Andy Blake will launch a new label this month called In Plain Sight.
Blake has had his hand in a variety of projects over the past few years. First there was Dissident, his vinyl-only label that shut its doors just after we made it Label of the Month. Blake said he he had to call it quits with the label in order to put his weight behind World Unknown, a London party series that has since spawned an imprint of its own. In the meantime he launched another label called Cave Paintings, a platform for his own techno productions.
With In Plain Sight, Blake further explores an aesthetic he's been interested in for years. In his own words: "It's all about rough, raw house music and hopefully in some small way it will be a lense that can focus something of the wealth of energy, creativity and musical freedom from a quarter century old tradition fairly and squarely into the present." The label kicks off with a hitherto unknown producer named youngTEE, who will appear on at least a couple more In Plain Sight releases.
Chatting via email last week, Blake told us a bit more about In Plain Sight:You've gone through a few different labels in the past few years: Dissident, Cave Paintings, World Unknown and now In Plain Sight. Why so many?
It's a pretty straightforward division of labour really. World Unknown is for the kind of stuff we play at the WU parties—heavy, throbbing and somewhere off to the left of centre, Cave Paintings is an outlet for my own productions and is fairly analogue techno oriented and In Plain Sight is house: rough, chunky, raw stuff for the floor.
House is the universal, the thing that holds all this all together and the common language that unites all the various nightlife scenes and circuits. I've been meaning to do a straight up house label for ages and I've finally got round to it.
What can you tell us about the artist on the first release, YoungTEE?
YoungTEE, who made the first release Doctor Chocolate / Perfect Model, is a mate of mine, yet another one of those incredibly talented people that I have the good fortune to know quite a lot of. There will be another 12-inch from him on IPS in a few months and, if all goes at least somewhere near to plan, an album after the summer. I've heard demos of some of his new things and they are really excellent so I'm very excited about that. He's also getting a live thing together which he'll be doing at the label nights once they start happening in the next few months.
Is this a vinyl-only operation?
There'll be a new 12-inch every month and I've got the first 9 months of releases pretty much sorted, with a little bit of leeway in there for if I get sent some stuff that I think has to come out straight away. And there will be digital as well, a few weeks after the vinyl. The game has changed so much in the last couple of years and it seems only natural to make music that potentially has a universal appeal easily available to everyone who wants it.
Tracklist
A1 Doctor Chocolate
B1 Perfect Model
In Plain Sight will release Doctor Chocolate / Perfect Model on January 30th, 2012.