Whose Fault Is That

Scott Soriano knows a lot about music. Via his label S-S, Soriano is responsible for the release and distribution of a host of excellent records by bands from all over the world. While it’s pretty undeniable that he’s got his finger on the pulse of a certain sect of the record collecting community, many of Soriano’s hallmark releases are reissues of music that was passed over by even the voracious listeners who tend to order from him. He’s also a contributor to internet record-nerd mainstay Terminal Boredom and co-editor of Z Gun, a print fanzine.

We think it’s pretty cool that the S-S website encourages a degree of leap-of-faith purchasing by only providing short MP3 samples of its catalog, so we’ve opted to include those samples here in lieu of full songs.

Whose Fault Is That: How would you describe your job as it relates to S-S, Z Gun and any affiliated ventures?

Scott Soriano: To start, I hope I never consider what I do with either S-S or Z Gun as “a job”! The record label is my baby and I am responsible for everything from birthing to changing diapers to teaching it to make a Scotch and soda for daddy. The zine has two mommies – me and Ryan Wells. We share in our responsibility to create a horror child.

WFIT: Were there any records or specific experiences that galvanized your interest in underground music or, more specifically, running a label?

SS: As a teen, I was snorting speed and playing football with fellow neighborhood shitbags, when one of them started singing the Sex Pistols’ “Bodies.” Hearing “fuck” sung three times in one line, followed by the word “abortion” sent me off on my bike to Tower Records, where I lifted me a copy of “Never Mind the Bollocks.”

It literally changed the way I heard music. Real anger was okay. Smart and primitive could exist side by side. It killed pretty much every piece of received wisdom about music that I had trapped in my teen mind. Hearing Ornette Coleman, Blind Willie McTell, and Folkways Ethnic records taught me that raw energy existed in more than underground rock & roll.

I also realized that while genres are good for trying to communicate to others about music, to approach music as a set of genres restricts how I heard music. Chum that into a philosophy and it probably has something to do with how I approach the label.

“Pushing Buttons” by Nothing People

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WFIT: What were your motives when you began putting out records? Are they any different now than they were then?

SS: I’d like to give you some high minded reason for starting S-S (with Sakura Saunders, who is no longer involved), but really it was sitting in on Chris Woodhouse’s first sessions with the A Frames and thinking “I want to put this on a record.”

The second release (a 7″ by early 80s synth punk band The Decay, nabbed from a cassette) was also something I wanted to put on a record. I’d like to say that one motive was to crash the stupid genre ghetto walls that punk and underground music seems to love, but that might have come a bit after the fact and is never the main motive. The main motive is “I want this to be on a record.”

WFIT: As the proprietor of a predominantly-vinyl record label, editor of a print-only zine and longtime employee of a used bookstore, how would you explain your type of archival impulse to an audience accustomed to digital immediacy and convenience?

SS: Vinyl & print archaic? Bah! The digital world convenient? By what measure? Too many assumptions in your question that, while might be status quo, are crap. Analog and print seem natural to me. Analog sounds better than digital and it lasts. Print still dominates the book industry and will for years to come. If the format changes and (more important), it is better than what it replaces, no need to resist it.

WFIT: Have there ever been any records you’ve desperately wanted to release but wound up being unable to?

SS: The only “dream project” has been a Fugs box set. The stuff is all out there on different labels but it would take an entity like Rhino to pull it all together. Too much legal bullshit for me.

WFIT: While most of your record label contemporaries tend to focus on a niche, the stylistic variations across the S-S catalog speak for themselves. Aside from matters of personal taste, how do you reconcile the wildly differing aesthetics of bands like the A Frames, Hue Blanc’s Joyless Ones and Les Club Des Chats under the S-S umbrella?

SS: I guess if I listened to just one style or genre of music than I’d think that the artists I release have “wildly differing aesthetics”, but I don’t. They don’t sound the same, sure, but only shitty labels put out bands that sound all the same, and I don’t aspire to have a shitty label.

Perhaps if I was putting out Los Llamarada, Puccini, and the Carter Family, I’d have something to “reconcile”, but, even then, I am sure I’d worm my way out of justifying what I do.

“Cola Ohne Coka” by Krysmopompas

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WFIT: In a recent interview with the Washington Post, Matt Whitehurst from Psychedelic Horseshit refers to Terminal Boredom as the new Rolling Stone and claims that “the bigger heads on Terminal Boredom are ruining music today.” I’m not about to make any claims regarding Matt’s sincerity or sobriety in that interview, but I was wondering if you had any thoughts about TB becoming a strange and increasingly accurate arbiter of what will appear on, say, Pitchfork within six months or a year.

SS: Ha! I think you mean TB predicts what will be covered on Pitchfork by a year or two! Listen, this is nothing new. Fan-based media such as print zines, web zines, fan blogs, message boards, etc. are always going to be out in front of the professional music media. It doesn’t matter if it is the mid 70s with the zines Back Door Man or Bomp! trumping Rolling Stone or later with Sniffin Glue and Search & Destroy embarrassing NME or Crawdaddy.

If you want to find the interesting stuff going on in the 80s you turn to Flipside and Forced Exposure, not Circus and Spin. Well, today you have Terminal Boredom being more timely and relevant than Pitchfork. Of course, Pitchfork is going to pinch ideas from Termbo! It is either that or rewrite one-sheets given to them by record labels, which is pretty much standard procedure for pro music press.

That said, nowadays, the influence of the music press, whether it be fan-based like Termbo or industry based like Pitchfork, is overblown. There are just too many sources of opinion to turn to, too many ways for fans to interact with each other, and many more options for music fans to immediately sample music without the music press acting as gatekeeper.

Hype on Terminal Boredom might be able to sell out a 7″ pressing of 300 but that is hardly the influence of Rolling Stone of the 60s & 70s, and to think otherwise shows that you need to expand your world. At best, Termbo is a tip sheet. You find people you trust (the bigger the head the better…or at least the bigger the hat) and use them as a buying guide until the stuff they rave starts to suck. And you find out before the herd. That’s what fan media is supposed to do.

WFIT: In In a climate where the only other print music zines are catch-all monoliths like Razorcake and MRR, what led you to produce Z Gun, a sporadically printed zine with scattershot subject matter?

SS: When we created Z Gun, Razorcake and MRR didn’t even enter our minds. I am sure if we would have thought of them as “monoliths”, our first impulse would be to attack them. But MRR is like an old friend who is starting to babble to himself and Razorcake? I didn’t know it still existed! It does? Well, congratulations Razorcake!

So I guess you can say what led us to produce Z Gun was lack of anything that framed punk or underground rock & roll or outsider music or “scattershot subject matter” or whatever you want to call it, as one single, uhhhhh, sound spirit. “Sound spirit”, listen to me. Next comes drum circle theorizing.

“Miaou-Miaou” by Les Club des Chats

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WFIT: Do you see the internet as a threat to the very existence of print media and physical music, or do you think collectors and enthusiasts will persist and endure?

SS: When the phonograph was invented, John Philip Souza claimed that it would lead to a “marked deterioration of American music and music taste, an interruption of musical development of the country…” and that the musician would be replaced by “the mechanical device” and that all would stop singing.

He ranted, “Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises will be out of vogue! Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?” Oh pooh on “threats to very existences.”

WFIT: S-S has a history of reissuing awesome records by bands that have been passed by or otherwise slept on. Assuming you can’t breathe new life into every gem that comes along, what are some near-forgotten acts of the recent past that you think merit similar treatments?

SS: Nothing in particular or rather too much in particular to note. I’d like to see something (beside Mutant Sounds blog) documenting the DIY cassette underground of the Seventies & Eighties. Or recordings of the National Chest and the National Throat.

WFIT: Aside from merely staying afloat, do you have any long-term goals for either S-S. or Z Gun?

SS: With S-S. and Z Gun, I don’t think about the long term and don’t think about “staying afloat.” It is all about what records or issue I am working on at the time. Beyond that, it is for the soothsayers to see.

Joe Bernardi interviewed Scott Soriano in April 2009. S-S records can be found (and ordered from) online here, with Z Gun’s online presence here. Scott also blogs about rare and strange records at Crud Crud.