na: squealer records

I’m a music person because of my father, a musician, and I’m an indie-minded guy because of a dude named Butch Lazorchak. I grew up outside of Blacksburg, Virginia (home to Virginia Tech), which had an amazing — and now out-of-business — indie record store called the Record Exchange. It was there that I bought my first albums from Archers of Loaf, Pavement, Sebadoh, Spoon and on and on. And every one of those albums I purchased at the behest of Butch, a thirtysomething clerk there who kindly took me under his wing while I was in high school, always guiding me towards stuff he thought I might like, always expanding my horizons. I owe the man a whole helluva lot.

Butch was much more than an indie-rock guy, though. The dude loved Japanese noise, psych-rock, the truly weird (at the time I doubly thought so, and for sure his tastes are still more adventurous in those worlds than mine). So devoted to this stuff was he that he started his own label in 1992 to specialize in those sounds. The label was called Squealer Music, and, to my delight, it hit eMusic today.

A lot of the Squealer stuff is very “out,” to use an Other Music phrase. Free jazz like Gold Sparkle Band and William Hooker, bizarro prog from Rake and Spatula (who I saw play a Happening-type show in NYC back in 1997 or so) and more accessible psych stuff from Major Stars. Some of this stuff I managed to “get,” some I did not.

But what I did gravitate to very quickly were Squealer’s forays into reissues and Japanese stuff. For instance, way before they were hip, totally nuts Japanese psych-noise band/cult Acid Mothers Temple released two excellent albums through the label: New Geocentric World (which I can still remember hearing for the first time in Butch’s living room — after high school, my family moved into Blacksburg proper directly across the street from Butch: fate!) and a performance of Terry Riley’s classic In C that I still return to regularly. Both records come very highly recommended, although with some caveats that this is definitely not music for everyone.

Two other Squealer bands, however, come recommended straight-up: High Rise, an ’80s Japanese psych/stoner band, and Circle, an experimental outfit from Finland who, in the past two or three years, have been adopted by the more adventurous hipsters (think Aquarius Records in SF). In terms of High Rise, I’ve always liked II best, in particular the totally poppy in a Deep Purple kinda way “Cotton Top,” a regular mixtape staple of mine over the years. The live record is also fantastic — really, any of their stuff will be adored by anyone into hard rock, psych or dark metal. Snatch that shit up!

And as for Circle, their live album Raunio is impeccable, incredible experimental prog with great Krautrock elements (if Neu! had stuck around they totally would have gone in this direction) and some amazingly explosive jams. Mesmerizing! Here’s a clip of a recent live show they played:

Anyway, I owe Butch a lot, and I’m ecstatic that he’s finally joined the eMusic family. (His wife Madelyn Rosenberg, btw, has written several pieces for us as well. And in another nice twist of fate, I briefly worked with Madelyn in high school when I interned for the Roanoke Times — I didn’t know of the Butch-Madelyn connection at the time!) As someone to whom I owe a great deal of my musical legacy, I feel like it’s my duty to extol its numerous virtues. Do me and Butch a solid, and give it a chance.