Introducing Centagon Records

Paul

Thursday, June 23, 2016 6:01:50

Well folks, here it is. Everyone who knows me knows that Centagon Records has been in the works for a long time. If anybody needed to see hard evidence that I’m actually doing this, I hope this shiny new website should suffice.

Centagon’s story began sometime in 2009 in my cramped studio apartment on Seattle’s Capitol Hill when (for reasons I don’t even remember; perhaps some misguided hipster sensibility) I brought home my first turntable. Among my first vinyl purchases was Things We Lost in the Fire by Low (Kranky, 2001), which I’d already a favorite, having bought it on CD years before. Thumbing through the LPs in a now-defunct record store, a sticker on the shrink wrap peeked my curiosity. It said “AAA,” explaining that the album’s production had been entirely analog. Unaware that such a thing was still available outside my parents’ basement, I took it home and listened. And the way I listen to music changed forever. It just sounded real, in a way that digital audio, for all its precision, just couldn’t quite touch. It infected me with a fantasy of creating such an artifact of my own. I didn’t know how to do such a thing, but I set about figuring it out.

Today, in 2016, that fantasy is about to become a reality. I’m proud to announce Centagon Records to the world, or whoever is listening.

In today’s saturated music landscape, it might seem hubristic to think the act of starting a small record label to be some kind of statement. In an age when a song can be catapulted across the globe with the tap of a touchscreen, a label’s function as producer of physical media may seem obsolete. Yet physical media persist, even flourish. Obviously, I wasn’t alone in what I experienced in that apartment in 2009. It was something as old as music itself, when it becomes something more than just cheap background noise. Sometimes, whether it’s live, digital or analog, music has the power to create a moment in time when you’re compelled to sit down and just listen. It’s time well spent.

My goal in this weird, likely unprofitable enterprise is to create more of those experiences. Here’s to misguided effort, to thumbing our noses in the face of capitalism and obsolescence. Here’s to art. Come along for the ride.

-Paul