“I think it’s important to ask yourself how much you are actually contributing to the artistic ecosphere. Even if we’re just passing the same twenty dollar bill around to each other, that’s more meaningful than not.”
Kory Reeder, Sawyer Editions
Sawyer Editions is a small-batch record label based in Texas that specialises in contemporary, experimental and improvised music, with a focus on new and unreleased artists. Founded by US composer-performer Kory Reeder in 2021, the label has put out a total of 25 records over the course of 5 batches from January 2022, including portrait discs from composers such as Sylvia Lim, Lise Morrison, and James M. Creed. In 2023, Kory began Sawyer Spaces, an imprint to the label that specialises in field recordings and soundscape composition.
Sawyer Editions released their fifth batch of records on 5th January 2024, featuring Matt Sargent, Noah Jenkins, Ben Zucker, and Germain Sijstermans and the Prague Quiet Music Collective, alongside Kory’s own album Snow. Shortly after the release day, Patrick Ellis had a chat with Kory to discuss his process of discovering and liaising with composers, burning CDs en masse, DIY punk scenes, cassette tape culture, and contributing to an artistic ecosphere…
Patrick/PRXLUDES: What were some of the record labels that you closely followed when you were growing up?
Kory/Sawyer Editions: A lot of punk and emo labels from the 2000s — like Hellcat Records, No Sleep, things like that. A lot of bands that you would find in Alternative Press Magazine. I would look around at websites like interpunk.com which had a lot of music; way back in like 2007 — when emo music was gaining a lot of popularity in places like Hot Topic — [they] put that music on there. So it wasn’t necessarily the labels themselves, but more about where things were curated; Hot Topic’s radio or sites like Smart Punk would curate music to those scenes. That was really early, before I got into this world. But it sets the foundation for a lot of this stuff I do now.
When I started really getting into music, [I was] playing in bands, playing in the hardcore scene. We had a cool local music scene. I’m from a really small town called Kearney [in] Nebraska, which has about 35,000 people, and it’s in the middle of nowhere. But [it] had a cool scene for punk rock, hardcore and emo in the 2000s through to the mid 2010s when I was still living there.
Throughout my undergraduate I was in a hardcore band, playing bass and doing backup screaming. We toured all the time. And all that stuff was done DIY; we put stuff out ourselves, but we got some stuff out of small independent labels, we would tour shows playing in basements, bars, venues, whatever. We never got big, but it was a lot of fun and we did it all the time; and I think it put this sort of do-it-yourself attitude into how I handle my so-called “classical” or contemporary music.
When you began to get immersed in contemporary and experimental music, which of those labels did you admire? And which platforms did you discover these through?
When I started to get into experimental music, contemporary art and contemporary music, there [weren’t] a lot of labels that I was aware of until the latter part of my undergrad. We’re talking 2014, 2015, 2016 — which was when I discovered Edition Wandelweiser Records and by extension, things like Another Timbre — which [were] the main places for that. That was around the same time I found Bandcamp. I’ve never liked Soundcloud as far as a platform for sharing music, it’s never been my favourite; it all seems like previews or portfolios rather than actual albums, there’s not as much curation.
I’m from a small town in the middle of nowhere, so there’s no experimental music scene to speak of — especially not any contemporary music — other than what’s focused around the university. There’s a lot of finding stuff yourself, finding pieces online, that sort of thing. By the time I started my PhD in 2018, I wanted to try and find a way to put out my music in a way that I liked more than Soundcloud or anything like that. And probably because I grew up in this DIY punk scene, putting stuff in physical media has been really important to me. Even if that’s not necessarily how most people consume music — it’s not even how I consume most of my music — having some kind of physical format was pretty important to me.
So when I was there, I felt like: “Okay, I have all of this music, I think I could definitely put an album together.” So I started digging around, trying to find places where I could. Eventually, I put out my first album on Edition Wandelweiser. But that mixed with how I knew how to do audio engineering, recording, editing, mixing and mastering. I’d spent so much time doing DIY touring and putting out music that way, working with people in the punk and hardcore scene, doing it yourself — and I had the technical knowledge and I considered myself a relatively organised person… -laughs- I felt as though I could do project management stuff, so it was like “this was something I can actually do myself.”
From those labels you admired and were involved with (including Another Timbre and Edition Wandelweiser) when you were younger, were there any aspects that you found intriguing and inspiring at the time?
With Edition Wandelweiser, it’s so much of an artistic collaboration rather than a commercial enterprise — which is extremely important to me. That’s how I’ve run Sawyer Editions: I manage it like [they’re] artistic collaborations with people that I get to know whose music I like. With Simon Reynell [of Another Timbre], the extremely high quality of everything and a very clear aesthetic vision was pretty important. When we agreed to do my album Codex Vivere, we were exchanging emails where I pitched him this idea, and he was like “we’ll have Apartment House do it” — like the relationship was “hey, here’s this composer that you’ve never heard of who’s really young from the middle of nowhere in America, let’s just cut a record together,” and then everyone would go “cool, let’s do it.” It’s kind of radically naïve, in being like: “This is the thing that I think is cool and I think it’s worth [our] time” — and they all trust each other that it is, without worrying about crazy economic relationships or reputations. It was so relaxing and trusting, which was something that really inspired me. Just seeing that affirmation that we can do stuff together and this is important — maybe it won’t sell very well, but it’s worth us coming together and doing it.
The first batch of releases for Sawyer Editions were released in January 2022 — what galvanised that commitment? A lot of composers (and artists) when they finish education ask themselves “okay, I’ve got my music, but how can I support the wider artistic community?” And usually that falls into curation in some kind of aspect…
I was still in the middle of my PhD programme [at the University of North Texas]. It’s kind of hard to say which came first for a lot of stuff, but one thing that kind of got under my skin… You know Score Follower? So Score Follower posts a video of a composer you’ve never heard of, and I would go listen to it — “wow, this is amazing, I love this music, I’m going to go and listen to everything this person has put out” — then you go to their website and they just don’t have recordings of stuff! Composers are so bad at getting their music out there and making it easy to find, and it drives me nuts… -laughs- Someone will have awesome work or a couple of great pieces, and you go to try to find more and you just can’t. Unless you have a reputation like Klaus Lang or something, being anonymous online is really difficult to do in 2024, if you’re trying to start fresh as a young artist.
There was a little bit of me seeing that and thinking that when I was trying to put out my first record — other than Simon and Antoine Beuger — nobody was helping me. My music’s not got an international reputation because I don’t have a ton of performances, I’m still really young. I didn’t start composing until I was 20 or 21, but I thought: if I’m going to go all in on this, I want my work to be easy to find and to get a hold of. I think it would be devastating if someone said “I like this piece, but I can’t find anything else by this person.” So, there was a little bit of “maybe something like this can be a platform to make these people easier to find”, to just get their name out there, or find music that I like so that I can work with people and make something happen together.
So it branched out from a lot of different things at the same time; partially wanting to put out music from people that I liked or didn’t know, or are unknown, trying to be useful that way. But I’m the only person running this whole thing, so it’s all totally my taste and my interest, you know — maybe that’s its own thing. But I’m not doing anything that’s so weird that other people won’t be into it.
So really it was a few years before starting Sawyer Editions that there was a slow realisation towards that?
I think it probably took a couple of years before I was like “I’m going to do this”. I don’t know how long it would have been. I remember when I committed to starting the label, because I sent a message to somebody — and I remember where I was when I sent that message. -laughs- Before that, it was just a couple of months of just eating in the back of my head, incubating for a while. Once I actually committed to doing it, it felt like “Okay, now what? What have I got to do?” -laughs-
I wanted to put out stuff by people I knew — which you mix that idea with what I had with the Apartment House and Another Timbre thing, there [was] actually a long time where I was recording stuff for people. A lot of the recordings for the first batch didn’t exist until I committed to doing it. It took a long time to get stuff recorded and put together. That first batch definitely has the most of my own input — I’m performing on one of the albums, I did all of the mixing and mastering, etc. One of the pieces on the first batch — Anthony Donofrio’s piece for three vibraphone players on one instrument — I had to get percussionists together, rehearse it with them, and then I had to record it, do the mixing and mastering… -laughs- That just took a long time.
Were there any composers who were featured on that first batch of releases that you didn’t know? And if so, how did you find out about them?
I didn’t know Darcy Copeland personally. I wanted to find somebody who would do a record without knowing who I am and without having this thing exist, which was pretty hard to do. I was talking to Aaron Michael Butler — who plays on Anthony Donofrio’s album — and he was like “I know this person Darcy, she’s really cool, she’s really good, you would like her music, let me exchange a couple of emails” — and then we had five [for the first batch]. I don’t know why I picked five, but that was just the number that was in my head; and one of them had to be someone I don’t know, so it just took forever to get all of that stuff put together and ready to go. Then when I was doing that at the same time, I thought “well, this can’t be a one off, I have to do this more than once.” So by the time I got finished with that first collection, I had to start doing all the work for the next one, and then it felt like it was a real thing from that moment onwards.
You mentioned earlier that some labels demanded a recording fee — were there any aspects of some other labels which did things that you really wanted to avoid doing yourself?
What I said there is true — I do actually have a very small production fee that I ask people to contribute to. But I operate in the black. It has always still made a profit off of that initial investment, but that’s just a small materials cost. The financial split between me and the artist was a big thing. Some labels do 50/50, some labels don’t pay the artist at all until they’ve made all of their money back, some labels won’t tell you what you’re going to do; but for me it was extremely important just to be completely transparent and clear about why I do things a certain way, and how I have to do things — what is going on behind the scenes as far as it goes. I don’t have investors and I’m not independently wealthy; so it’s just all me. It’s just DIY, basically; so looking at other labels as an example, I can’t say which ones operate certain ways, but I just knew how I wanted to do stuff and what I would want. And that clarity, that transparency, was extremely important.
What was the process in choosing composers for the first batch? Am I correct in thinking that you like to support emerging artists who haven’t released a record before?
Certain labels just put out music that I’m just not into, certain labels put out music by people who have a big name. It was important to me to release music by people who have never released something before — that’s something I have continued to do, and will continue to do with this. Originally that was going to basically [be] the only thing I would do, but I’m malleable to doing other stuff. -laughs-
With the first batch, it felt like, if I’m going to do this, I need to put my own work out there; I’m going to back this whilst I am doing this. However, Sawyer Editions is not a platform for me to release my own music. There are labels that I’ve seen on Bandcamp that you’ll look at and see that it’s clearly just one artist putting out their own stuff — there’s nothing wrong with that — but that’s not what I wanted Sawyer Editions to be. With the first batch, that was important, because if I’m going to [take] the risk of doing this stuff, I’m going to be on the front line. If I’m going to take the time, the energy and spend the money to get the materials, to do that I’m going to put that risk onto myself, not on somebody else.
What were the main challenges with preparing and releasing the first batch? And what were the learning points?
The biggest one [is] how to figure out how to do it in an economically reasonable way. When you do disc manufacturing somewhere, you have to have a certain quota of how many things you have — it’s usually 100 CDs or something — and that has a financial layer that’s a lot higher than I felt comfortable asking people to help me pay for. You’ve got to remember that I was doing five of these at once; so one of them might not be much, but if you are doing five of them, then it’s whatever the amount is times five, which can be a lot.
So [I was] finding a way to make it economically viable in a way that it was going to work. It’s all stuff that you don’t even think about. You have to think about everything: the graphic design, the layout. For instance, the inserts that go into the CDs; you start to think about the album art, do you want it to have a unified aesthetic or do you want them to be different? Do you want them to have the title on the album cover or not? What font are you going to use? How long do you want the programme notes, how do you want to lay that out? Would it be different, or are they going to be uniform? If you’re going to print them out by yourself, are you going to print them out on thick cardstock paper or is it going to be on a lighter weight paper? If you do it on a thicker paper, you’ve got to make sure it’s either on a laser-printer or an inkjet — and depending on the density of that, if it’s going to smear or not. Do you have a paper cutter? No, but I know somebody that does, so they let me borrow that and then I’ll cut that and make sure that I fold it inside the thing.
I think that’s a big reason why it took so long to do everything. Maybe if I had done it with a manufacturing company — like CDBaby or whatever — if they would have done the production for it, then you’re limited to slightly less creativity with certain things. On the one hand, it was really fun to be creative and find stuff. I like the packaging of [the CDs]; it’s like these string-tied, envelope kind of things and I had never seen anybody put something out like that, which is why ultimately, I ended up going that way with it. But at the same time, it’s a rabbit hole, and every decision that you make goes into that rabbit hole; there can be decision paralysis or just getting overwhelmed by everything. Or you can just not be very thoughtful about it and just do whatever. But I’m not that kind of person — I overthought every single detail as much as I could, even though I probably made plenty of mistakes along the way.
All of these decisions have to be made while you do this and you don’t think about any of them when you start. “I just want to put out music”: okay, but what is the thing that you are going to put out? It’s a physical thing that has to come into existence, and if it doesn’t exist somebody’s not going to do it for you. You have to make decisions, which on the one hand is very exciting and fun; but at the same time, that’s also something you can screw up at every single point. -laughs- The music stuff was actually easy — it was all the other stuff that took forever.
Going into the second batch, were there any approaches that you immediately changed from the first batch when you were preparing for the second lot? I understand that you also approached some composers from the UK such as Sylvia Lim and Sophie Stone?
It was a lot easier because I had the experience from the first one, and I knew how to do everything and I had figured out how everything worked. I recorded a lot less stuff on that one. I did a lot more mixing and mastering for this second batch, though. A lot of that one was trying to branch out into more unknown people; which included Sophie Stone, who I had talked to for a little bit before — we had a lot of mutual connections, especially with Wandelweiser. Then we had this album by Forrest Moody with Jack Yardbrough playing piano. I had kind of commissioned that because Jack and I are really good friends, but we’re also both really interested in longform piano music and there just aren’t a lot of people supporting that stuff. And then with the rest of these albums, I didn’t know anybody.
Sophie and Sylvia both live in the UK, so it was like, “Okay, we’re going to try to make this not just my friends in the US, but include people I don’t know [from] anywhere”. I still recorded a piece on Sylvia’s album — the actual title track ‘sounds which grow richer as they decay’. That was on Score Follower, actually; I thought that piece just kicked so much ass and I wanted to make an even stronger recording of that, or at least just a really clean recording of it.
All of this just opened it up and made it feel like the label was now a real thing; it didn’t just have to be my friends that I know immediately. -laughs- It didn’t just have to be an American thing either. I think Sawyer Editions is a very American sounding name, but it’s not an American enterprise or just an American aesthetic; I am open to people from wherever, but that batch really felt like the door is now open to find people and work with people that I didn’t know.
How did you come across Sophie and Sylvia’s music? What qualities in Sophie and Sylvia’s music attracted you to approach them to release a disc on your label?
Sylvia’s music was from Score Follower specifically. With Sophie, I think she might have done a residency with Antoine [Beuger], there was a Wandelweiser connection there that I don’t remember exactly how that started. Do you remember during covid, everybody just lived on the internet and then suddenly you have all of these connections with people online where you don’t really know how it happened? -laughs- It was one of those things I’m pretty sure.
Sophie does these amalgamation scores which are these really intricate webs of cells and ideas. [They] have these symbols and text that are these instructions for what they mean and how you navigate through them. I really liked the piece and that idea conceptually, and how people had performed and recorded them. I liked what people had done with them, so I just asked her if she wanted to do an album of that stuff and she said yes. -laughs-
For Sylvia’s music, [I liked] the aesthetic and the patience of her music — how things kind of linger, and how she’s committed to sit on an idea for a really long time. Not to be reductive or anything, but the title track ‘sounds grow richer as they decay’ is basically the same thing the whole time; but it’s such a beautiful thing that I want to be in this world for a long time. I think her ability of finding a sonic space and just being in that space was mesmerising.
It’s the same with Lydia [Winsor Brindamour]’s album too, it’s very patient, it’s very granular and textured with these subtle kind of hues of sound; and with Christine Burke’s album, doing these text-based, almost-improvisations outside during covid… I just thought they were beautiful and I liked them, so I just wanted to put them out.
In general, what is the process for working with each of these composers? You mentioned that Sophie handed over ten recordings — when you approached her, did you have a shortlist of works that you pitch to them and then negotiate from there, or is it more of an artist led process?
I’m actually changing that process at the moment. In the past with people like Lise [Morrison] and other people that I cold emailed, I wanted to first[ly] get interested in what the person’s music is. I want to listen to everything just to be really familiar with it, so that when I have a conversation with the person, I can speak intelligently and give an indication that I care.
With the predatory other labels that I’ve had direct experience with, it’s clear that they don’t really give a shit. -laughs- They aren’t about what the music is necessarily; so if I’m going to reach out to somebody who doesn’t know me or Sawyer Editions, then I want them to feel confident that I care and that I’m not just reaching out to them for no reason. And with Lise, her music is just really good, so when I approached her I said, “These are the pieces that I like, this is the part of your work that I’m interested in.”
But it is different with everybody. I think it was James Creed — I just like James’ music across the board, so when I reached out to him, I was like “I’m down to do whatever you want, I just trust you.” He had played a couple of pieces of mine too, so there was already a working relationship there. Whereas if you’re emailing somebody that has no clue who you are, I think it’s important just to be open, clear and upfront about what you are interested in or want to do.
So it really is just depending on the artist?
Yeah, it really is. For example, when I did Lottie [Sadd]’s album, I had been planning on emailing her about a batch in the future — but I had somebody actually cancel their album a month before the deadline. So when I emailed Lottie I was pretty thorough about everything; I needed her to know everything about what I’m trying to do in this one email, because I do not have time. Which was cool, because she got it immediately — she also knew James [Creed] so I think there was a little bit of an endorsement. But she came in pretty clutch for that batch. She was another person where I had listened to everything she had, so I knew exactly what I wanted to do and what I wanted to ask her for.
I guess this batch that came out now too, has [had] the most submissions of people coming to me than I have done before. It might actually be all of them, except for mine. I don’t remember if the Prague Quiet Music Collective sent me a demo or if we had talked about it in the past, but I know Matt [Sargent], Noah [Jenkins] and Ben [Zucker] came to me, instead of me approaching somebody else. So it changes every time. It’s still changing now, and I’m sure in the future it’s going to be changing as well. It is [changing] on the next batch; my friend Ryan Seward is going to be doing an album of stuff I asked him to do that currently doesn’t exist, so that’s going to be its own thing there too. There are no rules, it’s just me… -laughs- So I can do whatever I want.
Each of your batches are released in January and July, so there’s like a six month cycle, but were other durations of cycles considered when you started the label up? Was it so that it allowed time to get things prepped and market the releases in some way?
I wanted to do stuff in batches because it makes it feel like an event. When you have five different people, plus everybody they’ve worked with, all sharing the same link at the same time, the scale of visibility in one concentrated moment gets really high. If Kory puts out an album of music on his own label and nothing else, it’s like “okay, whatever”; but I have like a bunch of people doing this whole thing at the same time — which made the first group of things feel a little bit more like a spectacle I guess, that’s part of it. The other part of it is my sanity. -laughs- It gives me more time to plan, more time to breathe, more time to space stuff out, it gives me time to allow things to work, and allows me space to talk to multiple people and look at different things at the same time. Then when it comes to doing the releases, it makes it more of a big thing with lots of people involved in that sort of stuff.
From batches one to four, the CDs were encased in these handmade cases, but for this new batch you have moved onto more of a digipak format. What was the main decision to do that and what were the other considerations/options you had when making that change?
The biggest thing is time. It takes a long time to make those handmade cases yourself. If it takes four minutes to burn a CD and you’re doing a hundred of them, that’s four hundred minutes, and then you’re doing five albums; so that’s two thousand minutes of just burning CDs. Even if you have clever friends, who give you the idea of using studios at certain institutions that you have access to — where you have several computers running at the same time burning CDs, then you’re making it faster — but then you’re running around this building constantly changing CDs… and that sucks. -laughs- I did have my friend, Conner Simmons, who plays cello on Gabi’s album. There were a couple of times where he would come over to my apartment and we would just watch a Formula 1 race as the computer was burning CDs and we packed and labelled them and that was it, not even talking to each other.
It was a good problem to have that Sawyer Editions got big enough to become an untenable nightmare. It would take me days of work just to do that — and as much as I really like that packaging, it ain’t worth it… -laughs- It just wasn’t worth it with how long it took me to do, it’s also that they take up a lot more physical space and I live in an apartment. And then the side effect of having those really thin albums on a shelf is that they kind of disappear. A friend of mine was telling me that it’s actually kind of hard to find them; even if they own all of them, they spread out. With my shelves here, I lose them all the time, because I’ve kept a copy of every one of them — so changing the packaging would get rid of that problem, so it will be easier to find.
With your most recent batch in January 2024, you’ve been experimenting with releasing albums on cassette. Personally, I don’t affiliate cassette tapes with contemporary classical music. So what are some of the charms and benefits of listening to a cassette tape for someone who listens to music on multiple formats of the same release for this kind of music?
I think it’s a charming format. It is an nostalgically quaint, weird, little format; like a toy almost. I disagree with what you said about experimental music, because I’ve seen so much of it on tapes — Full Spectrum does a lot of their releases on tape (I’m actually putting [an album] out with them!) — I’ve done much work with experimental music, noise, free jazz, and so much of that is done on cassette. I don’t think that the difference between contemporary classical music and that kind of music is so far. I think it actually has a lot of parallels. If there is a group of people who are interested in experimental music, and are also interested in tapes, etc. maybe they’re not interested in “Classical” music (with a capital C.)
I realise how niche all of this stuff is. It’s a very small market, which is why I didn’t make many of them; but the benefit of me touring is that the last time I went away, I sold out of my tapes before I sold out of my CDs. So the benefit of making my own tapes is the fact I know that I’m going to be on tour again, I’m going to be on the road again, and I’m going to be having my merchandise and selling albums anyway. I feel pretty comfortable that I’ll be able to at least sell them on my own — I feel pretty confident in that relationship, I think it’s there, it’s just not one I’ve seen anybody explore.
I had an opportunity to give it a try, so I wanted to. If it doesn’t work, then that’s okay; there’s no rules, it’s just me. That’s the benefit of doing this stuff all by myself; I can try this stuff and not feel self-conscious about it or worried that somebody else is going to get affected. It’s a low-risk kind of thing.
You started Sawyer Spaces last year as a means to focus on field recordings and soundscape compositions. What was the idea behind starting this imprint? Was it a means to showcase a different discipline under the Sawyer umbrella?
I’ve always loved field recordings and soundscape composition [and] just love the art form. I listen to a lot of that stuff and I just wanted a place to do it [too]. Sawyer Editions is aesthetically not [that] — it would be very confusing if these were the same thing, like every other Sawyer Editions batch was half chamber music, half soundscape compositions; it would be a little bit of a loss [of] identity there, but it was something that I wanted to do anyway.
It gives me an opportunity to work with people that I might not otherwise have worked with through Sawyer Editions. It also gives me an opportunity to talk with and work with people and think about music in a way that they may not necessarily always do. So I have a friend who’s name I will not say — because they have actually not yet committed to this yet on paper, but they have committed to this in concept. They don’t do field recording stuff at all, but I’ve asked them if they would be interested in trying. My friend Sarah Ruth, whose Fellowship of the Arid Plain album [on Sawyer Spaces] was one of my favourite albums of 2023. She was here in Denton with friends; she books a lot of shows here and I’ve worked with her a ton. I just asked her if she wanted to do a project and she said “Well, what do you want me to do?” and I said “Do whatever you want, we’re friends, I trust you” — you’ve gotten the conceptual framework with what this imprint is and you’re a brilliant artist, so just do it!
Did beginning the Spaces imprint give you more clarity with what you wanted to feature on the main label?
If you listen through some of the Sawyer Editions catalogue, there’s a couple of tracks at least — if not full albums — where you can kind of see a direct link between the two of them. I’m not saying that because I think one should have been somewhere else, but the linkages are there, and the clarity that comes from having both of them is actually more of a freedom of movement. Whereas instead of saying “no” to something based on an identity, you can see “yes” over here — and while I do call Sawyer Spaces an imprint or a “passion project inside of a passion project”, I don’t think about that hierarchically necessarily. One of them just takes a lot more time than the other. [For example] if someone sent me something for Sawyer Editions and I said “no”, but I want to release it on Sawyer Spaces, that’s not a demotion; it’s more that I think the project works better in that imprint as a collective aesthetic identity.
What effect has Sawyer had on your own work as a composer? Have there been any core elements of your work in the past that you have considered and even abandoned in your own practice?
It’s taken a lot of time away from my composition practice, because it takes a lot of work. I haven’t really thought about it too much… I’ve seen this a lot where people are ostensibly going to school to become capital-C “Composers” within the concert music tradition, and there are a lot of people that I have interacted with professionally [and] personally where I’m actually a little bit suspicious to how much they actually like music. I don’t know if that’s a side effect of academia killing peoples’ enthusiasm, or maybe there’s a bit of [a] dispassionate thing inside of a lot of people, but I’m not that kind of person. I love music, I love listening to music, I love going to shows, I love producing albums, I love playing music, I like everything about it. Doing stuff with Sawyer Editions has been affirming of that, but it’s also given me a lot of space to just listen and enjoy music. Be part of an active music making process even if it’s not necessarily me performing it.
I try to not be showy about Sawyer Editions being me. I think it’s clear enough that it doesn’t need to be explicitly said all of the time. It’s not something that I did for a CV line or bragging rights, [but] because I like making music and I like making interesting things with interesting people who are doing interesting things. So being able to affirm that I still really care about this, it has probably had the biggest impact. I don’t know if my musical aesthetic interests are changing because of it, or how much James Creed’s album influences what my next composition is going to sound like. It feels like an extension of my aesthetic interests that are already there. There’s stuff that I’ve released on Sawyer Editions that I don’t think I would ever write… -laughs- But there are things on there that’s exactly like something I would write.
[To me] it fulfils this artistic desire by participating, creating and working with something that is part of my artistic life; but isn’t necessarily the same way I think when I put dots on a piece of paper, you know what I mean? That doesn’t make them mutually exclusive. I don’t think creativity is hierarchical; I think it’s a cloud, in that you have no control over what comes in and what comes out so it’s unpredictable. Maybe in twenty years, the aesthetic identity will probably be quite different. You can see that with Another Timbre; it has changed quite a bit over the years, because it’s just Simon, it’s up to him and his interests with what he wants to do. I feel pretty similar about this. Maybe it will change, I don’t know how long it’s going to last, I have no plan. -laughs- There could be a day where I just decide I don’t want to do it anymore and maybe I’ll do something else. I don’t foresee that happening anytime soon, there’s no plan to slow down. In fact, I hope it continues growing because I get a lot of satisfaction and enjoyment out of it, artistically, creatively. So I don’t really know how it’s changed my composition life as much as it’s just been a fun part of my overall artistic life.
What’s next for the two labels? You’ve talked about having the ambition to further down the line to form an inhouse ensemble for the label that is similar to how Another Timbre and Apartment House have strong ties with each other.
I have the next two batches [July 2024 and January 2025] schemed. There are a couple of people that I would really like to work with — possibly more established/known people that I think would like to try to do something with. I would be deeply interested in working with ensembles rather than just composers. I’ve not yet put out an ensemble’s album — just composer portrait discs — and I think it would be interesting to do an ensembles’ album rather than portrait discs.
I’ve tried to be as receptive as possible to a lot of different kinds of music; and even then, because of institutionalised problems in our society, there’s definitely not enough voices from people of marginalised groups that I have been able to release. I think that’s a problem for the world. I would like to see Sawyer Editions get increasingly diverse — which may take soul searching on my part — and sure, there are biases within that put certain blinders on that I’m not aware of. So a big thing that I want to do in the future is to just become increasingly aware of blindspots that I have, and where my biases fall, to see what other great art is out there that I haven’t been able to interact with for whatever reason.
I want more people to find this music, I want more people to buy the music, to listen to it, to share it — even if people aren’t necessarily purchasing music from Sawyer Editions and Spaces. I would like it to be a platform for people to reconsider how much they are necessarily contributing to their artistic environment with capital and material. A lot of people that I’ve seen don’t always contribute in meaningful ways that they think they do. I don’t think people realise how far just buying somebody’s music goes; maybe it won’t help people pay rent, but it makes people feel really good. -laughs- So if your friend puts out music, and they are selling it, buy it! It does so much for your affirmation and does so much to actually feed into the ecosystem. If you’re like “Well, I don’t need to do that because I’m doing x,y and z”, that’s almost never true. All of these things are happening at the same time — so it doesn’t hurt to throw ten bucks to your friend because they put out an album, it makes a lot of that stuff more possible.
It’s hard to talk about that without getting deeply self-conscious, because it feels like I’m whinging when I talk about people not paying for music because I have a record label. -laughs- I have a vested interest in getting people to spend more money [on] music, but at the same time, I think it’s important to ask yourself how much you are actually contributing to the artistic ecosphere. Even if we’re just passing the same twenty dollar bill around to each other, that’s more meaningful than not; especially with contemporary and classical music. We talked about how nobody can make money on this stuff, but if the people that are involved in the thing don’t care enough to spend their own money on it, then we have a real problem.
Comparing your label and others to academia… You have it there facing out in the open, it’s still accessible. you can listen to it and then buy it, it’s not solely behind a paywall.
How else are you going to get people aware of it? I don’t know what to do about that. With Another Timbre, Erstwhile [Records], and Elsewhere, you can’t listen to every track and they’re not on streaming services — does that work for them because they are already established? I truly don’t know the answer.
I think with Another Timbre, its links with Apartment House, Music We’d Like to Hear, and Café OTO, the ecosystem that they’ve created; it’s a label, ensemble, series and venue system in a way. Comparing it to PRXLUDES, one clear thing for us is that we want it as open in the air and as transparent as possible, so that anyone can read it, but it’s different with records.
And that’s where it gets complicated. Especially with what I was saying about wanting stuff to be easy to find and access. If I put it behind a paywall, do people spend more money if it’s behind a paywall? Maybe, but does it then become harder to find? Maybe. But then are people going to be willing to pay for that in the first place because I’m some random kid in the middle of nowhere in America? Maybe not. I have no idea. All I can do is use my words there about that call to action; considering how much you’re actually inputting into your own ecosystem. But I know that there are a lot more of us, than just us — you know what I mean.
It might be slightly difficult because some of the artists are on the other side of the world to you — but have you considered release party events?
That is something that I would eventually like to do, absolutely. There is a lot of stuff where I don’t quite know exactly how [it] will look. But in 2024, a big thing that I’m trying to do is [have] a small ensemble of my own that plays regularly, and plays music that I’m interested in — even if it’s to five people in an art gallery — so that I’m laying the foundations of what could become something more like that. I can’t really speak to what [it] is or what it’s going to be, because I’m still trying to figure it out.
And with that ecosystem thing, it’s another element. If you did have an ensemble, would you regularly play the pieces off the records?
Absolutely, I completely understand the whole “write a piece, it gets eaten up and then you forget about it.” I would really like to have a group where you wouldn’t just do that — especially stuff that I’ve released on [Sawyer], which is stuff that I’m already intimately familiar with. I’ve done a number of other pieces; I’ve done some of my preludes that I’ve performed, I’ve done Sophie’s [Stone] music, I’ve performed Christine Burke’s music, so of that’s already happened a little bit, but it’s very tentative, it’s not frequent or anything, whereas I would much rather have a group that I play with at least once a month or something.
Final thing: I will say it is deeply important for Sawyer to put out music by people that haven’t ever put out stuff, and people that don’t have a discography or maybe haven’t had an opportunity to do something like that, so I do accept demo submissions. You can just contact [me] on the Sawyer Editions Bandcamp page — it goes straight to me, so don’t be shy if anybody is interested in that kind of stuff, also don’t be shy with just messaging me. If you are a composer and nobody is listening to your music, then you are the only person that’s going all in on your own work, so you need to find ways of getting people to at least know that you exist and if that means, like I did, sending fifty emails to record labels to get all rejections, then fine, because eventually something cool is going to happen and it’s worth it. It might not be me, but I listen to everything, so don’t be shy!
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Check out Sawyer Editions’ most recent batch, released in January 2024:
- https://sawyereditions.bandcamp.com/album/matt-sargent-illuminations
- https://sawyereditions.bandcamp.com/album/noah-jenkins-without-persistent-environments
- https://sawyereditions.bandcamp.com/album/ben-zucker-hole-complex-per-formance-eration
- https://sawyereditions.bandcamp.com/album/germaine-sijstermans-the-prague-quiet-music-collective-tracings
- https://sawyereditions.bandcamp.com/album/kory-reeder-snow
Check out Sawyer Editions’ full catalogue at:
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