Digging around in Soundcloud hoping to stumble on new music you’ll love is like being that guy on the beach looking for gold with a metal detector: you need both optimism and spare time in large amounts. So to stumble upon Gentle Records was almost a shock – it’s a mini treasure trove of great music from artists we’d never heard before, and as much of it Australia as from overseas. We were even more surprised to discover they’re just around the corner from us!
So we got in touch, and did this Q&A to find out more – and to give you a taste of what they’re doing…
There’s a huge array of artists on Gentle Records. How would you describe the overall aesthetic of the music you’re putting forward?
We would like to answer this question in the form of a video. Feel free to leave this playing while you read the rest of this article.
What’s the best situation or location to be indulging in some Gentle Recordings?
Gentle is all about the 3am late night vibes. Whether you’re alone at home or out and about doing whatever the hell it is you do, $$$Gentle$$$ has you covered. Call our hotline 1800 – GENTLE – GOT U to get a free quote (reverse charges apply).
There’s so many acts on the label, from all around the globe, but there’s a consistent thread to the sound. We’re curious to hear a bit of what you’re putting forward from Australia specifically
Here you go:
As a label, how are you building a following?
At the moment, Gentle is exclusively a net label.
People find us through word of mouth but you can find all our music online at;
https://soundcloud.com/gentle-
https://gentlerecords.
and also our Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/
Promo-wise, we will be doing some physical merchandise as well – some tee’s will be available soon and will have some releases on tape by the end of the year. We also have some gigs coming up. We’re hosting a night at TAXX, August 20 and there are talks of some more shows in September but we can’t give out too much info just yet.
So currently it’s all net-based music, and with a pan-global collection of acts – does being physically based in Sydney present any challenges or opportunities?
The local Sydney / Australian scene for what we like feels like it’s still pretty young, but it is definitely growing and moving in the right direction.
The problem with our kind of music is that people love it when they hear it, but they don’t know where to find it. That’s probably why we have a lot more success dealing with international artists on the internet than we do with pushing the scene in Sydney. Hopefully with our upcoming gigs we can really start pushing our music locally and branch out a bit.
A taste of the international stuff you’re putting forward?
Sure:
How do you find acts and choose what goes on the label? Because it’s interesting it’s not genre-driven yet there’s so many acts and the sound is consistent.
We take hella submissions. Anyone is free to send us some tracks or hit us up for a chat on this email.
We love music that sounds original. It’s easy to tell when someone is trying to sound like someone else and we aren’t about that.
Seems like Gentle is very much steeped in internet culture. What does the in-real-life version of Gentle Records look like?
Gentle Records started with three of us ( Paisley, n t o, and Drip Drop) getting together and making beats. We started to meet a lot of similar minded people online and realised we had kind of accidently made a solid platform to reach out to a lot of rad people and release some good music.
Our first release was from a local Sydney artist Nuck Fames (Ototoi), who is now the fourth member of Gentle. We meet in a little studio in Wynyard sometimes and you can usually find us out and about in Sydney doing pretty ordinary shit.
In terms of production, most of us use Ableton Live. n t o dabbles in bass guitar and the rest of us just stick to using Software. We are starting to work with some vocalists that reached out to us online.We love learning new things so we try to push our production process as much as we can. Nuck Fames (Ototoi) uses a bunch of tape decks and samplers in his work to give it that lo-fi feel. Paisley recently bought an old tape deck as well and will start running tracks through that.
Who else is out there like you?
If you follow us on Soundcloud you can pretty easily reach out to artists / collectives that we think are pretty tight. It’s all a pretty close community and we tend to help each other out a lot.
We are collaborating with Yume Records to make a compilation of our favourite artists which will be pretty cool. This should be out next month so definitely look out for this if you’re interested in the scene.
You can check out Yume here; https://soundcloud.com/yumecollective
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