we interrupt the stay on the island for a public service announcement.

Ertia Creations is basically dead.

Many of you probably don't know what Ertia Creations is, which is kind of embarrassing since it's a record label I co-founded. Don't worry, this says more about how absolutely shocking I am at some brands of self-promotion than at your inattention to my endeavors.

(Although you're perfectly welcome to be inattentive to my endeavors, should you choose.)

Back in 2001 or so, when I was living in Portland, my friend Hermann and I decided it would be a good idea to start a record label. The reasoning was something like this:

1) We had a band (The Tritium Miracle) and we wanted to put out a record down the road.
2) (unspoken) No self-respecting label would want to put it out.
3) If we self-released it, it wouldn't look like a "real" label.
4) If we, however, released records by other bands, it would be a "real" label.

(God, I wish there was a MySpace-oriented model for bands in 2001. We could have saved a lot of trouble.)

So the idea germinated. I had talked about starting record labels before with people, or by myself, and liked the idea of supporting music I loved.

And then our first release presented itself. Dave Deggeller, my bandmate from Dyn@mutt, had self-released a CD-R of his new project, Secret Primper, and was gearing up to do the same for another collection of songs. I had played on one of these songs back in 1998, perhaps as part of Conor's work on his master's degree or perhaps just sneakily utilizing equipment he had access to, and four more songs in 2000. We got Dave up to Portland for some basement recordings in the summer of 2001, and Conor recorded a few more in the Bay Area (with the estimable and gregarious Matt Plock on the skins), and then we had something like an album.

The label name was one I'd been sitting on for a while - it was simultaneously unfamiliar and obvious. (Well, at least to me - consider in- as a prefix, and inertia is a word.) After coming up with a basic idea for a logo, I enlisted the help of designer and friend Todd Stadler to design both a logo and a web site, both of which surpassed my expectations and certainly my ability to do it myself. After fumbling around myself for a while without success, he saved me from myself and came up with an awesome design for the cover of the Secret Primper album, now titled Alliteration and You. (An ancient blog by him on this topic can be found here.)



After a lengthy introduction to the world of CD production, mastering, getting clearance for cover songs, setting up a business, and similar sorts of things that I probably should have documented more thoroughly at the time, we managed to bring Alliteration and You into the world in 2002.

I would like to tell you that it set the world on fire and made it possible for Dave to quit teaching, tour internationally, and sell out stadiums, but this is not remotely true. (Actually, I'm not sure how much of that Dave would have even wanted.) Of the slightly over 1,000 CDs printed, I'm confident we have several hundred left. (Drop me an email if you'd like a box of 100 at a reasonable rate.) Reasons for this are myriad and sundry, from the lack of fanbase prior to its release to the small number of shows Secret Primper actually played to the complete lack of understanding on my part that the production of the album was not the culmination of its release but actually its beginning.

Message to anybody starting a label: things like publicity and distribution are very, very important. And I was very, very bad at them. I sent it out to a few places, and got a reasonably friendly review, a less enthused review (scroll down), and a couple adds on a few radio stations. (I don't think KTRU ever played it or even knew about it, despite the love that Dyn@mutt's record received at the time of its release. How quickly the past is forgotten.)

Also, listening back to the album, the production is thinner and more problematic than I remembered. We did the best we could at the time, but play it back to back with a Polvo or Superchunk album and you definitely hear the difference. Also, there's a couple drumming flubs on my part (particularly on "Cooked Captain") that cause me to cringe every time I hear them.

I still love it, though. And I'm really proud that I helped bring it into this world.

Somewhere along this time, I was corresponding with the incomparable Kyle Bruckmann, who mentioned that he had a trio CD in the hopper that they were trying to bring into the world. I had often thought of the idea of co-releasing being a very good idea, helping out underfunded labels with more passion than capital, and so we became involved in the release of Six Synaptics, along with Barely Auditable.

In terms of building label identity, there couldn't have possibly been a less appropriate follow-up. At the time, this didn't really bother me. I liked the idea of Ertia being home for creative initiatives of all sorts, and not just musical. To further the scope of what Ertia did, I gathered MP3s from various friends and associates to put together what I called a "Sporadical". Well, two of them. The first one included Kyle Bruckmann & Fred Lonberg-Holm, Easter, S.Ghael, Lie & Swell, stuart g smith, Blue Skies For Black Hearts, and Conor. The second one, many months later, featured Lumpy, Buddha on the Moon, Jesse Canterbury, Lozenge, Dw. Dunphy, and Ultra Hummus.

(I gathered a few tracks for a third one, but never succeeded in bringing it into the world, for no reason other than, well, sheer inertia. My humblest apologies to Jeff Smith, Kilian Sweeney, and everyone else who I asked for and received music from and then proceeded to let fester.)

Anyway, despite (or because of) the complete dissimilarity of Six Synaptics in every way to our other release, I was very excited about it. (And I mean every way, not just sonically. The packaging wasn't jewel case but one of those cardboard digi-paks. Even our label logo somehow got screwed up and was printed the wrong way.) And, despite being far, far, far more difficult listening, Six Synaptics got a bit more press, sold a bit more, generally got us a very very small but not entirely imperceptible bit of attention despite, once again, my complete indifference and/or ineptitude at promoting the release in any meaningful way besides placing it on the web site.



Just as we were gathering steam, though, we were also losing it. My band (remember them?), that was part of the reason for the label, was clearly nowhere near getting it together to put out a CD. I was pretty unemployed most of this time, and thus not sitting on a cash reservoir to put out lots of CDs, particularly when I hadn't really figured out how to convert them from CD form into cash. I had grand ideas about using Ertia as a site for my filmmaking, writing, countless enterprises. I did blog there for a while - apparently I was very angry about Iraq in 2003, looking back - but other than that not much came to light. And then I changed personal directions, and I moved to New Zealand amidst a lot of personal changes I've alluded to in previous blogs here, and then just never really got back to it, but kept dumping $20/month into keeping the domain and website going.

But that's silly. So now www.ertiacreations.com and my associated e-mail address is about to go away - it may be away by the time you read this. As I wrote this, I was looking over it. I was shocked at how much I'd deliberately ignored it over the last few years, not even taking the most minimal effort to maintain it. (For instance, there's multiple references to our address being the house I once bought with my ex-girlfriend, who no longer speaks to me, and who I strongly suspect is not holding my mail.) I'm slightly sad that it wasn't more than what it turned out to be.

But it was something I needed to do, and even though I did a half-assed job in a lot of ways I'm glad I did it, and I'd rather have the 2 CDs that we made and the memories than the couple thousand bucks I spent on it, and I could probably go on a lot longer, but it would just be a more verbose way of saying that.

Thanks to everybody who helped out with Ertia in any way, and next week I'll be back on the island.