Okay, so it’s been an interesting time over the past while, with a few good things and few not so great things. First off, we’ve finished the artwork for the Cabbage s/t release, so it’ll be sent to the pressers we hope early this week.

Money is such a pain in the arse with all of this. Over a grand to get the CD pressed, more for promo, then more for the Sahk CD, blah blah blah… it sucks. Oh that’s something noteworthy - the Fah Khing Project has changed their name to Sacre Bleu!, thank god they did it before we released any CDs and stuff with the previous name. Their CD sounds really good by the way, can’t wait to get it done.

Okay, to get the bad news over - our 3rd band She Spits Macabre is no more, the band has split up for some reason that I’m not entirely certain of… after not playing any shows for a while, a few almost-breakups and a lineup change they’ve finally called it quits which is a bit of a blow. They were a fucking great band, albeit a pretty damn volatile one. I think that energy may well have been the very thing that ensured their eventual implosion, and tensions within the band were pretty high towards the end. We’re gunna miss having SSM around, and whilst the band is no more I still keep in touch with Jake, who - along with being a talented lyricist and singer - has become quite a good bud. I really hope at least some of em start another band at some point.

I remember when I first decided to throw some money at these guys to get their EP recorded and pressed I was going to put it all down as an ‘experiment’ to just see if it would work. The whole idea was to leave the band to do anything they wanted, not make them to do anything at all and just try and back them as much as possible. When I first found out about the split there were a whole bunch of thoughts flying around like “maybe I put too much pressure on them”, or perhaps not enough, or “maybe I didn’t nurture the band enough” etc etc… but looking at it with a bit of distance I can see that ‘maybe’s don’t help anything and on the brighter side at least a cool band existed for a bit, played some good shows and gave all of us at Pith an idea of what it’s like having a band on board that we don’t know other than “the guys in a band on our label”.

All in all I guess the experiment was a mixed success, and whilst I have a feeling I’m not going to end up seeing any of the grand or so invested in the band it was all worth it.
After all, isn’t the whole idea of Pith to help bands who we think deserve it, and not to make huge swagloads of cash?

Maybe ideals work only in an ideal environment.. but whatever the fuck it was belief and I’m not letting that go.

It’s a bugger though, no matter how much we try and make money not the central focus it remains somewhat of a central point in everything we’re doing at the moment, as I said previously.

Speaking of money, I’ve been getting down with a few NGOs and stuff trying to sort out funding for Mentalfest. I have this terrible suspicion that it’s going to cost a fair bit more to put on than I thought, thanks to stuff like public liability insurance and the like. It seems that whenever you deal with established organisations tied in with the government things get very complicated.
Manouvering through the piles of paperwork and associated bullshit makes me very happy to be independent from it all, I hope we can work it so we keep as small and mobile as we are currently, whilst still getting some backing from the established organisations that have all the money.

Anyway. That’s more than enough for another diary entry, the next one will probably be after we release the Cabbage CD…

This entry was posted by Will Dayble on Saturday, March 26th, 2005 at 9:00 pm and is filed under Start an Independent Record Label. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.