bored and I was really consciously trying to find other types of music that would keep me interested and engaged. I didn’t go straight to experimental music…I probably came to noise actually via techno. I got really into techno but it can be pretty one dimensional. So I came out the other end of that having listened to that very kind of noisy techno where if you strip away the beat you’re just left with usually fairly crap noise.

MAM: Around what year would you say this is just for perspective? 

RB: Right about 2010? Something like that? So from there I got into noise pretty heavily and then eventually to more of that sort of sound art or just experimental music in general.

MAM: How do you decide what to release? Regional Bears seems to represent, or rather work within, a certain “post-noise” aesthetic. Is this a conscious decision in terms of ‘curation’ or rather a natural result of the sound work you tend to be drawn to? Like if someone sent you songs…or a while back I recall we were talking about the Tim Shortell tape [E. Granby Granby ‘Cold’] being kind of different and pretty ‘musical’, and it stood out in relation to other releases because of that. So I guess the question is do you just release things you like, or take into consideration their place within a larger project?

RB: Yeah that’s interesting you’re saying that about the Tim Shortell, I’d forgotten it felt like that, whereas now it seems to me to have been absorbed into the catalog. My instinct is that if I had something song based I really liked I’d probably…I don’t feel it’s a natural fit for the label. I wouldn’t rule anything out 100% but I do view it specifically as a label for fairly experimental and really quite unstructured sound work. But then having said that there are a few releases that have music now….it is essentially a reflection of what I listen to and what my tastes are on the whole and that does include songs so I haven’t got a set idea for what it should be…well I do but it’s flexible. Some releases come to me out of my control, like Tim’s, that was something which Scott [Foust] set up, he match-made us, and it worked out. I really like that tape. It probably isn’t something I would have gone out of my way looking for, it was just good fortune.

MAM: Can you elaborate on that? 

RB: Yeah so you know Tim plays in Idea Fire Company as well, and so Scott knew Tim had just produced this particular set of recordings and wanted them released and so he just hooked us up and it was pretty straight forward from there.

MAM: That is a great tape. I always like those releases that are a bit ‘out of character’ for labels that have a pretty particular identity. 

RB: Yeah Scott’s great of course…he fixed up the Darksmith tape as well.

MAM: Oh ok, and what was it like putting that together? I’ve never been in contact with Tom Darksmith but I’m a big fan of his work, of course. 

RG: Yeah well it took awhile, from first contact to getting it done it was probably around 18 months. We agreed to do something and I’d occasionally touch base and he’d tell me he was still thinking about it but you know…very brief emails…I probably had a couple of emails that were a bit more chatty saying he’d set up a show locally, but some emails were one word, two words. And just now the last email I got from him after the tapes were done and I’d sent them out and said to him something like “Thanks so much, it’s a really big deal for me to release something of yours…” and he sent back a really nice message, saying something really complimentary about the label and that he was very happy to do it. So that was nice. 

MAM: What do you feel is so significant about tapes, as a format? Other than low overhead, why do you think they’ve remained the go to for such a broad range of underground recordings, while being, in a broader cultural sense, completely obsolete? 

RB: There are a lot of reasons they hold so much appeal to me. It’s a format that just lends itself to experimental music because any failure is going to be fairly minimal financially. It’s a format you can afford to take a chance on with difficult material. Ultimately it does come down to the fact that they are cheap to produce.

MAM: But why do you think they have such a staying power as opposed to something like a CDR, which is arguably cheaper to produce, and people still do make them of course, but they don’t have, well speaking for myself anyway, I don’t have the same kind of attachment to CDRs, whereas there are some tapes I’d never want to get rid of, and it’s not just because they are rare and would be hard to find again. Do you have any thoughts on why that is? 

RB: I don’t know for everybody, for me when I became a music fan I was buying stuff on tape, so I have an early association with listening to them, even before I was buying my own I’d listen to mixtapes that my dad made. So there’s that. And I really think they are just beautiful items, they are just this lovely tangible thing. I don’t know about people younger than us who grew up with CDs; do they feel similar about them? I doubt it. 

MAM: I don’t think people…this is just what I’ve observed but I don’t think people younger than us, say people in their late 20’s and younger…I think older Millennials like us are the last generation to have any real attachment to physical media, broadly speaking. Because we didn’t grow up solely on the Internet. It was there when I was a kid but it wasn’t a big part of my life until like college really. So in order to hear something you needed to have it right in front of you, and that seems to just be embedded in my brain, at least. Probably younger generations are right; there is something really perverse about caring about objects of course, they aren’t that important. I guess it’s all a matter of perspective though, plenty of worse things to obsess over. 

RB: In terms of doing a label on cassette I think potentially…it’s not always true…but by and large a lot of artists who know what they’re releasing will be on cassette approach the work slightly differently…

MAM: A little ‘freer’ you think?

RB: Yeah I think having something they know will be on vinyl they might regard it as going into their permanent record. It obviously varies but I think there are some releases for people I’ve done where the material they gave me to release is a little more leftfield than what they typically put out.

MAM: I also wonder, in relation to the above question, if you have any feelings about the particular sounds that are replicated on the types of tapes you put out? Do you think, on a material level, there are certain sounds that are best suited for the cassette format, and thus are best served by being presented that way? 

RB: To be honest I don’t really know; I’m not much of an audiophile. I recently changed my tape deck, I upgraded, and now I have quite a good one, and I just realized I’d mostly been listening to the sound of a motor running for a few years. Like alongside the music. So I don’t think I have particular sophisticated ears. I do know that more delicate stuff doesn’t sound great on cassette. But I think with cassettes more than anything else you’re dependent on a good player.

MAM: But I wonder if  there’s a sort of self-selection going on? Where the type of work you tend to release is very leftfield as you say but also often very, not overly concerned with ‘errors’ and things like that. Or using sources that tend to be kind of murky and lo-fi. And I wonder if the sort of artists that want to release that type of material are drawn to this format because it compliments what they do. That’s my own theory, anyway, neither here nor there…

RB: Yes, well tape music is the genre isn’t it? As much of an appropriate catch-all term as Noise or whatever.  

MAM: So much dialogue around the kind of music/sound art we are discussing seems to revolve around ideas about ‘freedom’, ‘openness to possibilities’ , ‘inclusivity’. I find this to be a generally positive attribute until I look at the discographies of certain labels and find them littered with the most bizarre and unnecessary documents (10pg+ Discogs listings of some obscure early Aughts Scandanvian imprint which somehow had multiple Thurston Moore-related 3″ CDRs you probably could not give away today…). Perhaps I am projecting because I find myself struggling with such questions regularly, but how do you reconcile the motivation to release work you feel is worth others hearing with the reality that there is far too much music out in the world already? Does it ever feel that in a sense you are contributing to some sort of artistic/cultural pollution?

RB: No reconciliation necessary. I don’t really think about it if I’m being honest. 

MAM: That’s probably healthy. 

RB: I mean running a label is the work of fandom, isn’t it? So I get excited when I see that someone whose work I like has released a tape, or record or CD or whatever. I’m happy to see it and I’m happy when other people do it and I get attached to labels. If there’s a label I think is really well curated I will trust that and get whatever they put out. That’s what I’m trying to do with Regional Bears. And it’s only 100 copies I’m putting out, fairly low stakes, and easily ignored if not to someone’s liking. But I do take your point, because it is relentless in terms of how much is out there and I spread myself way too thin in terms of how much different stuff I listen to. I don’t give enough things repeat listens the way I did ten years ago. But I don’t really worry about it much. 

MAM: Yeah that’s a good mindset. I guess it’s like anything, the vast majority is gonna be bullshit…or maybe not even bullshit but just not ‘for you’, not to your taste, and that’s fine. Just find what you like and focus on that. Anyway, next question: You’ve recently begun recording your own material and publishing some of it to bandcamp, as well as a track on the ‘Isolation Postcards’ SoundCloud series. Are there any concrete ideas on what to do with that going forward? Do you have any experience working with music/sound in the past?

RB: Nothing concrete as yet, no. I may self-release something, it just depends on there being a gap in a batch. That may happen later on this year. The bandcamp thing is more just to process the idea of putting my stuff out, getting some feedback and letting go of it, which has been quite useful in figuring out what bits I like and what I don’t. 

MAM: How long have you been doing that stuff, collecting recordings etc.? 

RB: Oh, probably around 6-7 years. Maybe a bit less. Definitely before the label started, but in a pretty directionless way. I feel recently I’ve been able to devote more time to it and be a bit more focused on what I want to do. And probably just getting better at the editing. So it’s progressing in a way I feel good about. There are a couple compilation things out there, the ‘…Postcards’ series you mention and something by Sam Grossinger, who has a distro and is involved in Work From Home Pipe Band, he’s asked me to contribute to a compilation, so that may come out. It’s a compilation of “Mack the Knife” responses. 

MAM: I don’t know what that is.

RB: You definitely know it, it’s one of the most famous songs of all the time. Like there’s a version by Dean Martin [plays song on phone and holds up to computer speaker].

MAM: Haha I guess, seems familiar enough. What are your interests outside of the rare tape publishing/producing business? Do you find they have any influence on what you do with Regional Bears? 

RB: When you sent the questions last week this one definitely made my wife laugh. The concept of me having other interests…

MAM: An all encompassing sickness, is it? 

RB: Exactly. Pretty narrow…tunnel vision…I have some other interests but I don’t think any are comparable to my focus on experimental music. I’ve been reading more poetry recently. I’ve been thinking of releasing sound poetry and more voice-based work on the label, so there’s potential for that to influence how the label goes a little bit.

MAM: You’ve just released a new batch amidst this global pandemic (Darksmith, Mark Gomes, City Medicine), what can you tell us about these releases? We talked about Darksmith I guess, but the others? And also, well we talked about how there’s a low overhead so perhaps the world crumbling around us doesn’t really matter in this regard, but do you have any ideas or intuitions about what the changing tides of global commerce will mean for distributing these sort of fringe sound documents? 

RB: Yeah it was a bit unpredictable, I was nervous releasing a batch while this is all going on.  Though it was easily the fastest selling batch I’d ever done. That’s partly because it’s a really strong batch…I mean Darksmith…and even without the name Blue Chemise attached I think Mark Gomes, that one sold the quickest.

MAM: Yeah well Mark doesn’t release much and It’s always very purposeful when he does…

RB: Yeah for sure. Just the three releases in general were all really strong. And I did put it out there that if people were financially unable to pay for them to contact me and we could work something out, but no one did that and they just sold really quickly and I think that is a benefit to doing tapes; it’s not too much of a stretch if people want them. The next batch is coming out soon, so whether they sell as quickly, who knows? I’m terrible at predicting these things. 

MAM: What else? With this next batch I know there is a kind of ‘voice-based’ compilation coming up because I’m on it. Anything else you’d like to mention in the realm of future plans/releases etc…?

RB: Yeah so the next batch, which will hopefully be ready early July, is the compilation of voice work, Chris Fratesi, who usually records as Gene Pick, and Hair Clinic, which is something that Jack from Noise Not Music pointed me towards. He’s very good at trawling the depths of Bandcamp, and when he finds something he thinks I’ll like he’s kind enough to point it out to me.  So that was a tip from him, and it all came together very quickly.

MAM: Yeah I’ve never heard of them so I’m excited for that. What’s their deal? 

RB: It’s total non-music basically. It’s a guy called Max Nordile, who does quite a lot in a variety of different styles. Punk stuff I think, all sorts. But this is interesting just in terms of how sometimes careless it is, but also it’s nicely done, fun kind of no technique field recordings…harvested field recordings, I really like it. Have you listened to Chris’s yet? 

MAM: Yes he sent it to me, or did you? Either way I’ve listened and I think it’s great. 

RB: Yeah he must’ve sent that to you. I just love that tape. I’m so excited to get it out. Let me see if I have anything else worth mentioning…I have a long list but nothing solidified…these could all fall through…so no that’s it, let’s end it here.

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

Do you record marginal music to keep yourself from going insane? Would you like for it to be reviewed? If so, donate to community bail funds: https://www.communityjusticeexchange.org/nbfn-directory. THEN: Email crisisoftaste [AT] gmail.com. Only physical releases will be considered, and reviewer reserves the right to discard upon unsatisfactory listening experience, but if what you send is good then that shouldn’t be a problem.