the third shift is the one that starts at eleven at night.
that is where most of this music was made, and it is where the label got its name.
how it works.
badly, mostly, and on purpose.
there is no schedule.
we put out a record when there is a record. six in seven years is not a business plan, it is what happened. nothing is announced until it is already at the plant, because we have been let down by plants often enough to stop promising dates.
nobody is signed.
there are no contracts. somebody makes a record, we press it, we split what comes back after costs, and they are free the day it ships. two of the four artists here have put records out on other labels in between and that is exactly as it should be.
two colours, always.
every sleeve is printed two colours because that is what we could afford in 2019. it has since become the thing people recognise on a shelf, so it is now a rule rather than a constraint. the geometry changes; the count does not.
demos.
send one link, not a folder. we listen to everything and reply to about one in twenty, which is a worse ratio than we would like and an honest one. do not follow up — if it has been a month, the answer was no.
about the audio on this site.
the part of this that people are most entitled to be suspicious about.
there are no audio files here. everything you can play is generated live in your browser by a small synthesiser — a kick, a hat, a bassline and a chord, sequenced on a sixteen-step bar, with the pattern seeded by the catalogue number so that each release sounds like itself every time.
that is deliberate. this is a fictional label, and putting real musicians' recordings behind a fictional label's name would misattribute their work. the sleeves are generated for the same reason: a record sleeve is authored, and borrowing one would be borrowing somebody's authorship rather than a picture of an object.
so it is not music. it is a demonstration that the player, the analyser and the colour extraction are real and working on a real signal. the waveform you see is drawn from the audio that is actually reaching your speakers, not from a stored image of one.
the colour of this page comes from the sleeve that is playing. it is sampled from the artwork, then its lightness is corrected until it passes contrast — the hue is whatever the record says, the legibility is not up for negotiation.