The label’s minimal marketing — still just MySpace (www.myspace.com/lanimauxtryst) and Blogspot (lanimauxtryst.blogspot.com) pages — didn’t hinder its ability to move Les Biches quickly. Consistent Northeast touring and the odd acquaintance in useful places have garnered Cursillistas gushing acclaim from Northeast Performer magazine and non-local music Web sites Foxy Digitalis and Animal Psi; he’s also received strong airplay on college radio stations at NYU, MIT, and the University of Georgia at Athens, along with local scene-booster WMPG.
The new L’Animaux Tryst releases establish a broad but distinct identity for the label. While somewhat loosely classified as noise, psychedelic, or avant-folk recordings, each of these projects casually reject the polarizing implications of those terms.
“These are all lo-fi home recordings,” Lajoie says. “And because every artist is basically recording, mixing, and editing their own songs themselves, you can hear the idiosyncrasies that each of us have in our production style, but they all have that homespun vibe, because none of us are trained audio recording engineers or anything like that.”
That vibe — along with each release’s gorgeous packaging — is a huge part of what makes these releases so compelling. The albums are pregnant with open spaces and possibilities (hence that suggestive, parenthetical “Field” in the label name); soundscapes gestate and grow in surprising ways. L’Animaux’s output may be disparate, but its aesthetic feels as if it has already been realized and agreed upon by everyone participating.
Collector’s items
With laptops, iPods, and now cell phones making it less and less necessary to purchase an album (easily scratched) in a package (easily cracked), the L’Animaux Tryst releases are a nice refresher course in how the album-as-art-form can maintain some relevance. The relative inconvenience of finding a place to listen to a three-inch disc or a cassette is a moot point when you get hold of these releases. They’re such lovely and singular objects that they beg (or insistently whisper, more like) to be listened to, and the nostalgic reversion of popping one into a tape deck becomes an essential part of the experience.
The desirability of L’Animaux Tryst’s limited-edition artifacts to its first collectors is apparent, and it’s fair to assume the label’s customer base will grow as it gains more local notoriety and Internet word-of-mouth does its thing. It poses the question of how Lajoie intends to increase the size of L’Animaux’s pressings while maintaining homemade, homespun essence. Lajoie responds deftly to that intriguing irony — the more limited-edition the work, the more people are likely to want it. He argues that creating these packages on a greater scale would be more time-consuming, less fun, and probably result in products less desirable to the label’s fans.
“Selling out an edition of 40 doesn’t necessarily convince me that there’s any sort of wider market for CD-Rs and tapes than what we’re providing for. The market we have found, however, definitely wants to have a copy of everything we put out, so that’s nice. . . . But I’m sure that part of the appeal to this specific audiences is that the releases are so handmade and limited — if we were mass-printing stuff and making a thousand copies, these people wouldn’t be interested anymore.”
