Imagine, if you will, a record label that does not divulge the identity of the artists it releases. One that puts out all of its releases with no titles and no artist information. There’s nothing but the music.
This has been done before on a small scale. In the late nineties, the noise label Freedom From released three tapes by an unknown artist, supposedly because “the credits were lost.” Around the same time, a mysterious German label called Indoor put out two seven-inch singles with images of obese cats on their covers with no artist information. In the early 2000s, the Kollaps label ran a series of 7″ EPs with unknown artists, entitled Of Things That Move. A 2000s-era ambient music net-label known as Ansiform released all their mp3s anonymously. And the Boomkat mailorder put together a series of untitled CDR releases which obscured the musicians’ identities. There’s even a recent label called Anonymous Records that puts out music by established artists but hides their identity – though the artwork is flashy and the marketing is rather maximalist.
Yet none of those labels pulled this concept off with as much gusto and conceptual purity as Alex Botten. His net label, Zero Info, kept all revealing information obscure. Starting in 2012, he distributed sixteen releases by mystery artists. The releases and tracks had no titles at all, apart from some dots and slashes to fulfill Bandcamp’s requirements. The cover art for each was identical – a blank white square:
I caught up with Botten via email to learn about this anomalous label. I first wanted to know a little bit about him. He tells me he has a day job working for a charity, and spends the rest of his time doing diverse creative work — “bits of writing (novels, ghostwriting etc), artwork for record sleeves, and my own musical projects,” he summarizes. “A dear friend at work described me as a ‘renaissance man’, which is nice but makes it sound like I know what I’m doing, which I absolutely do not. Currently, when not helping people in my day job, I am working on a couple of novels and writing/rehearsing songs for the two noisy bands I’m in.”
When he started Zero Info, Botten was in a slump. “I was living in a flat next to a pub, in Lye in the Black Country,” he says. My own music stuff was getting no interest, I couldn’t get gigs anywhere and I was feeling pretty glum. I’d been married to my (now ex) wife for a couple of years and things weren’t great. I’d gone from playing gigs every week, and getting played on the radio and reviewed in the NME a few years earlier to being ignored. So nothing was happening and I had to do something about it.
“I settled on making a series of what I called ‘SuperLimited’ releases, records, tapes, and CDRs in tiny runs of no more than ten. Those picked up a bit of a collectors vibe and sold quickly but I still wanted to do something that had no physical presence in the world.”
The idea for Zero Info came from a desire to explore a conceptual extreme. “I liked the idea of something completely anonymous and it fitted with my interest in doing something that had no physical format,” he says. “I took the idea to the most extreme place I could – the releases would have no information, all the artists would be anonymous, all the sleeves would be white. I had to compromise a little with the titling of the records, using various punctuation combinations to be able to put them on Bandcamp, but otherwise, the rest was as I wanted it to be. The label name ‘Zero Info’ was the obvious choice.”
It was all about the concept, which he imagined catching on with a certain subset. “I wanted the music to stand entirely on its own,” he says. “I hoped that people would eventually download everything on the off-chance it was made by someone well known. I tried to get the Wire to mention it in their news pages but nothing happened so the downloads were less successful than I’d hoped.”
He thinks he might have been inspired by Boomkat’s series of anonymous CDRs, which similarly obscured the identities of its created, and avoided song and release titles. “They had some way of differentiating between the releases that I wanted to avoid as much as possible,” he notes – signalling a desire to push the concept as far as it would go.
Order one was convincing artists to embrace a concept that deprived them of credit for their own work. For many, that wasn’t an opportunity, but an opportunity to experiment. “Through being involved in music for a couple of decades, I have a lot of musician and artist friends,” Botten tells me. “I just asked if anyone would be interested, then laid out the rules. I told any artist who was interested that they could never reveal that they’d been on the label or identify themselves with a release. I think that was liberating for a lot of people, and I got things from people who are known for other things that sounded nothing like their usual output.”
Most of the releases could be categorized under the drone, ambient, and experimental tags, which makes them particularly opaque from the perspective of guessing the artists’ identities. When I ask Botten for anecdotes, or any tantalizing details of the artist behind Zero Info’s impressive sixteen releases, he is tight-lipped, telling me they will go to the grave with him. “Partly because that was the plan, and partly because I’ve forgotten who did what,” he explains. “Time has erased who did what from my memory, and I haven’t listened to any of the releases in years. To me, that means the project has succeeded – the work is all truly anonymous.”
He does tell me that the artists he approached to contribute were “a mixture of well-known artists and people who’d never done things before. I like that there are these hidden gems by artists that are collectable that their fans are almost certainly unaware of.”
It’s only fitting for him that he has almost no memories of Zero Info’s activities – even though I find this a little hard to believe. “I wanted Zero Info to be like staring at a blank white wall, overwhelming in its underwhelming amount of information; I wanted it to be the sudden silence after the explosion that seems louder than the bomb,” he reflects.
Looking back, he has mixed feelings about Zero Info. It didn’t end up in the pages of The Wire, but it delivered on his concept in an unexpected way. “It was an art project that both succeeded and failed,” he reflects. “At the time I’d wanted it to become something that hundreds or thousands of people would download whenever a release was put up, but that didn’t happen. Now I know it’s succeeded in a completely different way, by being a pure expression of nothing.”
Thanks to Alex Botten for the interview. Botten’s many multimedia happenings can be explored here.
Anomaly Index 