a conversation with Christian Schiefner of Falt Records
When did you start Falt? And starting your own label was something you had been thinking about for a while, or you rather began out of an impulse? Did you go straight for tapes or were you considering other formats?
I started Falt in 2016, when I had just finished an album of my Chemiefaserwerk music titled “Collagen”, and I had talked to some label guy back then and he had told me he wanted to release it. He actually had sent me all the artwork, and then one day he just told me “Hey man, I am shutting down the label and every release is canceled”, so I was like, ok. With the Chemiefaserwerk stuff I always work tape to tape and recording to recording, I finish one thing, then I release it or I try to get it released, and then it is finished it for me and I am moving on to another thing. And so there I was just blocked with that, for like two or three weeks I was thinking about asking other people to release it, but then I just thought “I’m going to release this myself.”
And I had a shoebox full of empty tapes which I had brought with me to Marseille when I had moved from Berlin a year earlier, and I had never done anything with these tapes. They had no cases, it was just the cassettes, so I had to come up with an idea for artwork and packaging. I wanted it to be very simple, actually. I have always done artwork and collages like the ones you can see on the Falt releases. In 2008 I started publishing a fanzine in Berlin with stuff like that, and also poetry. And this is the story of how it started. It was not planned, I had no idea where this would lead to, it could also very well have been just like an imprint of mine, but it turned out that people liked it, I got in contact with other people and that’s how it started.
Back then I sent out some mails because I wanted to have some reviews for Collagen, because the label was just starting and how should people know about it? I wrote to A Closer Listen, and there was another review site, I forgot the name, but the guy who wrote that review was Joe McKay. We got in contact this way, he wrote me an email asking me about the tape and the label, he told me that he liked it. And he also told me that he was about to start his own label very soon, that label today is Dinzu Artefacts. So I took this a little bit more seriously, I was like “Hey, there are people out there and they like what I do, and they are doing the same thing that I do.” I knew there were artist-run DIY labels, but this feedback I received was just like a nice starting point. After that I released music by Joe, his Monte Burrows project. Then I discovered Phil Maguire and I wrote him to ask him if he would like to publish a tape on Falt, “Empty Damage”, a great tape… and so it went on. So yes, basically I had no idea, I just started doing it.
I like the image of this shoebox full of tapes without a case. I think it is beautiful when one makes use of what he has rather than trying to fit in some abstract concept. I mean, you had tapes without shells and then you shaped your label’s aesthetic from there, this is beautiful.
Did you come up straight away with the idea of folding paper, and did you have to try different kinds of paper before finding one you liked?
I had a friend in Berlin, his name is Sindre Bjarga. He had this label called Gold Sounds which my friend Artem hit me up to, and he used to do packages and artwork with paper as well, but with CD-Rs which were folded in A4 paper. I did not invent this thing, I was thinking about packaging and I recalled some of his artwork. I tried some folding techniques, I actually still have one of the versions for the first tape, the paper is just folded around the tape but it did not hold the tape. And then I just found a way to fold the paper to make it stick together, and it worked.
Regarding the paper, I made some experiments in the beginning with black and white, and always always always copy shop. I don’t print at home, I don’t like the ink-jet printer style at all, and colour laser printer A3 at home is super expensive, so I have this small print shop with a long haired guy behind the counter who’s listening to heavy metal. When he found out I’m from Germany, because I have a very bad accent in French, he was like “I was in Southern Germany and there was this awesome metal festival!”, and sometimes I make hundreds of copies for Falt and when his boss is not around he is always charging me for less copies. I like him. Another thing I like is that you can not control everything in the copy shop, you can not re-do things endlessly. I always do test prints of the covers and I look at them and sometimes I change little things.
I think the paper right now is 100 grams per square meter, or foot? I don’t know exactly how it is called. It is a little thicker than normal copy shop paper and I think it is very good, it has a very good feeling, the tape feels very good when it’s folded and it has the perfect weight for a tape.
On Bandcamp I see all these prices for shipping and sometimes I want to order a tape, but the tape is 6/8€ and the shipping is like 12€. So I don’t order because 20€ for a tape is just too much for me.
The thing with Falt is I try to keep shipping costs as low as possible, on Bandcamp I have set the actual shipping cost, only 10 cents more beacuse I have to buy the envelope. In France shipping internationally is still kind of cheap, I can send up to five tapes for like 10€. And this is also because of the Falt tapes, they are not heavy because they don’t have a plastic case which is the heaviest thing in a tape. And so when I put two Falt tapes in a normal letter I am still around 80/90 grams. And up to 100 grams French post is the cheapest option. This is very important to me, it is kind of affordable. Shipping is really a pain right now because I have to print international text labels, I have to fill them in, it takes so much time to send out an order since I have to fill in an actual online form where I have to type everything by hand, it is taking me 5 minutes only to type the form, then to go and print it out… Still I think it is important to have a reasonable shipping cost because I sell all Falt tapes online and I ship them everywhere in the world.
Do you do the collages for the sleeves with paper, scissors, glue and then you scan it and print it? Or is it all digital a process?
I don’t use the computer at all, I scan the collage in the copy shop and print it from the original collage. I have an A3 sheet of paper and I start cutting photographs and sometimes I am typing stuff with my typewriter to add some other element, right now I started using some stamps. All the scanning I have done lately was mostly for the fanzine I released, the Falt Catalogues #1 and #2 which I released a few months ago, there I scanned and cut everything with my computer but I really don’t know how to use Photoshop and I don’t want to learn how to use it right now. Maybe in a few years, but I think that in the future it will be easier to edit photos on the smartphone, so even someone like me at some point will have a decent free software.
I am mostly just scanning all the artwork and arrange everything in a very simple text edit, and I just printed this book. So yes, it is all scissors and glue, handmade.
About the photos for the Falt releases, I feel like I am cashing in on another work I did in the past. At one point in my life, like ten/fifteen years ago when I lived in Berlin, I had a real obsession for analogue cameras, I always had one with me – I had a collection of cameras, a simple point-and-shoot, or an old soviet camera my father gave to me… Every photo which was used on the Falt cover artwork was taken with one of these cameras. I had like 20 or 25, you could buy them for very cheap at some point. Today they are really expensive because they are labeled “vintage cameras”, but in the 2000s in any flea market in Berlin you could buy an Olympus point-and-shoot for 5€ and what was also great was that in Berlin you have all these drugstores and they sell all kind of stuff, and they also have the service to develop film and print photos, which was ridicoulously cheap because for a film of 36 pictures plus the print you would pay 3 or 4€. So at some point I was developing 10 films a week and I had hundreds and hundreds of pictures, and I put them in shoeboxes and I scanned some of them, and published some on a photoblog I was running at that point which was called Monoklinker, which I deleted when I stopped taking photographs. I had thousands and thousands of photos on this photoblog, it was a tumblr blog, tumblr was something kind of new – I think right now tumblr is something a 12 year old might use to post animated pictures or something like that? Anyway, that’s the story behind the artwork. As I said, I feel like I am cashing in on all this work, all these pictures were taken by me and when I see that people actually like the artworks I am happy, the pictures represent a lot to me because I remember where I took them… I took so many photographs ten years ago that I have shoeboxes full of them. You see my life is pretty much organized in shoeboxes: tapes on shoeboxes, photographs on shoeboxes, I have shoeboxes full of walkmans and dictaphones, I have another huge shoebox full of these cameras…
The first few tapes I released with Falt did not have any photographs, Giovanni Lami’s tape was the first one where I used my photographs. I wasn’t so sure of myself, if I could actually use these photographs I had.
Did it ever happen that you were sending artwork ideas to some musician and he was kind of difficult to work with, like someone very picky who kept turning them down?
Actually I think people who are sending their material to Falt like the aesthetics of the label, so I never had any trouble with sending artwork back and forth to somebody. Right now I usually send two or three propositions for artwork I made and I think it is fitting for the release and let the artist choose. I never had someone who completely refused the artwork.
All the Falt releases have a very personal aesthetic, you can see a release and immediately recognize it is Falt. Except for one, Machine Inutiles by John Sellekaers, which instead of a picture collage has a yellow paper with some black symbols printed. What’s the story behind that artwork?
I was in Berlin visiting some friends, this cover was made by a guy called Bjorn Keller. I used to live with him, he was my flatmate, he is a graffiti artist and he is also doing a lot of comics, fanzines, water color paintings… so I was at his place and I saw these little sketches he had on his working desk. He said they were some ideas he was working at, they could have been some letters, or they could also be some tiny machines. So I had this demo that was called Machines Inutiles and I asked him if he would like to do the cover for it. I told him to just paint the whole page with those symbols and I would slide it into the copy machine and we would have our cover. John Sellekaers liked it and that was it. It is one of the few covers which I didn’t do myself, there is another one by Leo Okagawa called Uncommon Places, which is made of three photographs Leo sent me and I thought they were beautiful. I’m always open if somebody tells me he has a particular photograph he would like to use for the cover.
What about dubbing the tapes? Do you buy empty tapes and then dub them at home one by one, by yourself?
Yes, I am always dubbing the Falt tapes at home. I order empty tapes cut to length for each release, usually I order 30 or 40 copies, sometimes 50. I get them from Germany, in Leipzig there is this place called TapeMuzik, they are nice people and they send out the tapes within 3 weeks from the order, which is great, and I never had any trouble with them except during Covid when it took them up to 8 weeks to deliver an order. Sometimes I get these real big packages of 200 tapes and 2 or 3 of them are broken, but that’s more of a courier issue. They are really all right so I am staying with them although there might be cheaper options. I think you press your tapes in Czech Republic? Then there is another in Poland, one in England… but I am not looking for other options, TapeMuzik is my thing. I like them, I have been working with them since the beginning, I actually ordered tapes from them before I started Falt when I released a demo tape for the band I had in Berlin. I used recycled tapes for the very first Chemiefaserwerk tape, and after that I always ordered brand new tapes.
Wait, I am remembering right now, one time I ordered the tapes from Canada because they were not expensive at all, I don’t know what’s their name… duplication.ca or something like that? So I placed the order, the tapes arrived, and I had to pay a huge amount of tax for import, like 50€ for 50 tapes. So now I am staying with this German factory.
I like dubbing at home, I like doing it all by myself. DIY people say DIY is something that liberates you from the others, from production, from the industry… And this is completely true, but DIY meant as doing it all by yourself at home is also something for control freaks like me. I want to control it all, I want to have the tape in my hand, check the pre-amp, make a test, listen if it sounds good, change the file a bit because sometimes there is a really good master and sometimes not so much. And then I start dubbing, with my whole desk full of tapes, and I love it. I am sitting in front of them typing the stickers with my typewriter while I am dubbing, with the artwork next to me… I want to have it all in my hands, because then afterwards you let go, and this is good. You let go and it’s done.
I also used recycled tapes a few times, mostly for my releases. I think the Format tape by Chemiefaserwerk was recycled, and also a Mauer Duo cassette was made using some tapes I found on the streets, a whole box full of classical opera tapes, and when I saw them I thought right away those were going to be the Mauer Duo cassettes. Not because I want to destroy the opera music, I just liked the idea of having these opera tapes and they were in very good condition, and on their shells there were this famous composers’ names, I found it very interesting.
I think that the fact that you’re taking care of everything is something beautiful. And it is something you can see on your tapes even without knowing you, you can tell they are homemade, made with love and with a pure punk spirit, and when I say “punk” I mean it in the most romantic, pure and kind of heroic way.
I grew up as a punk kid, and I played in some punk bands when I was younger. Now I am older, I have children, I am working in some kind of serious job. But when I look in the mirror I am still the same person I was back then, and it is nice that you can see this through my work with Falt.
You said your editions are of 30/40 copies, but lately I saw you have been pressing second editions of some sold out titles. Is it something you plan on doing regularly in the future?
Yes, it happened with a batch where all the copies for three tapes sold out in a couple of days, and I thought it was crazy, because I knew there were people out there who collect Falt tapes and order every batch, and they had not bought their tape yet. I know some people around the world that I think have all the Falt tapes, maybe except the first few ones because the label was still completely unknown. Or maybe they found them on Discogs, although I would not encourage them to buy one of my tapes there for 12€. I saw once one of my tapes for sale for 12€ and I was shocked. Anyway I know these collectors exist because I see their names all the time, I am sending packages to them for every batch I release. I am happy everytime one of these persons orders the new batch I put out, it feels a little bit like “Hey, there he is!” And that time I knew there were 3 or 4 people who had not ordered the batch, and felt I had to make more tapes for them. So I set a pre-order for 20 more copies of each of the three sold out tapes and a few days later when I saw the familiar names appear it felt good, I knew that they would be happy to have these tapes together with all the others. It sounds stupid, but I feel like I owe something to all these people who support my label with their money.
Did you ever think about pressing bigger editions?
Well, dubbing 100 copies at home is pretty time consuming. Right now I am dubbing a Phil Maguire tape which is 24 minutes per side, so 50 minutes of time go by for each copy since I am dubbing in real time and I have to be there while the deck is running. I am doing this when I am home, dubbing the tapes, typing the stickers, wrapping the tapes I have done, preparing the packages to be shipped. With editions of 100 copies, if I am putting out a batch of 5 tapes, that would be 500 copies. This would mean I would have to order the tapes already recorded, even with the artwork I don’t know if I could do everything myself. For Falt 50 copies is already a lot.
Another thing about Falt releases I noticed is you seem to work in a kind of irregular way, that to me feels completely spontaneous. You put out a batch of six tapes all together, and then a few weeks later you put out another batch of 4, like you are releasing tapes out of happiness, out of enthusiasm. Like you have 6 things you like and you just release all of them.
It is true that I release a lot of tapes, I keep a very high pace and I like a lot of stuff, there are a lot of submissions coming in and I also ask people to record something for Falt. The number of copies of an edition is not very high, so I can release a batch of six, or four tapes every two or three months, because there is enough material I like. I have a lot of releases waiting to be released and I have right now closed the demo submissions since I have no more slots to release new things that are coming in. I could release a batch of six tapes every month given the amount of stuff that I receive and I like.
Most of the time people send demos which fit in with the Falt aesthetics, but sometimes I receive weird stuff, like some time ago I received some power electronics demo, very aggressive. Anyway I am following up on anything, no joke. When I receive a demo I listen to everything, I check the links and I also do a bit of Google search, since I think sometimes it is good to know a little about the persons behind the music, and so with this power electronics demo I saw the Bandcamp page and there were corpses, nudity, war photography and I thought that was no good for Falt, I was happy I checked that page out. And so I replied and said demo submissions were closed, which was true, and also that it was not material for the label. I write back to everybody, I am pretty serious about not letting any email unanswered. I think it is necessary to take this seriously. When I send out submissions myself to other labels, not much actually since I release on Falt most of the Chemiefaserwerk stuff, but in the beginning when I started the project and I was writing people and they were not writing back, I would have even appreciated a message saying “No thanks, I am not releasing your shitty dictaphone collage recordings.”
I am pretty chaotic when it comes to planning releases, I am sending out emails saying “Next week the release will be ready”, with a very short notice. I have a very short turnaround time, I start working on the batch, I see what I have in my folder collage, I send the artwork out… So basically it goes like this: six months ago I wrote you I would love to release your music, then for 5 months you did not hear from me, and now within a week we are sending back and forth a few emails and when everyhing is done, a week later I release your tape. Most of the time it works like this. But the most extreme thing was for the tape with Anne-F Jacques, Zhu Wenbo and Pablo Picco. You know we made a series of four tapes with the four of us collaborating on each tape: two people made the sounds, a third person mixed it and the fourth released the tape (we all run a tape label). It is called Floating Tape and it was an idea by Zhu and it was really great. With that release I just wrote them the morning I was releasing the tape, I sent them a link without even checking back what they thought about the artwork, because I knew with them I was free to do whatever I wanted. Zhu runs a very big operation, he has his tapes professionally dubbed, even the covers come from the factory, it is called Zoomin’Night. Anne-F runs Press Precaires and she is printing the tapes with stamps. And Pablo Picco, this is really crazy, his label is called Bolinga Everest, and his tapes come in shells, not in cardboard, but every copy is unique, the cover is collaged by hand and every tape is different, and he is printing on demand: once someone orders a copy, he takes some recycled tape he has and he dubs it and he works at the cover. So it was an interesting experience to see how each of them is working.
This week I am talking to everybody who is on the next batch, I informed everyone, I showed them the covers, I sent pictures of the tapes, the stickers, the photos I will put on Bandcamp – they have seen everything before it gets released. And so next week I will just release the tapes, send out the artists’ copies, send out the tapes after orders are placed, and not long after that I will start working on the next batch, this how it goes for me. I do it because I enjoy it, it really makes me happy and also I get a lot of things back, like people telling me they like the label and they like the artwork – it is just incredible to have this positive feedback, especially when it comes from people who make art themselves. To have an artist telling me he likes my own art is just fantastic, because it is not a consumer who is just buying stuff, it is about people who are interested in the whole system, in the circle of this DIY tape world. I love running Falt.
How come you decided to let the Name-your-price download on Bandcamp? How often does it happen that someone offers 0€? And how often someone offers 0.50€ just to have the thumbnail of the album on his Bandcamp collection? I have tsss tapes’ digital albums for 4€ but sometimes I did put some album for Name-your-price for a few days, like when it was Free Percussion’s 1st anniversary or something like that. And there were a few guys who offered 0,50€ and that kind of annoyed me. Fifty cents!
I set everything on Bandcamp at 0€/Name your price, so if you enter 0€ you get a free download, and it happens from time to time that someone just pays 50 cents to have it on his Bandcamp collection, which is like not paying anything: take these 50 cents and after Bandcamp and PayPal fees there is nothing left for the label. When entering 50 cents one should know there is really no money the label is receiving. But you know, people can only add an album to their Bandcamp collection if they pay at least 50 cents, and I don’t know, I don’t use my Bandcamp collection as a listener, I am not into streaming, but if you are one who wants to listen to your collection of music on Bandcamp through the streaming or through the app on your telephone then you have to pay these 50 cents to have your album show up. If you pay 0€ you only get the files to download. Actually Joe from Dinzu explained this to me some time ago, he was asking me for some codes for Falt’s latest releases, and I was like “Why do you need codes, the stuff is already there for free download” and he said “No, man, you see, if you use a code you can add it to your Bandcamp collection”, and so I started generating codes for releases, I put some of them on Twitter, I send others to the artists. And I can see in the statystics that something like 10/15 codes for each release get downloaded, which is not much really.
But sometimes it happens that some people pay 5€ for a release, just like that. Other times they pay 1€, 2€… and I always like that. It does not happen that often really, but sometimes it helps paying off the Bandcamp fees. You know Bandcamp holds something for every tape you sell and they keep counting counting counting and then at one point they tell you “Hey you sold a digital album but you will not get anything of this money, because it goes to pay the fees you owe us”. So when someone pays 5€ for a digital release sometimes Bandcamp tells me “Hey, you get nothing out of this, BUT now you do not owe us any more money”, so people really are helping the label with the fees for digital purchases. So, I’m okay if people download everything for free, I tell all the artists upfront that this is how it is going to work. They can put their own releases for sale on their own Bandcamp, I have nothing against this and I do not have any rights on the music. I have my own Bandcamp page with Chemiefaserwerk and I have every release for sale for 5€ and I am happy to get these 5€ since I made the music and I need to buy batteries for my walkman.
But I do get your point when it is the anniversary of the label, Free Percussion is up for free download and people don’t use this chance to really get the album for free, they take this as some kind of weird tricky way to put it on their Bandcamp collection for as little money as possible, I can see how this makes you sort of angry.
With Falt I chose no to limit the listenings, you know on Bandcamp you can decide how many times a single user can listen to the music without buying it. You can limit it to 3 and after three listenings a user won’t be able to listen to it anymore unless he buys it. Crazy thing. I don’t do this kind of things, I don’t like it.
Actually Pablo Picco taught me a trick if you want to listen infinite times and someone puts a limit to the free listenings on Bandcamp: you just open a private browser, Bandcamp does not recognize you anymore, and you can go and listen forever. He is the Argentinian Master.
Hahahaha, yes he is! The other day I was reading how the guys who own Bandcamp are millionaires right now, they built this thing from scratch, there wasn’t something like this before and they invented a whole new concept. It’s a lot of work but it is also crazy to think “I sold a tape of my 30-copy edition and I am giving 60cents to a millionaire”. In the very early Bandcamp days you could set the download for free, and you can still see some Bandcamp pages who are allowed to do this. You click and you start downloading the files immediately and without paying. When I started Falt with the Chemiefaserwerk tape in 2016 I thought that if I would get some listens and sell some tapes I would be really lucky and happy, because nobody knew about this project. So I thought the barrier should be very low to listen to this music, at the time there was no such thing as the Bandcamp app, in 2016 people were still downloading albums on their computers. Or maybe smartphones? It seems so long ago, I did not have a smartphone back then, so Internet for me meant using my computer. So I thought that if the music was free more people would take the chance of downloading it when they came across it. I wanted to set the release for free download but there was no such option, only the Name your price. I wanted the “Free download” thing to appear on my page, so I wrote an email to the Bandcamp support asking how I could do it. They got back to me within an hour, and I was shocked, like “Is this a real person answering my message?” And this person told me that the Free download option was possible only for Bandcamp accounts which had been registered before a certain date. Falt had been registered when they had already removed this option for all the new accounts because they wanted to stop this free download thing. And that’s how I came to NYP download, at first because I wanted my own tape and the first few releases to be for free, and then it just became a habit, and I wanted people to listen to the music. I kind of have this upbringing in experimental music, mostly thanks to my friend Artem who pointed me towards a lot of things, he showed be this world of Blogspot blogs in the early 2000s where people were posting pictures of the tapes and a link to some site where you could download the files. These links were up for just a few weeks, or days, then these blogs were being shut and then some new one would open with something like a new post everyday about experimental music on tape. And everything was for free, so it was some sort of pirate thing. But I felt ok with this, since for me it was the only way to have access to this music: those noise tapes that were being released in the late 90s/early 00s were made of guitars with lots of pedals and everything connected to a dictaphone, so you had a lot of hissing, screaming, electronic stuff – this kind of music existed in editions of like 20 copies, so the only option to hear this music was by downloading it. Today you can find the music a label like Falt puts out on Youtube, it is the same thing. Not so long ago I found a Chemiefaserwerk tape on one of these sites, because there are still people active on this scene, they might be 40 or 50 right now and they are still doing it. And I think it is cool. To have free access to art is a good thing.
Falt has a Bandcamp and a Twitter page, but not a website outside social networks, and it does not have other social media presence. Is there a particular reason why you don’t use, for instance, Soundcloud? And on the other hand, what do you like in Twitter?
I did have a Soundcloud page for myself some time ago and I used that pretty much to upload sketches and stuff from Chemiefaserwerk. I discovered thanks to Soundcloud quite a few artists, like Giovanni Lami for instance, or Costis Drygianakis. I was using it a lot, almost everyday. Then some years later when I started Falt it annoyed me that on Soundcloud there was so much spam, I would receive a notification that someone had made a comment on one of my tracks and I was happy, and then I would go read it there would just be a link to some site, there were so many bots commenting and liking tracks, many of the likes I would receive would be from weird accounts with pornographic images as their profile pics and that really started to annoy me. I liked Bandcamp at that point, even though I had no listeners on my Chemiefaserwerk account, so I decided to delete my account and not open a page for Falt. These bots were just destroying something that had been good for a while, which I think is the same thing that’s happening to Twitter right now.
I don’t have any social media for personal use, but with the Falt account I follow a lot of people on Twitter and that allows me to find out about a lot of interesting stuff made by these people. Falt has a bunch of followers, so I post about the new releases there, but I don’t post about personal stuff. Sometimes I post some personal things like when I am listening to some music I made with some friends a long time ago and stuff like that. But I don’t have Instagram or Facebook. I had Instagram for a while but then it was not my thing, it gets out of hand very quickly. If I had an Instagram account I could spend days just uploading photos!
It is kind of rare to find reviews of Falt albums on line. Is this because you’re just not sending out promos to be reviewed? How do you deal with the promotional side of running a label?
From time to time I get a mail because I am following some labels on Bandcamp and I get their updates like “Dinzu Artefacts is featured on Bandcamp Daily” and I am always like “What? Again? Why isn’t Falt featured on Bandcamp Daily? I got a pretty solid body of work!” So I googled to find out if I needed to get in touch with Bandcamp Daily or they would just find me, and I found out that I actually had to send a mail announcing new releases sometime before the release date and so I was “Ok, I am not doing this” – I have a pretty chaotic release schedule… I never send out preview copies or promos, email, links… I do this sometimes for my own music, but not for Falt. If the artist wants to do it I am totally fine with it, it is nice, but usually the tapes sell out pretty quickly anyway and I am not much after this review thing.
When I started the Falt radio podcast last year each episode would be deleted after a week, so whoever wanted to listen to it had to download it, and one day a guy from The Wire wrote me and told me that Faltradio was featured in one of their articles about the best 100 radio stations of the moment. And I thought that’s the way it should be: they found out about my radio without me writing them or harassing them with emails, they liked it and wrote about it. I like to invite people to listen to Falt, or to my radio podcast, but I don’t want to harass anybody, and also I don’t have much time to write long emails since I have two small kids running around the house while I am trying to work at Falt. Yesterday I had my 5-year-old son helping me prepare some Falt packages like I know you sometimes do with your own daughter, so you know what it means. If I have some time for myself I am not sitting at my desk writing emails to some blogs for a review. I do send download codes to anyone who asks me, and I have this email newsletter, this tinyletter thing, where from time to time I post a link. I have quite a few subscribers to that newsletter, although followers on Bandcamp, followers on Twitter and subscribers on tinyletter might actually be the same persons, so it the number does not amount to much after all.
What about distro? Did you ever work with a physical shop or distro? I think Tobira from Japan carries your tapes, for instance.
Yes, Tobira in Japan is carrying Falt releases, Taka writes me every 2 or 3 batches to get a few copies. And there is also a distro in Northern France which buys some copies from time to time. And also a new distro, Julius who runs the tape label Grisaille in Germany wrote me a while back that he was going to open this small cassette shop, I think this is amazing, I mean a tape shop ran by only one person. He could not find a physical place for the shop and I guess he was doing it just the same, a sort of online distro.
In the beginning I was also selling on Discogs, but I don’t have an account any longer because something like 5 years ago a guy from Germany, some sort of power user, was changing things on the Falt tapes’ pages. Like he was adding catalog numbers and I was like “What? I don’t even have catalog numbers!” But he was just counting on the Bandcamp site I think and keeping his own figures. So I was deleting these catalog numbers from Discogs and he kept writing them back, until he wrote me something like “What are you doing, you have no idea!” and I was just sitting in front of my computer thinking “Why is someone telling me that I don’t know how Falt work?” So I changed it back again and told him there were no numbers and he should check on Bandcamp, and he blocked my account and changed other information on the Falt page. And when I tried to log in again I got this message saying that my account had been blocked due to malicious behaviour, and I was changing information like a troll. So that was the end of my Discogs account, once I saw something like this I was no longer interested in that site and I did not make a new account.
That’s incredible, the same thing happened to me on Discogs. I was also selling there, I did not sell many tapes compared to Bandcamp, but sometimes someone would buy a copy. I was trying to keep the label’s page very clean, uploading a nice picture, writing all the information on the music, I was trying to have all my releases look the same to have some sort of harmony. And then one day a weirdo starts changing the information on tsss tapes releases, changing something so irrelevant. You know my tapes have this catalog number like “tst 004” and I don’t know why, but on the tape sleeve I always wrote the catalog number with a space in between tst and the numbers, while on Discogs I was writing all together, like “tst004”. I hadn’t even noticed this until this sociopath started editing this space in between the catalog numbers of tsss tapes releases. And I don’t know why, but I did not like this and I changed it back, and he put it back up like 10 minutes later. And this thing goes on for like 6 times, I delete the spaces on all releases (it must have been 8/10 releases by then) and he adds them back. So I wrote him that I was the person running the label and he replied with a copy/paste of a lot of paragraphs of Discogs articles and rules, and he said that the label was not mine because once I release a tape it becomes something public, and things like these. And I was like, what’s going on, why is this happening? I mean, who cares about the catalog numbers of my tapes? 5 people in the whole world are buying those tapes, why don’t you leave me alone? And he sent me another message full of Discogs rules, and this went on a while more. Until I got tired and I just deleted my account and let it go. I wonder if we both stumbled on the same guy who goes around harassing small labels for catalog number issues. Or maybe there is a full squad of them harassers.
Yes!
Thinking about all these Falt years, is there a demo you turned down and then regretted it?
I thought about this question for a while, and I think I have no regrets for a demo I turned down. Mostly if I get some demos right now I always tell people that I am sorry but I can not take on any more stuff since I already have a lot of tapes waiting to be released. But then if it is something I really really like then I ask them if it is ok to wait a little before the release, something like 6 months, a year… I have this huge list of releases for this year because I kept telling people “Yes, I like your recording and I am going to release it” and then one day I looked up at the folder on my computer and I had like 40 releases just sitting there and it became a bit scary. So no, I don’t regret turning down any demo because I have no other option.
Is there tape you released and then regretted it?
No, I never felt like “Oh no, why did I release this?”. All the artists that are on Falt are very nice, awesome people, always a pleasure to talk to them, to take their work to make more out of Falt, because every editions adds up to the catalogue.
Although there was a very strange moment in the history of Falt. A funny story, there was this guy sending me a demo and I ended up releasing his tape. And then sometime later he writes me again and tells me “Hey, I have this album of mine which I never released properly, would you be interested in releasing it?”. And I listened and it was the album we had already released together on Falt! And when I wrote him he said “Oh sorry, I forgot”. That was a funny story.
But talking about regrets or second thoughts, sometimes I think Falt tapes sell out too quickly and they are gone in no time, and sometimes I feel sad about it. And I think “Why did I limit this edition so strictly? I could make second editions of more tapes”, and that’s the sort of regret I sometime feel.
An album released by another label that you wish you had released on Falt? For me, a tape I would have liked to release on tsss tapes is one of your releases, Winterist by Jeph Jerman. Infact on the cover I think I recognize Jeph’s handwriting. Did he send you a physical copy of the demo, instead of the digital files? Because that’s what happened with the release we did together. I wrote to propose him to do a tape for tsss tapes and after a while I received a CD on the mail, with two long tracks. And it felt so good, just thinking that this guy who’s been making music for 30 years bothered himself to actually mail a CD to an unknown guy running a mini label so far away from his own country. And I have another memory, very clear, of me listening to “Winterist” by Jeph Jerman and “Bias” by Giovanni Lami, and thinking: my dream is to run my own tape label some day and release music by these two guys.
Yes, it is Jeph’s handwriting on the cover! Earlier I said that all Falt covers are photographs I took, but that’s not completely true, some covers are not photographs of mine at all. Like Jeph Jerman’s tape, infact. It was one of the first Falt tapes, like in 2018. I had written to him to let him know I would have loved to release one of his recordings on Falt. Jeph had sent me a bunch of photographs he had taken at the places where he recorded the sounds for this album. And I just printed them and put them on the sheet of paper. He also added this note saying “Hey Christian, hope you like it. Jeph” written on a cassette sleeve, because he sent me an actual tape, the master tape of Winterist – I still have it. The tapes I released were all dubbed from this original master tape which Jeph had sent me.
Can you think about a musician you would like to release on Falt? You can go as big as you wish, and you don’t have to stick to a Faltish name, like you can say Elton John or Nena if that’s your dream.
Elton John? I would love to, I love his music. A few times I contacted artists I would have loved to have on Falt and they never got back to me, and they were kind of dream releases for me. On the other hand Sandra Boss, Giovanni Lami, Coppice… they were dream releases for me, so when I wrote them and they said yes it was incredible. The dream tape would maybe be a tape of field recordings from some unknown space.
Looking back to the days when you started Falt, is running a label how you thought it would be?
I had no idea at all when I started, but I am very happy with the turnaround, and this is Falt’s 8th year!