I thought it could be interesting to have a little flashback of some of the label / artist Q and A sessions which ran on the original Tesselate, so here we go from the very beginning.

Airecords Q and A from 2003.

Welcome to the 1st of a series of record label question and answer sessions. Session 1 is with the people behind Airecords who are Steve, Jason and Phil.

Tesselate : What is the labels background? How did it come about?

Ai Records first release appeared in the summer of 1999, a 12″ EP entitled ‘Experiments in Colour’, it featured 4 tracks by the labels
founding trio of ‘Normal’ (Steve Hyland), ‘Cell’ (Jason Smith) and ‘Phylom’ - now recording as ‘Fil’ (Phil Parker).

This first release was met with widespread acclaim, receiving reviews in music magazines such as Mixmag, reviews like these have helped and continue in helping to establish Ai as an influential and new dynamic force in electronica.

Since ‘99 the Ai catalogue has grown, and to date stands at: x1 CD LP ‘Estate’, x1 7Inch ‘Split 7′ and x2 Vinyl LP1s ‘Produce’ and ‘Leisure’ These releases feature tracks from 10 artists, a very diverse mix and all of whom were initially unknown in the electronica scene.

Our next release ‘Leisure.LP’ (Vinyl Only) which sees it’s release this February, features 9 tracks from 8 artists (Claro Intelecto, Cell, FZV, Michael Manning, Montag, Yellotone and a guest appearance from Kone-R of Uncharted Audio) The tracks on Leisure we wanted to compile in such a way that there was a dileberate flow from Electro, harder edge IDM into the softer, emotional sounds of electronica, a recipe we had tried on ‘Produce and which worked fantastically well. People involved in and around Ai have indicated to that Leisure stands to be our strongest offering to date. It’s a record that we are very proud of.

Tesselate : Which other artists/labels are you into? / inspirations / influences?

Being comprised of 3 partners, Ai has a very dynamic tension, each of us a re passionate about electronic music, our personal influences include amongst others: Derrick May and the whole Detroit/Transmat movement , Electro (both in its original sense and the recent out pouring of modern electro, punk, hip hop , rave, jazz. We have a real fusion of tastes, most importantly for us, so long as it is good quality music which stands the test of time and still sounds as fresh now as when it wasfirst released.

Tesselate : If you could steal a favourite track from any artist / group for an Ai Records release, what would it be and why?

Jason: Sitting under a tree / carl craig with sarah gregory - such gorgeous track (timeless)

Phil: Oh, yes, I gotta go with Jason on that one.!

Steve: Telephasic Workshop / BOC - opened my eyes to a new musical terrain.

Tesselate : Which print / online magazines / newspapers do you regularly read?

Jason: the metro in the morning cause it keeps me from going mad on the tube.

Phil: Adrenalin (cause I always wanted to be a skater/snow boarder, but am shit, keeps the dream alive though), I find it really hard to read papers it just ain’t my thing, the best magazine ever for me was Level (why did you ever stop publishing!!!!!)

Steve: New Scientist - fascinated by all the inventions and discoveries going on all around us that we never get to hear about.

Tesselate - What are you hoping to accomplish with the Ai Records Label, and where can you see Ai Records in 5 years?

Our main hope is to still be putting out excellent quality music that ultimately we’re into, we hope other people like it as well. We plan to be around for as long as we stay true to our initial ideas behind Ai Records, making and releasing music that carrys on from when electronica for us was at it’s best. Music from a time before the scene fractured and started becoming more technical and mathmatical than musical, we are about music that moves ya, makes ya think (maybe) or even just makes you tap yer foot. Oh and ultimately of course put Ai on the global electronica map.

World domination!

Tesselate : Which artist / group [apart from the Ai Records team] is producing music that makes your head open up and listen?

Jason: Difficult to pin anything down at the mo as their is such a fraction of music and it seems that no one label seems to be putting out good music consistently. unlke in the past where you could go into a shop and say I’ll have the new one on such a label and know its gonna be shit hot. so i seem to pick n choose to what mood I’m in.

Phil: City Centre Offices, Morr Music and of course Def Jux.

Steve: I like buying on impulse whether it’s electronica or whatever. a good review goes along way but I’ve got no favourites - though Skam always gets a closer look.

Tesselate : What are your thoughts on the whole IRAQ / war situation?

Jason: difficult one this as its now getting very messy. And there seems to be alot of war mongering on the behalf of bush and the whole USA thing. I think UK should stay way out of it, but as I see it we don’t really have a choice. Then what’s next korea…..? I think this is gonna get very messy.

Phil: We are damned if we do and damned if we don’t. If Iraq’s power base can do what is claimed of it, then the gamble is to see if they do do anything with there weapons of mass destruction, or supply terrorists with them. Is it about Oil or is it Religion, Oil could be easy to solve, concentrate on developing other fuel sources, if it’s religion, well religious wars have always existed. There are new enemies, hidden ones, the world has got itself fucked up. It’s historic, Europe has been at each others throats for generations, now Europe has topped kicking the crap out od each other, the Middle East are in the headlines, it’s scary shit. Peace, that’ll do nicely for me.

Steve: War is never good. How simple is that. I don’t think there’s any justification in a pre-emptive invasion of a country in such a desperate state. Surely we have the means to take out the current government and install a new one whilst some form of democratic control is put in place (Afghanistan). Even if we had to prop it up it’s got to be better than the half million deaths that have been projected onto the civilian population. fuc’sake!

Tesselate : How did you get together? And where and when did Ai Records begin?

Jason n Phil met at college whilst studying Graphic Design in Worthing (back in 1989), that’s principally where it all began. They set up a sort of design group together called ‘Area 39′ and rapidly changed thename once they found out some Junglists were called the same, to become Area Industries (circa ‘92). Later they split things up a bit, now there’s the design division, ‘Design.Ai’, a merchandising division (t-shirts ? run by Jason) ‘Area Info’ and of course the label ‘Ai Records’.

Steve met Phil at Farnham college whilst studying a degree in Graphic Design, and began putting tracks down around ‘97.

Tesselate : When you released ‘ Experiments in colour’ in 1999, did it mainly go out to friends? or did it make its way into any shops?

We self distributed experiments in record shops in central London around the Soho area (hard work). It was also given to DJ friends we know in the business. The best example of this was walking into ‘Mass’ in Brixton, Jim Masters was DJ’ing, Jason handed him a copy of ‘Experiments’ and he dropped Normal’s ‘Neptune Square’, there and then. Watching the reaction of our friends and the crowd gathered gave us the biggest buzz and made up our minds, we had to do more. Ai was really formed as a label at this point.

Tesselate : The artists on the label, are they friends of yours? Or people that have sent you demos / you have approached?

Most of the artists we have now are from demos they sent in, Richard (FZV) is the only direct friend of ours who is on the label, and even he gave us a load of demos when he got wind of what we we’re planning. We have never approached anyone to start recording with us. It just happens. The artists are our friends and this is important in the Ai label, we see ourselves as a family.

Tesselate : What is the labels favourite transformer?

Galvatron.

Tesselate : With ‘ Produce LP’ goin’ down so well and selling out, does it put extra pressure on the label with its further releases?

No not at all as this was so unexpected. We believed that ‘Produce’ was good, of course, the tracks were solid and sat together so well, we reckon ‘Produce’ gave us a good jump up the profile ladder. If you listen to ‘Estate’ it’s still a good album, and on a par with ‘Produce’. We will see how ‘Leisure’ goes down.

Basically with everything we release, we never really now how it’s gonna go down. There has been a lot of pinching of ourselves (are we Dreaming!), for some reason we seem to be doing something right.

Recently Ai joined forces with Baked Goods, an offer that surprised the shit out of us. Being invited into Baked (as one of their worldwide exclusive labels), has given us a unique chance to increase our output, and to have the backing of such a strong distributor. This has helped take some of the pressure off, when you belong to a family of labels like CCO, Morr and SCSi to name just a few you know you have made it in some way. ‘Leisure’ is the first offering through Baked Goods and we hope it goes down well.

2003 will sees a big schedule of releases. 6 solo EP’s follow the ‘Leisure LP’ one each month staring in March with Claro Intelecto’s 4
track masterpiece ‘Peace of Mind’. A test pressing of which has been doing the rounds with Rob Hall of Skam (a fan incidentally, or so we have been told), and the feedback has been great so far.

Later in the year we have 2 albums planned, and these will be nothing short of special!

Tesselate : Could you see Airecords broadening into any other genres such as film / video, or releasing DVD’s to accompany release such as Warp and Skam?

Defo.We are very visual (being 3 Graphic Designers). We keep pushing things especially around our live shows, Video plays central role in this, we have plans to really up the live visual stakes and are very interested in working with video artists to help achieve our goals (creating videos for our tracks, and live shows).

Tesselate : What are your top 5 albums of all time? [any genre]

Night and Day / Retroactive / 1989
Mr Fingers / Amnesia / 1988
B12 / Radio Interview Lt. Edition Cassette (Prelude Part1) / 1993
Black Dog / Bytes / Warp Records 1993
Autechre / Incunabula / Warp Records 1993

Tesselate : In the future will there be any chance of a repress of some of the earlier releases, if there was interest?

Sorry no. They have been done n dusted.

Tesselate : How does the Ai records process for selecting tracks for releases work?

If it’s good we will put it out. We always separately listen to the tracks then meet n discuss the results, and compile the releases that way.

Tesselate : If you had the power to go back in time and alter it somehow, what would you do and why?

Jason: Buy a house ten years ago. As I would be sorted now.

Phil: Learnt to have skateboarded / BMX’d / spent more time Snowboarding and to not have wasted 4 years of my life dating a physcotic ex-girlfriend resulting in me missing out joining Jason at some unbelievable parties back in 90 - 92, bugger.!

Steve: learnt to play an instrument other than the computer.

Tesselate : What was the last piece of music that you listened to?

Jason: Meam LP / Skam as I’m typing this. nice album and I love there visuals.

Phil: Fuck, I got 3500 tracks on shuffle off my MP3 player, at this exact moment the track playing is ‘Skimming Stones’ off the Maxi LP by BoC.

Steve: bonnie prince billy / master and everyone.

Tesselate : What can we look forward to as Claro Intelecto sees his EP ‘ Peace of Mind ‘ released? (released 31/03/2003)

Some excellent music. Not just on this release but for the future, right now he is being talked about by a lot of people, and we know he writes some absolutely cracking tunes, but then so do all the boys.

Tesselate : Do Ai records have an office / HQ or is it a home / web based label?

All three. We have built up a studio between us, and s’pose that is the base of operations, many many long nights have been spent in there. We are the ultimate hot desking label, very mobile.

Tesselate : What are your thoughts on file sharing over the internet? Do you think It has a negative effect on you, and the artists on your label?

Tricky. We need cash to continue doing what we do, it’ll be hypocritical to say that none of us have ever downloaded tracks, so it begs another question, should artists therefore work for free! For some people writing is a hobby, others do it to earn a a living. If you’re lucky you could get a lively hood from gigs and tours, maybe that would pay enough money. What we are planning to do is release mix MP3’s, like a return to the mix tape days, now that is a much better idea. There will always be a negative effect if someone is stealing your lively hood, it’s a big problem for the majors, for smaller labels it goes with the territory.

Tesselate : You now have a tiny invisible radio controlled fly, this fly has audio and vision which can beam back to you in realtime, you can send it anywhere in the world today to monitor someone / a situation, where will you send it?

Jason: Into the minds of Kraftwerk.

Phil: NASA.

Steve: saddams palace

Tesselate : Is your interest just in electronic music or do you have a broader taste?

Jason: my music taste has grown with the music but electro still stays with me.

Phil: Hip Hop, Jazz, Electro but always Electronica first it’s in my blood.

Steve: I love it all. Except celine dion.

END