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Constellation Records co-founders Don Wilkie, left, and Ian Ilavsky take pride in the labour-intensive artwork for their releases, including the debut album by Jerusalem in My Heart, seen here. ?We were certainly never thinking in terms of marketing or even of ?design,? really,? Wilkie says. ?We just wanted our records to feel honest and artisanal in all aspects.?
Photograph by: Pierre Obendrauf , The Gazette
MONTREAL - As I enter the Mile End office of the independent label Constellation Records, the room is a hive of activity. The local imprint is about to put out its 93rd release, Jerusalem in My Heart?s Mo7it Al-Mo7it, and label owners Ian Ilavsky and Don Wilkie are putting in some 11th-hour elbow grease before peeling themselves away from their computer screens for our two-hour chat.
Montreal?s Jerusalem in My Heart?is sure to leave fans of underground and experimental music with their mouths agape. Weaving Arabic vocal and instrumental traditions with distortion and healthy dashes of electronic music, the project is a perfect fit for the label. Mo7it Al-Mo7it possesses the thread that binds all the music in Constellation?s catalogue: boldness, honesty, genre-defying progression and pure artistic vision.
Founded in 1997, it seems Constellation couldn?t have happened anywhere but financially struggling Montreal. The makings for a musical and cultural hothouse were in place: rents were cheap, and vacant warehouse and loft spaces were plentiful in the post-referendum economic slump. A slow trickle of artists and musicians from the rest of Canada began setting up in our fair burg to pursue their work under the radar, with strong do-it-yourself ethics. Ilavsky and Wilkie were part of the experimental music current that was surfacing in the Montreal underground, originally hatching plans to start a much-needed venue that would cater to musicians whose styles and politics were not being particularly well served by the city?s existing rock clubs.
?It was a really small scene, but it was super exciting,? says Wilkie. ?There was no sense of reach at that time. Nobody was wondering how they were going to become rock stars; we weren?t thinking and looking beyond our own community and neighbourhoods.?
The venue plans didn?t pan out, but with the few thousand dollars they?d saved between them, Wilkie and Ilavsky issued their first three releases in 1997: a seven-inch single and CD from Ilavsky?s band Sofa, and the debut vinyl LP by Godspeed You! Black Emperor, F#A#, which would become a seminal work. In befriending members of Godspeed who lived at the Hotel2Tango rehearsal space, things really started percolating. Wilkie and Ilavsky rented their own loft at the edge of Old Montreal, hosted an intimate concert series called Musique Fragile, and helped put on shows at ?the hotel? with resident musicians Efrim Menuck and Thierry Amar (of Godspeed) and artist John Tinholt (who now runs the studio and exhibition space Le Corrid?art).
Godspeed?s debut hardly exploded upon its release, but its cinematic scope was undeniable; slowly but surely, it would go on to sell massively on an independent scale. By the time Constellation was pushing its third pressing of 500 copies out the door in 1998, they sensed they might have an indie success on their hands.
As glorious as the Godspeed record sounded, the packaging was equally enthralling. Individual darkroom prints were hand-glued to the embossed front cover, and an envelope of goodies featured more art, including a penny flattened on the railroad tracks that ran through the Hotel2Tango?s backyard. To this day, those crushed pennies continue to be included with every copy of the LP.
The labour-intensive artwork is a point of pride for the two label owners. ?Financially, we couldn?t hire a print shop to execute our design ideas, nor did we want to,? says Ilavsky, recalling their early days. ?We ripped up other record sleeves that we liked to see how they were cut, folded and glued. It was all part of a larger set of ethics and instincts, wanting to do things for yourself.?
?Actually making these objects with our own hands is what we wanted to spend our time doing,? Wilkie adds. ?It obviously carved out an identity for Constellation, but we were certainly never thinking in terms of marketing or even of ?design,? really. We just wanted our records to feel honest and artisanal in all aspects. When the bottom started to fall out of the physical record industry, we were probably preserved for a while. Perhaps people thought that our physical records weren?t commodities so easily bypassed or disposed of.?
Despite investing so much in packaging and giving music fans a true and complete listening experience, moving forward would eventually mean embracing the digital domain. Constellation was probably one of the last labels to join the iPod generation, finally offering up its catalogue on digital sites in 2008.
?We?ve made our peace with digital, but it was a tough reality to accept,? says Wilkie. ?Bands on the label seemed relatively accepting of the fact that we were not releasing records digitally, but we also began to feel we were holding them hostage to our artistic and cultural politics.?
While the waters of the music industry get increasingly rough, Ilavsky and Wilkie have not changed much since they started Constellation in their kitchen 16 years ago.
?Our initial ideals have largely survived and been galvanized, not so much through the modest success of the label, but from seeing how all the artists we?ve worked with have defined and achieved success on their own terms, with such integrity,? says Wilkie. ?I get absolute pleasure seeing artists affiliated with Constellation continuing to carry forth a set of ideals, ethics and politics in a music industry that is increasingly disdainful of those ideals.?
For more information on Constellation Records, visit cstrecords.com.
? Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette
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