Australia has a rich diversity of independent record labels, as the nominations for the 2014 AIR Awards reveals. From I Oh You, to Elefant Traks, and everything in between, indie labels produce some of the best music locally and internationally.
Now Wally De Backer AKA Gotye, who has been getting his hands dirty in the political game with his bandmates in The Basics, is getting into the record label game, launching Spirit Level with longtime collaborator Tim Shiel.
De Backer and Shiel – Double J radio host and electronic music producer – have been busy setting up the label over the past few weeks, signing a distro deal with Inertia, and they’ve announced that the first release will be from American experimental pop group Zammuto’s new album Anchor.
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“The Zammuto record is what inspired [the label] straight up…”, Shiel told theMusic. “When we found out that he had this new record coming up and found out that it wasn’t going to necessarily get an Australian release we felt it deserved Wally called me up and said, ‘We’ve talked about something like this before, let’s do it’.”
Zammuto came to the attention of De Backer and Shiel, who has been playing in Gotye’s live band during his international success, when he opened up for them as a support act on a few international dates.
“We got to know him and about his self-sustaining DIY approach,” Shiel explains. Once the pair decided they wanted to release the record in Australia, “it all just happened really quickly, because Wally and I have just poured passion into it for a couple of weeks.”
The Zammuto album is out now digitally and there should be a physical release on Friday 26th September 2014.
So what’s next on the horizon for the new venture? Shiel revealed that although the label had been set up to release the Zammuto album and there were no plans beyond that release, it was “unlikely” that the pair wouldn’t seek other records to release locally.
Meanwhile, Gotye’s bandmates in The Basics, Kris Schroeder and Tim Heath, are forming the Basics Rock’n’Roll Party (BRRP) alongside the Grammy Award winning artist, for Schroeder to run in the Upper House on November 29 as a push back to what the band are calling “life-long politicians”.
“Politics in this country is treated like it belongs to the elite,” Schroeder said at the announcement of the party. “We have these career politicians who often come from well-to-do families … and they are groomed in to becoming these life-long politicians that have no other life experience outside of either being in the young Liberals or young Labor, and becoming a Member of Parliament.”
Instead, the trio aim to prove anyone can take their place in the political arena, and even inject a little bit of rock ‘n’ roll into it.
“Decisions don’t have to be made by these elite, you can just be musicians,” he said. “We’ve all got higher education degrees so we’re not just musicians, but we haven’t come up through any political ideology we just care about certain things like indigenous affairs and education.”
