The Quietus have interviewed us and some of our bands about Rocket's history and our 15th Anniversary Compilation:
With the Bristol/London label turning 15 this year, Daniel Dylan Wray caught up with its founders and asked its roster to talk us through their favourite tracks from the anniversary compilation, Crystallized.
Founded drunkenly at a Heads show in Bristol in 1997 by Chris Reeder and Simon Healy, Rocket Recordings are now turning 15 years of age and to celebrate, they've released a compilation LP, Crystallized. It showcases both the wealth of talent and variation already housed on the label through such artists as Teeth Of The Sea, Gnod, Hills and Goat as well as other artists that have caught the label’s eye and seem to embody the label’s cacophonic surge of forward momentum, mind-fuckery, and a restless strive for experimentation, such as Sheffield’s finest purveyors of rhythmic noise, Blood Sport, the churning Swedish chug of Uran or the twitching psych-funk of The Lay Llamas. It’s a celebration of a label and time period that illuminates its past achievements not by looking back or by re-releasing old material but by embodying the qualities that have kept them going for 15 years and brought them to this juncture: releasing new music.
Says Reeder about the label’s birth: “We never had any aims or underlying philosophy when we started, we just wanted Rocket to put out damn fine records that sounded and looked great. We were huge fans of the US underground so labels like Sympathy For The Record Industry, Amphetamine Reptile, Alternative Tentacles, SST, Wax Trax!, In The Red and early Sub Pop. John O’Carroll, who runs the label with Reeder, also recalls the early days: “I seemed to remember long evenings being sat around houses folding sleeves and putting records together, there was a ritual element to the event, music blaring in background, playing each other the latest purchases, opening up new worlds. This is how I started with the label, maybe that’s where our love of repetition came from, hand packing sleeves over and over again in time to the music. Then I turned my skills to creating sleeves and getting involved in the visual side of production, an aspect which has always been a hugely important for us and that was in place from the very beginning.”
Read the full interview here: The Quietus
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