Time-Lag , based in Portland, Maine, is a record label worth celebrating.
It is essentially a one man operation and Nemo Bidstrup has built an impressive catalogue of mainly vinyl releases since he started out in 2001.
While Time-Lag music is an essential entry point to what has been dubbed the New Weird America, Bidstrup wisely rejects links to any music scene or attempts to tie him to one genre. He prefers to call the artists as a “vague community” as a reference to the healthy cross fertilisation of ideas and shared philosophies.
If you really want to generalise, you could say that a common denominator of the artists he is drawn towards are those inspired by primitive Folk-Blues from the first half of the 20th century alongside more recent sounds of Psychedelic-Rock and Acid Folk in the 1960s and 1970s. Time-Lag’s releases include free folk benchmark albums by Six Organs of Admittance, Espers and Charalambides. They (he) also collaborated with Eclipse Records to produce the remarkable triple lp set ‘By The Fruits You Shall Know The Roots’ (see earlier blog entry).
More recently the label has extended its reach to reissue ‘lost’ Psych classics from Brazil by Satwa and Marconi Notaro. Time-Lag is proud to be worlds apart from the corporate majors that still dominate the music industry.
Nemo openly admits his modus operandi is deliberately designed to show that there is an alternative to mass produced digital music – “The world has too many CDs” he told the online zine Diskant. The label’s policy is to make high quality vinyl pressings which they present with lovingly crafted sleeves.
From a hard nosed financial perspective this is an approach which is tantamount to commercial suicide. It is only viable because the releases are limited to a small number of copies, usually no more than one hundred.
The irony is that it is only through unstoppable music sharing on Cyberspace that small operations like Time-Lag have become visible and influential on a global scale. Both in terms of sound quality and presentation, these copies are obviously inferior to the original but the bottom line is that a growing audience is able to access sounds previously only available to the fortunate minority.
So, paradoxically, it is through the virtual network that Nemo Bidstup’s own philosophy of “less laws more music” is most fully realised. It also opens a global window to similar artists and labels from Finland, Brazil, Japan and Europe so that they can legitimately lay claim to being part of Nemo’s community in downtown Portland, Maine.
