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[Cellars]
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Independent spirits
Kimchee emerges as Boston’s best new local label
BY JONATHAN PERRY

Sounds of Kimchee

From the Phoenix's MP3 Studio, listen to a healthy helping of music from Kimchee :

From the album The Evening Drag, Torrez's The Flame

From her new EP You're a Big Girl Now, Thalia Zedek's Everything Unkind

From their album McCarthy, listen to Helms' It Takes Skin to Win

From his album Red Cities, listen to Chris Brokaw's Bath House and Dresden

From her album Little Airplane, Blake Hazard's Converting to the Diver Species and Strange Love

From her album Struts and Shocks, Seana Carmody's Deirdre, Rocket Out of Time, and Smoking in the Dark

From their latest album The Good Night, Victory at Sea's Mary in June

From their album Animal Life, 27's Cavalla and Sky Walker

From their album Blessed are the Trials that We Will Find, Tiger Saw's Blessed… and Still

From SUNTAN's self-titled disc, listen to Soak in the Rays

And the Pee-Wee Fist's Duty Lay

Like most noise addicts and rock fanatics whose obsession extends beyond the usual demographic boundaries of high school and college, Kimchee Records founders Bob Dubrow and Andy Hong would rather talk music than money. The duo’s Ipswich-based imprint makes far more of the former than it does the latter, after all. And it’s their slanted sense of business priorities, with product taking precedence over profit, that’s made Kimchee one of the most intriguing and dynamic local labels to emerge over the past few years.

A glance at the Kimchee catalogue, which is peppered with titles by the likes of Chris Brokaw, Blake Hazard, Heidi Saperstein, Pee Wee Fist, Seana Carmody, Victory at Sea, and Thalia Zedek, tells you a lot about the label’s mission. Dubrow and Hong have sought out some of this city’s most independent-minded performers — artists with a penchant for noisy explorations. Last year was particularly busy: Kimchee issued a dozen titles, spending between $7000 to $10,000 per release on production and promotion costs.

"This is not what you’d call a moneymaking venture," admits Dubrow as he reclines on a couch inside MIT’s nonprofit, all-volunteer radio station WMBR (88.1 FM), where for the past nine years he’s hosted the live local-music show Pipeline! (He recently announced he’s leaving Pipeline! to take over the station’s Lost & Found show.) "I think we overextended ourselves last year. We made a lot of commitments in 2001 in our enthusiasm to create a label with a solid catalogue and a certain profile. And we made more promises than maybe we would have. But we now know better."

Hong agrees that there’s been "a lot of tripping and picking ourselves up." He was himself a host of Pipeline! when he attended MIT during the 1980s, and he’s stayed on as an engineer for the show, but he also co-owns a couple of consulting and architectural concerns — enterprises that help "keep Kimchee alive while it’s in the red." And he functions as Kimchee’s in-house engineer, recording many of the label’s releases at a home studio he’s dubbed "The Living Room." In fact, in 1999 Kimchee released a collection of Hong’s behind-the-boards recordings titled In My Living Room.

Sean McCarthy, singer/guitarist for the post-rock trio Helms, recalls Hong as the guy who was always in the audience at his band’s shows. "He approached us one day about recording, and then it turned out that he liked the recordings and wanted to put them out. We were at the beginning stages of being a band and didn’t really know how to get our stuff out. So it worked out perfectly." A Victory at Sea/Helms split EP ensued in 2000, and by the end of the year, Kimchee had also issued Helms’s debut, The Swimmer.

Dubrow and Hong can pinpoint when the idea of creating an indie label became a reality. The year was 1996, and they had been thinking about all the great artists who had played Pipeline! over the years: Lou Barlow, Big Dipper, Buffalo Tom, Bullet LaVolta, Come, the Cavedogs, Flying Nuns, Morphine, Moving Targets. The tapes of these live performances were languishing in the radio station’s vaults. So the duo decided it was time to put together a two-disc set culled from those broadcasts, and they turned the project into a fundraiser for the station.

"Even before we launched that double-CD set, Bob and I had spoken for a couple of years about doing a record label," Hong recalls. "And then Bob took it very seriously and said, ‘All right, let’s do this Pipeline! thing as a record release, and we’ll kick off our label that way.’ " Dubrow claims a conversation with then–Slow River president George Howard impelled him to action. Encouraged, he cobbled together $9000 in lottery profits earned from a liquor store he owned in Beverly at the time and put the funds into producing the 40-artist, 40-track Pipeline! set. The project ultimately ended up being a collaborative release between Slow River and Kimchee. Soon after, Dubrow and Hong enlisted Big Top Records to co-release Tugboat Annie’s sophomore disc, Wake Up and Disappear, and they’ve been issuing Kimchee product ever since.

As for naming their label after a spicy Korean vegetable delicacy, Dubrow explains, "My wife’s half-Korean, Andy’s Korean, and they’re both people who were very supportive of me in my life. I just thought it was a really nice thing to do to honor those people."

"Besides," adds Hong, "it’s catchy and kitschy."

Kitschy, however, does not characterize the kind of music the label has favored, particularly over the past year, which has seen Kimchee issue a spate of CDs that are anything by cute and cuddly. The most recent releases include a dark, brooding solo EP by Come frontwoman Thalia Zedek titled You’re a Big Girl Now, a full-length of Slint-styled serrated guitar rock by Helms titled McCarthy, and a bewitching album by the band Torrez titled The Evening Drag.

Torrez — a previously unknown outfit of slo-core dreamers from Portsmouth, New Hampshire — are a textbook example of how WMBR has remained a valuable resource for Kimchee. "The station has enabled us to jump on a few things that we wouldn’t have otherwise been able to," Dubrow points out. "Some of the bands we’ve signed we first heard through demo tapes that were sent to the station, or through them playing live at the station."

Dubrow first heard Torrez when they sent a copy of their self-released debut, Wildhorse, to WMBR. He then invited them to play Pipeline! before working out a deal to have Kimchee release their second CD. Although Kimchee is still a very small label, it has helped Torrez reach out to an audience beyond the Northeast. Later this month they’ll be performing as part of a Kimchee showcase at the annual South by Southwest music conference. "I feel we’ve really jumped up a notch as far as being seen more," says Torrez frontwoman Kim Torres over the phone from Portsmouth. "I was really shocked, actually, at how much visibility we’ve had by just being on the label. It’s made me feel like part of a community."

McCarthy also uses the word "community" to describe the experience of being a young band on a young label. A characteristic that unifies the otherwise disparate artists, he says, is the sense that they aren’t expected to conform to somebody else’s narrow idea of "how songs should sound. Andy and Bob just want you to keep developing as a band. It’s a productive atmosphere that ties the bands together."

Ask Dubrow and Hong to put their finger on what exactly makes a Kimchee artist and they grapple for an answer. "In the beginning, they had to be friends of ours," says Hong. "It wasn’t intentional. That’s who we were going to see, those were the people who were approachable, and as a just-starting label, you can’t just walk up to someone and say, ‘Hey, I’ve got this record label and I think it’s going to be really cool.’ " Hong does claim he can hear a unifying æsthetic among the albums. He’s just not sure what it is: "If you ask me what genre it is, I wouldn’t be able to say."

"It’s unspoken — it’s just felt," Dubrow offers. "We’re marginal. I think our stuff appeals to a bit of an older demographic. I hate to use the word ‘sophisticated,’ but I think it’s potentially true. Andy’s in his 30s, I’m in my 40s, and I think that informs what we do. If you’re an avid listener of music, I think you start finding yourself a little later. In the beginning, a lot of things happen to persuade you to like something — what your friends are buying, which radio station they listen to. It sounds really old fogey-ish to say, ‘You’ll know what I’m talking about when you get older,’ but in a sense it’s true."

In that regard, however, Hong’s tastes have remained consistent since his college days at WMBR. "What was indie rock back then is indie rock now, in the sense that it’s music that’s a little more challenging than what you typically hear on the radio. It’s stuff you listen to because it’s a bit different, it’s exciting, it’s new, it’s not controlled by the corporate masses, And because that’s the stuff I was listening to back in college, and that’s what kept me here at the radio station, that’s why I wanted to start a label. I wanted to be behind the process of putting that music out, as opposed to just being a listener."

Issue Date: March 6 - 13, 2003
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