asphodel records
incredibly strange music: the untold story of asphodel records laurent fintoni looks back at cult label asphodel records. urltoken
guide to peterborough county ancestry, family history and genealogy: birth records, marriage records, death records, census records, parish registers, and military records .
use census records and voter lists to see where families with the asphodel surname lived. within census records, you can often find information like name of household members, ages, birthplaces, residences, and occupations .
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a limited edition release of campires was relased on tape via locust amber records in january .
going back to asphodel for a minute. you set up a distribution network ?
census records can tell you a lot of little known facts about your asphodel ancestors, such as occupation. occupation can tell you about your ancestor' s social and economic status .
that was one of asphodel’s main things, giving technical power over to the artist .
census records can give you a fascinating window into the day - to - day lives of your asphodel ancestors - like hours worked per week, level of education, veteran status, employers, and more .
sound records next release comes in the form of samfeel, jf & br - hallo membraan. including original mix .
church records can include baptisms, marriages, burials, membership lists, financial business, and other records for a particular congregation. they may be available online or on microfilm, but frequently they are still with the local church or in centralized archives by religion. the canadian census records asked for the religion of those listed, so you will be able to narrow down which archives to consult. for help with writing a letter requesting copies of records, see letter writing guide for genealogy .
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one of the crucial voices missing from the oral history of illbient i put together in 2014 was naut humon, founder and a & r of asphodel records. the label had been a cornerstone of the short - lived scene, home to releases from dj spooky, wetm, sub dub, badawi, and byzar. to many illbient and asphodel were inseparable .
richard devine has remixed top warp artists like aphex twin and mike patton (faith no more). he has released 5 full - length albums on schematic, warp, asphodel, sublight records, and detroit underground and has performed his own ear - tearing music mayhem worldwide .
asphodel 763 brannan st. san francisco, ca. 94103 usa tele: (415) 863 - 3068 fax: (415) 863 - 4973 e - mail: hello @ urltoken (valid in june 1998 :) asphodel records po box 51, chelsea station new york, ny 10113 - 0051 usa fax: (212) 965 - 0959 tel: (212) 965 - 0953 erik @ urltoken
serviceontario, death records offers a death search option and a historical certificate option. also official death certificates are available to a wider range of relatives than birth and marriage certificates .
some of the church / civil records have been microfilmed by familysearch. these microfilms may be available for viewing at family history centers around the world. to find a microfilm :
old corpse road signed to legendary cacophonous records and released their second album' of campfires and evening mists' on 27th may, which was was positivly received by critics and fans alike .
the compound, asphodel’s studio in the bay area, was central to asphodel’s artistic nervous system throughout its life. outfitted with both old and new technology — pro tools alongside vintage synthesisers and outboard effects — it was used for recordings, experiments, and artist residencies. gregor asch remembers it as “a wild laboratory out on some abandoned airbase. ”
asphodel records, a label founded in san francisco in the early 1990s, was part of the illbient story. it championed the music with physical releases, alongside early turntablist recordings. i wasn’t able to speak with naut humon, co - founder and a & r of the label, for the illbient story but he’d long been on my list for other reasons. thanks to raz mesinai i was able to finally get in contact with him earlier this year and sit down for an extended conversation about asphodel, another blip on the historical radar that has gone largely unexplored .
“that place still makes me drool, ” he says. “i used to have dreams of naut’s old classic lxp42’s. ” based on humon’s experience with the compound, asphodel decided to also outfit a studio in new york. “the idea was to give artists resources, that was one of asphodel’s main things: to give technical power over to the artist. ”
. centered on peterborough (city), was founded from the historic newcastle district in a new colborne district in 1838. curiously, census records don' t use colborne as a district label, instead lumping the townships created under newcastle .
since homer’s first description of the meadows, the asphodel’s connection to the afterlife has captured the imagination of authors through the ages. in the early 1990s, san francisco - based musician mitzi johnson had recorded a debut for her band, the self - titled blue rubies, but she needed a name for a label. taking inspiration from the flower’s mythological roots, she named it asphodel. blue rubies came out in 1992, but asphodel the label wouldn’t fully come into being until 1995. its logo depicted a flame rising from five petals, reflecting the flower’s symbolic juxtaposition of life and death .
in greek mythology, ordinary souls went to live after death in the asphodel meadows, a field of flowers located, according to homer’s odyssey, at the gateway to the underworld, where the sun never shines .
and some of those cities were more electronic minded, some were grimier and downtempo. i guess asphodel dealt with all those things. and soundtracks too. we had a genuine interest to help the scenes out .
our conversation became the basis for a feature i recently wrote for fact magazine, detailing the history and importance of asphodel. alongside my interview with naut it includes insights from artists and others who worked at the label .
in telling the evolution, and ultimate death, of asphodel records, the feature also looks at naut’s work behind the scenes and the production work he brought to projects like mixmaster mike’s debut album. coming from a different era, naut remained closer to the traditional producer role – in the back, orchestrating, facilitating – yet he also saw the value in using old practices to refine new ones, and in the process help to push along the evolution of the producer as artist .
over little more than a decade, asphodel became a mythological place of its own, remembered fondly by artists and fans. yet its place and significance has been lost in the sands of a pre - internet time. the story of asphodel is the story of what was possible before the world changed, before planes crashed into the towers of the world trade center, and before napster pushed the music industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century .
what follows is a largely unedited extract of my conversation with naut, touching on his background, the birth of the label, the ties with the nyc underground and more. consider it additional color to the asphodel feature .
naut humon is the founder and artistic director of recombinant media labs, and during the last decades was curating av content for asphodel records in new york and sf and for select portions of the annual ars electronica festival in austria where he also helped coordinate their digital music category for ten years. having performed in the past with the avant - garde music group rhythm & noise. he later formed the surround traffic control network, the aural optic incubator that gave birth to today' s cinechamber apparatus .
one of xenakis’s primary “polytope” multimedia pieces “persepolis” was chosen for re - interpretation with customized remixes. the composer was aware about its soon to be release by asphodel records in 2001 when he passed away. the interlacing of the remix pieces by various composers draws largely from the original work, emphasizing its noisy sonorities and overlapping waves of intensity. naut humon who curated the customized reworkings applied to those remix sources other outside electronics from frankenstein symphony, for this dedication tribute remix to the future memory of iannis xenakis .
the impetus for asphodel’s existence was a favour to the couple’s friend v. vale, the japanese - american writer and publisher responsible for the counterculture zine re / search. in 1993, re / search had released incredibly strange music vol. 1 through caroline records, a compilation of leftfield rock and early electronic music from vale’s collection. asphodel released the compilation’s second volume in 1995, featuring music from ken nordine, jean - jacques perrey, and les baxter among others. “the release got some notice and after a period of time we were getting better exposure for it than the previous volume, ” humon explains over the phone in a soft yet energetic west coast accent. “that’s what got us on the tracks and inspired us to keep things going. ”
may saw the release of the limited 7
split with the infernal sea on three swords records along with a mini tour supporting finnish symphonic death metallers whorion. we played a few of these shows with box head as a final send off and a thanks for his time with the band .
they gathered under the same leitmotiv: producing a strong and heavy, industrial music. “traces to nowhere” (backspin records), their debut ep released in spring 2016, found huge support from all around the world, and their forthcoming releases on dead cert. and vielspass will finish to convince .
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from droned - out ambience and densely layered field recordings, right through to distorted beats and industrial - edged basslines, swarm intelligence has honed his sound over releases on invisible agent, stasis, acroplane, acre, ad noiseam, and most recently voitax records, where he just released his latest 12” called “the lighthouse” .
an unusually short lifespan might indicate that your asphodel ancestors lived in harsh conditions. a short lifespan might also indicate health problems that were once prevalent in your family. the ssdi is a searchable database of more than 70 million names. you can find birthdates, death dates, addresses and more .
on friday 13th march 2009 old corpse road unleashed their first demo
the echoes of tales once told
in a limited 1st edition of 1000 hand numbered copies. reviews of the demo were outstanding (click here to view them) and we gained much support including a slot on the zero tolerance covermount cd. on the strength of the demo the band were offered the chance to record a split ep with the meads of asphodel to be released on godreah records. the old corpse once again entered the studio to record three more songs for the split ep which are hob headless rises, the witch of wookey hole and the devil’s footprints. in addition the band featured on the uk black metal vol. 2 compilation with the unreleased demo track “hell’s kettles” and also contributed guest vocals on the meads of asphodel xmas special track for terrorizer magazine “the song of a thousand roars”. during the later half of 2009 the band played several successful live dates, including the well renowned gathering of the clans festival .
hey, i came across this in a newsgroup, and thought bay area loopers may be interested. if i wasn' t in the middle of a work crunch right now, i' d be pretty tempted to check this out myself... > > + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + - + > > asphodel records presents > > recombinant' 96 > > a convergence of audio / visual mixology > > - - - > visit > < - - - - > - - - >
she enabled the label (laughs). in other words she had resources, we met and became involved and in 1994 we got married. so during that time… asphodel had already begun. she had a group called blue rubbies, which used luth, hand drum, and vocals, much more in the dark folk vein of what she was already doing at the time i met her back in 1989, 1990. that’s when we first ran into each other. her idea of the label was to… first is the word asphodel. the flower that grows on the river styx in hell. the flower and the flame. beauty and the beast, or beauty in the… juxtaposition of forms. that was her ideas .
the excursions in illbient compilation, released in 1996 and partly responsible for cementing the fateful naming of new york’s experimental scene, was recorded at this new studio. raz mesinai, one half of sub dub, remembers jumping at the chance to work in a professional studio after years of home recording. “for me the greatest records of the so - called illbient era are the first wave by wetm, byzar, and spooky. and that’s all due to asphodel, ” he told me last year. humon’s philosophy of empowering artists with knowledge and equipment paid off. recalling the recording debuts of his band, asch remembers how “wetm had made do for so long with so little, entering the compound was like walking out of a post - apocalyptic junkyard onto the bridge of the starship enterprise. our first album, as is, was born in that experience. ”
well i wouldn’t call it parties. it’s interesting you bring that up. to me that’s more like what techno and house grew into. recombinant was more about design. we did one in 1999 for 9 hours, 9 minutes and 9 seconds. these were more designed… performances. rather than just here’s different artists on at different times we’d design the shows so that different things would happen. put on a spectacle, organised in a certain way. maybe over different nights. sometimes stretching far beyond… it wasn’t really an asphodel showcase either, it was a supporter of it but it wasn’t just about asphodel artists. so with the dj things we had x - men and the piklz but we’d also have the beat junkies from l. a. it was a wider cast so to speak .
i always felt my role wasn’t just that of a musician, someone who played in a band, but someone who’s a sound traffic controller, who conducts and conveys… dealing with sound traffic as it moves through various spaces. audio and visual and with groups. that led to the iso orchestra, which were on early asphodel records. the audience would come in and see tv sets of an orchestra playing in the room. we had them at the big recombinant shows in sf. then they would come into the main room and i would be conducting an actual orchestra with guitars, electronics, strings all being amplified in the room but they would discover that was the source and we would feed it into surround systems in the other rooms. so the entire building was like a remix chamber. you could hear the orchestra in different ways in the other rooms and then when you’re in the live room you’d see the orchestra .
with a career going back to experimental theatre and performance in the ’70s, naut is a strange and fascinating character. in many ways he resembles the music the label released and championed: dark, quirky, unashamed. i wanted to know more about asphodel to better place the label in the story of a book i’m writing about beats and the producer as artist. after two hours i came out with a fair bit more .
when i call naut humon, the a & r and one of driving forces of asphodel throughout its 12 - year run, he’s in between california and the north west. since 2008, humon has lived a nomadic life. today, he helms the recombinant media labs (rml), an offshoot of asphodel, and its roving theatre project the cinechamber, going wherever the work takes him — from moscow to the mutek festival in montreal. humon has been involved in performance since his childhood in seattle, where he became an actor at the age of seven and began directing in his teens. in the early 1970s, he relocated to san francisco and, alongside like minded friends, searched for ways to transform performing arts. the result involved moving audiences through various sites, treating them to destabilising montages, and, eventually, using music and early video technology .
in march old corpse road unleashed the split ep with the meads of asphodel entitled “the bones of this land are not speechless” which received excellent reviews and press. the band toured the uk extensively playing alongside hecate enthroned, wodensthrone and many fellow uk bands with a live highlight at bloodstock open air. they also hosted their own mini festival' fires of rebellion' in nottingham and were aksed to return to gathering of the clans festival .
the band entered the studio to record their debut album to be released in the later part of the year. during the recording sessions they also covered the bathory classic' equimanthorn' for a tribute album named' voices from valhalla release via godreah records alongside many great bands such as sigh, the meads of apshodel, nokturnal mortum and skyforger. old corpse road played a series of gigs including several headlining shows and also had a special guest slot at warhorns festival, a viking / folk / pagan / black metal gathering in york which featured bands from latvia, germany, belgium, ireland, america and of course scotland and england. in august a brand new track from the upcoming album named' the cauld lad of hylton' featued on terrorizer' s secret history of extreme metal covermount cd. this served as the first chance for fans to hear the new material and was received with excellent praise. the end of the year saw the release of the debut album' tis witching hour... as spectres we haunt this kingdom' via godreah records .
within a few years asphodel’s new york outpost had moved from a “roach - infested apartment” on west 14th street to a fully functioning office further up on west 27th. around the same time, a young producer who had moved from georgia to new york by the name of guillermo scott herren, yet to become prefuse 73, interned briefly at the office. asphodel was becoming a well - oiled machine, with new york handling the business side — product management, sales, distribution — and san francisco acting as its heart and soul. “the challenges were in building a label brand that was not entirely focused on one style of music, ” says gilbert. “this actually turned out to be what set us apart from many other labels at the time — we released great music by great artists and were known for our curation. we were more like art curators than a label. ”
the title that launched asphodel would also come to define it: this was to be a home for incredibly strange music. “there was no conscious decision to start a label, it grew out of our experiences and encounters, ” humon remembers. “mitzi brought ideas and handled the support system and i was the primary curator throughout its zones. our philosophy was driven by a desire to put out a range of music and not be stuck in any genre. ”
it’s not just “these are good artists. ” when we try to put together an event it was about being another player, another influence. each artist is different, they have their own ways of working and you want to support that but also give them options. i was… definitely on mike’s record and some others, a big player on content and how the material evolved. i also worked with the brian jonestown massacre in the early ‘90s before they became really famous. did the same thing. we had pro tools in our place, there’d be people in the studio to help them use the stuff. you provide them access to the tools to learn the skills. asphodel was trying to enable artists to learn the skills needed to be their own artist. i had a customised way that i would be a behind the scenes producer. how tracks emerged got blurred. i was involved in a lot of it, in the studio, in the recordings or sometimes it was live shows that provided ideas for records .
starting in the ‘80s we built these things called sound traffic control towers, part of a sonic airport where different sonic cargos would land, taxi and take off. and the audience were like passengers on an imaginary run way between all of these different trajectories. that was part of the idea that became recombinant. it grew out of this sensibility, big spatial sound networks… in ‘91 we were in a room with almost 800 loudspeakers. we built one of the sound towers and did the show with maryanne but also had one in sf in our studio. audiences would come and attend that. this is all before asphodel. we released with ralph’s records. it was really the idea of networking. i didn’t want to be a group, which i had for a long time with rhythm & noise. that happened in the ‘80s into the early ‘90s. we toured, released, did all that. the idea became to get into orchestration, what the orchestra of the future might become. this wider idea of recombinant. it’s beyond the group thing .
a cassette reissue of the' echoes...' demo was released through darkness shade records featuring bonus tracks form the demo recording sessions. this year also saw the band tour heavily playing with the likes of fen, alcest, winterfylleth, skyclad, hecate enthroned and also hosting another mini festival named' witching hour festival'. it also saw the bands first visit to scotland. towards the end of the year old corpse road participated in the great exhibition uk mini tour with the prophecy, northern oak and eibon la furies. finishing touches were made to the songs which would soon be recorded for the album .
in 1976, humon co - founded rhythm & noise, an industrial band and multimedia ensemble that released two albums and set up the compound, a warehouse - cum - studio on the outskirts of san francisco that would become central to his work. humon left rhythm & noise in 1985 and set up sound traffic control to explore the same ideas outside of the constraints of a band format. he met mitzi johnson in the late 1980s and the two got married in 1994. their union would lead to the birth of asphodel as a label proper .
asphodel had always enjoyed healthy sales across physical formats, like many independent labels of the time. compounding the change of mood in the country, the arrival of file - sharing programs such as napster heralded the demise of the music industry’s established modes of distribution, which would trickle down to independent institutions. in 2003, apple announced the itunes music store and within a few years many of the distributors that had been vital to labels like asphodel folded. “we stayed independent but once the distributors were gone it became about defining what was really important to go forward, ” humon reminisces with a slightly wistful tone. “the idea became to keep the lab, and focus on that. ” discussing society’s wider shift towards digital creation and consumption, humon, who has witnessed four decades of creativity, is realistic. “to me, most people who buy music aren’t into music, they’re into it for social reasons, ” he states. “it’s a different sort of emphasis. it was more culturally integral in the previous decades. there are still great indie labels doing work but really the context has shifted. ”
anyway, re / search wanted to do cds and had already done volume 1 but were looking for another trajectory to keep the series going and asphodel became that trajectory because ironically asphodel ended up putting out incredibly strange music (laughs). that was our first public release, sort of officially distributed. but when we first went into it we did it as a favour to vale. we were friends and so it became “let’s put out something. ” that was incredibly strange music vol. 2. and it was jumping on a trajectory they’d started but we loved that whole strain of what was going on and so we wanted to pursue that and see what was going to happen. we put it out, it got some notice and became an internal launch pad for getting this thing out there. it turned out, after a period of time, we were getting better exposure for it than vol. 1, and it was helping it as well, but that’s what got us on the tracks to start putting out material. that was again… 1995, 1996 zone when this general premise was occurring .
speaking on the legacy of asphodel, gilbert underlined its uncompromising stance and approach: “incredible artists, incredible albums. i am honoured and proud to have been involved with them. nothing has since come close. ” for asch, without naut there would be no dj olive as we knew him and perhaps no illbient. “the label is naut’s legacy really, ” he admits. “quality sampling from emerging sounds on the meridian between the underground and the popular. a world class grasp of production and mastering while always pushing the boundaries of a surround performance experience. ”
a photo of humon, likely taken in the 1970s, shows him dressed entirely in black with long, pitch - black hair against a bank of modular synthesisers. it’s a look he’d keep throughout his career, somewhere between distinguished and eccentric. gregor asch, who performed as dj olive and was part of brooklyn’s wetm, one of asphodel’s earliest acts, remembers humon as something of a mad scientist: “he had an overall charred charcoal look and i wondered briefly where he parked his broom [ … ] he was 100% about the music and not at all an industry type. ”
rolling stone named asphodel one of the top 10 independent labels in the world in 1998. the accolade reflected the label’s risk - taking and its bewildering roster of artists: turntablism from bay area godfathers the invisibl skratch piklz and their new york counterpart the x - ecutioners; contemporary classical by avant - garde composer iannis xenakis; chinese folk from min xiao - fen; downtempo easy listening courtesy of san francisco’s tipsy; and the elastic beats and dubbed out vibes emanating from brooklyn and manhattan that came to be known as illbient, courtesy of dj spooky, wetm, sub dub, and byzar .
humon and johnson began making regular trips to new york at the same time as asphodel began its journey into strange music. attending shows around town, humon found himself in the midst of both illbient’s happenings — a heady mix of philosophy, art, and music spread around reclaimed spaces in a chaotic urban centre — and dj battles and showcases where scratching was evolving into turntablism, and where he also met a young dj craze from miami whose crew, the allies, debuted on the label in 1999. “both scenes had mutual respect for each other, especially from illbient to the turntablists, ” he recalls .
one final component of the asphodel machine was its performance aspect, which fell under the umbrella of the recombinant shows. starting in 1996, the recombinant shows were a direct extension of humon’s performance background and of his sound traffic control outfit, which debuted in japan in 1991 with a performance involving 800 speakers and a physical metaphor for a sonic airport with audience members as passengers idling on an imaginary runway while sonic cargos moved around them. for the new shows, “the idea was to recombine different strains of music and visual art over the course of a presentation to give the audience a broad range and diverse takes. ”
in a pre - digital world, the idea of curation was still rooted in the tradition of cultural institutions interpreting historical heritage. thus if humon and johnson were curators, asphodel was a temporary sonic museum. its collections included “incubated projects” — illbient, turntablism, but also musique concrete and dub — alongside license and distribution of hand - picked artists: the experimental folk of japan’s world standard; the dub techno of rhythm & sound from berlin; or the electronic cut - ups of atlanta’s richard devine. “we were interested in all those things, ” humon tells me, “but the content was always the most important. ”
i tried but couldn’t get a hold of naut at the time and it wasn’t until the summer of 2015 that we finally managed to make it happen, thanks to raz mesinai’s help. i decided to use the conversation with naut as a way to delve into the history of asphodel, and his own, for the book as well as for a feature on fact magazine. the idea was to tell the definitive story of a label that many knew but few had ever investigated in depth, a label that had fallen through the cracks of time yet remained important to so many scenes that are part of the book – illbient, turntablism, experimental beats .
in the late 2000s, johnson and humon divorced and with their separation came the decision to also separate the children. humon took the lab with him, which would become rml, while the label would be ended but its catalogue kept alive. “that’s the deal we made, ” he tells me. “i wanted the catalogue to survive and the rights to revert back to the artists. ” due to the circumstances of the split, humon had no real control over the agreement, and while the asphodel catalogue existed for a short while on itunes it has since disappeared, with only a handful of releases available today via artists who have exercised the rights to their catalogue .
humon continues to explore the future with the recombinant media labs, focusing on audio / visual while remaining connected to artists like mixmaster mike and richard devine. there is a sense that he will always be there, somewhere, thinking about what could be done to take things further, to shift the comfort zones. there’s an element of selfishness in wishing for asphodel’s recorded legacy to be available in today’s digital landscape, if only to show younger generations what was possible. at the same time it’s perhaps for the better, and truer to the label’s roots in that mythological flower that grows in the underworld where the sun never shines and souls are left to wander for eternity .
asphodel’s early focus on and support of micro scenes like turntablism and illbient brought it to the attention of a growing underground of hip - hop and electronic outcasts, yet the label remained impossible to pin down, unlike european counterparts like ninja tune or mo’ wax. “we were about the music, ” humon enthuses when i ask what drove him to sign such varied acts. “it was a sincerity with liking the material and also with new things happening, but on a personal level. we didn’t want to go towards a genre - ification of the music. i felt like the flavour, character, and personality of the music coming out of new york really had its own slant. ”
speaking to passion of the weiss in 2010, mike explained just how much humon taught him: “ [ naut ] approached me and said ‘i want to help you make a record. ’ [ … ] he showed me my first steps in using the tascam da–38 digital recorder. [ … ] he took me from dirty to the nice sounding world, you know? [ … ] he showed me how to use technology to my advantage, and i give all the glory to that guy. ” discussing the process of putting anti - theft device together, humon recalled the story behind the album’s track ‘surprize packidge’: “i gave him a bunch of records he’d never heard before, and the track came from that. it really was a surprise, he hadn’t heard any of it before and we used it to make segments that became the final track. ” mike’s debut would go on to sell over 100, 000 copies worldwide .
the lab has kept growing but the label didn’t want to maintain the responsibility of physical stock nor the digital distribution of the catalogue. that disappointed me. the itunes links are all dead now. of course i wrote to them about it but they didn’t want to do that, they didn’t want to deal with it anymore, it was only a couple left involved. they stopped being responsible for it. there’s still a lot of management involved in just keeping the catalogue alive. i wasn’t able to do it legally. i just wanted the artists to own it again. i never approved of the direction it took. i just tell stories of asphodel now. i have digital recordings of the label, most of it, but i’m philosophically agreeing with you. i wish it’d be done in the correct way .
but mitzi and i decided that instead of flying them out and using stuff here we could get a studio for them, pro tools, mixing board and some gear to set up their own place. so the idea became why don’t we give them resources and we can then have a few of those groups work in nyc, set this stuff up wherever they wanted it and have them run their own operation. put it into the artists’ hand. let them create it with some tools. and if they needed to master or go further with mixing, we had the facility in sf. but how about putting the power into the artists hands. give them the tools, let them manage the studio. co - ordinate between the various people of the illbient scene who were on asphodel. they made their own schedules, creating under their own auspices. so instead of the typical label approach, it was about empowering them, letting them be mobile and put stuff together. they had different technical abilities. some were learning from scratch, some of them had knowledge. like john, who worked with raz, was an engineer, and that’s how raz got more hip to working in the studio. it meant several groups had access to it. the illbient guys, soundlab and whoever wanted to work in the studio and become their own producers in a certain way. and of course different artists would take that to different levels… in terms of how they wanted to do it. that was one of asphodel’s main things, giving technical power over to the artist. some people are territorial about that. excursions in illbient was all mostly done in that studio in nyc .
in ancient greece, the afterlife consisted of three distinct realms. when one died, a coin would be placed in one' s mouth to pay charon the ferryman to take the soul across the river styx. this coin wasn' t
payment
exactly as much as a sign of respect between the soul and the gods - the greater the value of the coin, the better seat the soul got in charon' s boat. once the soul was on the other side, one would pass by the three - headed dog cerberus and then stand before the three judges to give an account of the life one had lived. when the story had been told, and as the judges conferred, one would be given a cup of water from the river lethe, the waters of forgetfulness, and would forget one' s former life on earth. the judges would then assign the soul a location: if you had been a warrior who died in battle, you went to the elysian fields which were a paradise; if you had been a good person, you went to the plain of asphodel, also pleasant; if you had been a bad person, then you went to the darkness of tartarus where the soul remained until it had atoned for the sins of one' s life. no soul was
condemned to eternal damnation
. the soul in tartarus could become elevated to the plain of asphodel in time. as in the cultures of mesopotamia and egypt, souls were not expected to return to earth for any reason, but sometimes they still did. this same basic paradigm was adopted by the roman culture who held a much more deep - seated belief in ghosts than the greeks .
upon one' s death, a spiritual entity known as a gidim was created, which maintained the personal identity of the deceased and traveled on to the land of the dead. it was this gidim that would return to haunt the living if proper attention had not been paid to funeral rites and burial or if there had been some unlawful act involved in the person' s death. inscriptions do make clear, however, that sometimes the gidim could mischievously slip out of irkalla for visits to the earth, where they would harass the living for no good reason. these spirits would be punished by the sun god shamash by having their funerary offerings taken from them and awarded to gidim who had no one to remember them on earth, and so no one to provide them with offerings for their continued existence. although there are records of loved ones returning from the afterlife with warnings or advice, most of the ghosts of mesopotamia were unwelcome guests who were sent back to their realm through the use of charms, amulets, prayers, or exorcism .
but at the start i was going to people’s houses. mike had made all these cassettes, tons of them, racks of cassettes. i wanted to listen to it all and use some of that as sources too. going back through the archives and use a blend of that to be reflected in the record. show the voyage through all these things. i would also do spontaneous things with mike, like give him a bunch of records he’d never heard before. we were sharing how to do stuff. ‘surprize packidge’, on mike’s record, came from that. it really was a surprise, he hadn’t heart it before and used it to make segments that became the track. we tried all these different techniques of how to put together composition, tracks, different things. i went to mike’s place in vallejo and i listened to all the tapes. i would then tell him what i thought sounded good. guiding the process as an inspirational thing. and recently i’ve gotten back in touch with a lot of these guys. it is kinda coming back after being saturated .
within a few years asphodel became bi - coastal, with its roots in san francisco and a growing outpost in new york spearheaded by erik gilbert, the label manager. gilbert was introduced to the couple by american music club’s wally brill, who suggested he’d be perfect to handle the day - to - day business of running such an operation. at the same time, gilbert had been preparing a move to the east coast. “the fact that erik went to new york and forged an office there allowed us to grow this genuine musical chemistry with the city, ” humon remembers. speaking by email, gilbert, who continues to work in the music business, explained how his initial role was “to arrange a recording agreement with the brian jonestown massacre, who had recorded their second album at naut’s studio, the compound. ” after that, he settled into new york and “set up distribution, pr, radio, and slowly begun to build the label’s infrastructure while naut and mitzi focused on a & r. ”
beyond giving artists the necessary tools, humon was also hands - on in engaging them to upgrade their music making skills. when he first began frequenting turntablist and illbient circles, he was surprised to find that most of the artists weren’t releasing music beyond homemade cassettes. he brings up the example of isp member mixmaster mike, who debuted on the label as a solo artist with 1998’s anti - theft device and joined the beastie boys as their official tour dj soon after. “i would go and visit mike at his place in vallejo and listen to all these cassettes he’d made, ” humon explains. for mike’s debut, naut got the idea to reflect this history in the recordings, by weaving elements throughout. humon became the album’s producer, in the traditional sense — guiding mike’s creativity while teaching him how to work with new technology. “asphodel was trying to enable artists to learn the skills needed to be on their own, ” says humon of his hands - on approach. “i had a customised way that i would be a behind - the - scenes producer. ”
here’s one story related to that. i already had a studio out in sf. we were using new tools back then, late ‘80s, early ‘90s. things like pro tools that enabled new ways of putting records together that was more fresh back then. now it’s standard, part of the methodology. so… being interested in all this stuff and seeing… part of it wasn’t just seeing the musical works or the sets, be it groups or dj sets or the loft thing going on. it was like… how… what’s the best way to work to achieve the best results? you know, we could have done the thing where we invited people to come to the studio and let them use it. which is what a label might do. bill laswell had that going on in greenpoint already. he’d have people over, releases on different labels. but since our operation had begun in sf, our studio was out of a place called the compound. out on a dirt road, all this stuff going on with it for years. projects we’d do independently, artist residencies… when the nyc thing came into focus and i saw the community there, the musical community that was illbient, i thought if we’re going to work with these people they probably need some resources. they could come out, which they did a little, and work here in the studio with the board and accoutrements .
so i guess… i’d visit new york twelve times a year, seeing how things developed. there was the admin side of things but also this creative side with the studio. that was our option instead of getting them to come out to sf to work on stuff. wetm and others did come out to sf to mix and also do shows. we’d have a bunch of these groups in the show, and turntablists too. this idea of what we started in 1996 called the recombinant shows. it was about recombining different genres and things. electronic stuff from europe with illbient and turntablists. over the course of one or more evenings. asphodel presented it but not just as a label. there’d be people not involved in the label, because we liked it. my idea with recombinant was to put on a great… this idea of recombining different strains over the course of a presentation. dj, hip - hop, illbient, electronic. to give the audience a broad range and diverse takes. that was the start of the recombinant fest which became recombinant media labs, a space for residencies, expanding upon the idea of what we started in the ‘90s. a nice, higher - end studio for experimental projects .
when i refer to recombinant as a party, humon is quick to try and differentiate it from the homogenised standard the word conjures. “it was more about design, we’d design the shows so that different things would happen. putting on a spectacle but in an organised way. ” the shows would sometimes stretch over multiple nights and spaces and involve asphodel and related artists. both humon’s description of the work, heavy on metaphors, and reviews from the time hint at the shows as a meeting point between a standardised musical performance — at the time still a fairly new concept for djs and electronic musicians — and something closer to an art installation, one that is living rather than calcified inside an institution. recombinant shows took place in san francisco, los angeles, new york city and miami with guests including the beat junkies, dj craze and a - trak, as well as the austrian media art group granular synthesis. the recombinant shows would ultimately give way to the rml and cinechamber that occupies humon today. when i tell him how the description of recombinant brings to mind soundlab’s beth coleman’s use of “experiential events” to describe new york’s illbient happenings, he agrees: “today i say that recombinant media labs are experiential engineers. ”
“there was no conscious decision to start a label, it grew out of our experiences and encounters. ” naut humon
“i felt like the flavour, character, and personality of the music coming out of new york really had its own slant. ” naut humon
“i would go and visit mike at his place in vallejo and listen to all these cassettes he’d made. ” naut humon
having spent time in a group in his early years, with rhythm & noise, humon wanted to go beyond the band. “the idea became to get into orchestration, what the orchestra of the future might become, ” he remembers. “i always felt my role wasn’t just that of a musician, someone who played in a band, but of a sound traffic controller, who conducts and conveys sound traffic as it moves through various spaces. ” the january 1997 edition of the wire magazine summarised recombinant’s first san francisco show: “an open - ended work in progress, a petri dish of sonic emergences and unexpected comminglings, the event was a breath of fresh air in an often insular town. ”
asphodel ltd ( a.k.a. asphodel records ) was a san francisco-based independent record label founded by musician mitzi johnson and naut humon in 1992 . the label is named after the mythological flower that grows along the banks of the river styx in hades . the label had shut down as of january 2011 . asphodel has a diverse catalog of releases with a prominent experimental thread in the genres of turntablism , electronica , ambient , illbient , electroacoustic , trip hop , spoken word , noise , techno , and lounge . 
asphodel ltd (a.k.a. asphodel records) was a san francisco-based independent record label founded by musician mitzi johnson and naut humon in 1992. the label is named after the mythological flower that grows along the banks of the river styx in hades. the label had shut down as of january 2011. asphodel has a diverse catalog of releases with a prominent experimental thread in the genres of turntablism, electronica, ambient, illbient, electroacoustic, trip hop, spoken word, noise, techno, and lounge.
asphodel ltd (a.k.a. asphodel records) was a san francisco-based independent record label founded by musician mitzi johnson and naut humon in 1992. the label is named after the mythological flower that grows along the banks of the river styx in hades. the label had shut down as of january 2011. asphodel has a diverse catalog of releases with a prominent experimental thread in the genres of turntablism, electronica, ambient, illbient, electroacoustic, trip hop, spoken word, noise, techno, and lounge.