Recent releases from L'Animaux Tryst Recordings |
Each release from L’Animaux Tryst (Field) Recordings is a tiny, elaborate hand-made gift, packaged like a mix-tape you’d make for your all-time biggest crush. The albums, released as standard CDs, three-inch mini-discs, and sometimes cassettes, are pressed in small runs (a max of 50, so far), and scooped up quickly by loyal customers around the world — many of whom discovered the label on noise/avant-folk review Web sites.
The label — possibly Portland’s smallest, certainly its most interesting — is the part-time operation of local musician Matt Lajoie, 23, a full-time employee of USM’s Portland library who has been performing under the moniker Cursillistas (pronunciation up for debate) for the past three years. In 2005, while interning and learning the ropes of distribution at Time-Lag Records (home to local indie-rock favorites Phantom Buffalo), Lajoie recorded his first Cursillistas release, the avant-folk LP Rotary and Gems. Time-Lag label head Nemo Bidstrup, a fan of the album’s sound and unusual packaging, offered to distribute it.
“I realized that my burned CD-R in a hand-painted, hand-sewn, recycled brown paper bag was actually an album. I made 50 copies in all. They sold out pretty quickly, and when I saw how quick and easy it was to self-release music on a small scale like that — and that through Time-Lag’s distribution it could go all over the world — I knew it was something I wanted to continue doing,” says Lajoie.
Produced with the same scrappy care and attention to detail you see on their packaging (see sidebar and cover), the L’Animaux Tryst releases are a refreshing (and legitimate) do-it-yourself antidote to streamlined mainstream releases and distribution. As Lajoie puts it, “We’re not going into the studio and compressing the hell out of the recordings.” That ideal has attracted seven other acts to Lajoie’s label — mainly experimental-musician friends, along with some of his own side projects with larger groups — who work together in the recording and designing of the albums. After Lajoie recoups the expenses, the artists, who make the album packages themselves, receive the profits from sales.
The label’s camaraderie and intermingling — days working on getting album art together are called “crafternoons” — adds up to Portland’s newest and largest musical collective. The L’Animaux Tryst family will have its official coming-out party, as it were, at SPACE Gallery on May 26.
The evening’s event, called the “Tryst Haunt” and headlined by non-label friends Brown Bird (see “Flying Free,” p 9) will feature performances by seven of L’Animaux’s eight artists, each of whom will also be selling new albums for between $6 and $12 (assuming they’re still available).
Crafting a market
To this point, Cursillistas has been the label’s only recording artist. He distributed the second Cursillistas album through Time-Lag early last year, and in December his third release, Les Biches, became the first work distributed by L’Animaux Tryst. The three-inch CD is painted over with what looks like whiteout, and stamped with the artist’s name and the edition number (out of 40 copies). The package is recycled from a brown paper bag, with a white cardstock back sewn onto it with black thread. A flap of brown paper folds over to the back of the casing with a strand of thread, which you wind around a shirt button sewn onto the center of the back side. The album’s cover image is a haunted tree out of a Tim Burton film, drawn in black pen with brushes of whiteout about the trunk. A cloud of black squiggles to the right takes the shape of a bat.
