NETWORKING: Cozy’s O’Keefe says, “If it’s digital and it’s on the Web, the whole world is at your fingertips.” |
In the scramble to capitalize on the digital music revolution, old record labels are restructuring their business models and new labels are rushing to market. Few of them, though, are designed to take advantage of the opportunities the Internet provides. But one New England label has the right idea. Cozy Music, born on the third floor of the AS220 art compound in Providence, is strictly digital and is pouring out music at a rapid clip. Already in the works are EPs from top-shelf Boston mixmaster DJ C, Providence DJ-turned-producer Mike Hoska, Maryland producer Slouch, and the pop project “tfo.” And the hotly tipped Cozy electro project Triangle Forest play Great Scott this Tuesday.
All of this comes courtesy of AS220 resident and New England techno-whiz Timothy O’Keefe, Cozy’s founder. “Some people I don’t think would need at all to come into the label,” he says over the phone from AS220. “They’re sort of helping me establish the name. Other people, though, I’m offering them an opportunity to make their products available everywhere.” O’Keefe does this through Iris Distribution, a digital aggregator out of San Francisco that signs labels to digital deals and then puts that music on 90 different download sites around the world, including iTunes. O’Keefe simply mails Iris a CD-R and in three months it’s worldwide.
“My contact there used to be a DJ at Brown, and we were friends back then. I found him on Friendster, actually. At that point I was just starting to get my own release out there, so I signed a contract for the entire label, as opposed to just the release, and that got me thinking, ‘Hey I should totally do a digital label. There’s less overhead, I don’t have to manufacture CDs, I’ll make CD-Rs for promo. I just send Iris a CD and it gets distributed everywhere.”
O’Keefe has been around the New England scene since he started producing music at 14. In the ’90s, he made tracks for NYC techno act DJ Keoki, threw parties with names like “A Rave Called Quest,” and promoted warehouse raves up and down the Northeastern seaboard. In 1997, he moved into AS220 and from there met a laundry list of musicians, DJs, and producers. “It’s a hub of different artists coming through here, so it’s allowed me to pursue my heart in some ways. I kept meeting people who were really talented, and this came up as an opportunity, so it’s like, ‘Hey, are you interested in putting an EP out?’”
Mike Hoska was. A fellow AS220 resident, Hoska released his homonymous four-song EP on Cozy last month. “It’s funny, I just found out Tim promoted a lot of the parties that I would go to.”
“Hoska started out more as a DJ,” O’Keefe adds, “but he’s taking on a bigger role with the label, too, doing promotion.”
“I’m out and about a little bit more,” says Hoska, “I know more electronic producers, so I’ll do some promotion and some A&R.”
It’s a new template for a label as a collective of like-minded friends and colleagues pooling their resources and talents to benefit one another. O’Keefe: “It’s an opportune time to start a digital label, because I don’t believe that CDs are going to be around much longer in terms of a product people purchase. Ten years from now it will all be digital sales.” He pauses. “If not sooner.”
But whereas the traditional start-up has business plans, venture capital, and million-dollar lawyers, O’Keefe is counting on friends, acquaintances, and old associates to help him along the way. “Most of these people are friends of mine, so we already have a sense of trust. I met Jake (Trussell, a/k/a DJ C) back when he was doing the Electro-Organic Sound System. Ian Bradley (a/k/a Slouch) just graduated from RISD and we did a night together called the Cozy Lounge. And Brendan Britton of Triangle Forest I met when he was performing at AS220 as B-Lite, the blind rapper.”
Cozy wouldn’t be much without AS220. Through the center’s programs for visiting artists and residencies, O’Keefe has made enough contacts to schedule 11 releases in the coming months, including UK producers, Australian sound designers, and, most astonishing, an album of unreleased material from electronic-music legend Hans-Joachim Roedelius (Kluster, Brian Eno). Sonic Snapshots is a collection of unreleased collaborations the icon has done, including two tracks with ambient producers the Orb.
“I would never have enough money to release all these as albums,” O’Keefe says with a laugh. “I’m having a hard time with the promo side of it, but I’m trying to invest as much as I can, you know? I hope to get people interested in the quality of the stuff I’m putting out so they won’t be just like, ‘Oh, fuck this.’ ”
