Small record labels – don’t you just love them. Nostalgics might rant about punk being their heyday but just take a flick through Bandcamp and you will see the real independent spirit is alive and still plugging away stoically. With numbers getting prolific, the indie label ecosystem seems to be swelling from bedsits and backrooms everywhere and Brighton is well represented within in this alternative bio-sphere. There’s Fatcat, Tru Thoughts, Hivemind, Mr Bongo, Jalapeno, Headcount, Phantom Limb plus more and since July 2021, bringing its own particular strain of cultural nourishment, Daniel Hignell-Tully’s ‘Difficult Art And Music’ or DAAM for neatness.
As you’ve probably clocked from the name, DAAM deliver something slightly less straightforward, focusing on the experimental and specialising in what they call “short-run, research-orientated, art-objects”. That means the releases come as music tapes, magazines, photo-books, composition scores, you name it, all in various intriguing combinations. With releases taking in everything from Brexit-themed audio collages, an exploration of drone in all its guises and a lost eighties synth horror TV soundtrack from the Faroe Islands, it was necessary for SOURCE to find out more. So via the wonder of Zoom we quizzed Daniel about all things DAAM.
So let’s start at the label’s beginnings…
I moved to the area about 11 years or so ago to do an MA at Sussex from a background of playing in punk bands. I used to do some very spur-of-the-moment get up on stage and make some sound kind of things. And as I spent longer in academia, finding out about a lot of vibrant anarchist stuff going on in the area of sound art and weird experimental music, what struck me was people spending huge amounts of time creating art works and then it not going anywhere, it would disappear forever. That got me thinking that it would be interesting to have an outlet for, not necessarily academic, but research-based music… where people had taken a bit more time and it was a bit more knotty and convoluted.
How did you get from those early thoughts to having the label up and running?
I suppose it was just chance really because the first release on the label (‘Brexshitting’) was a sound piece exploring the language used by the media during the Brexit debate and the outcome of that had been a lathe-cut record. So there was this object sitting there and I thought well this is a good starting point, we’ve got this physical object that exists not going anywhere and so maybe I can do something with that, kind of create a forum, an environment where people could access this thing.
Going back to the research ethos you mentioned, why is that important to you?
I think there’s a lot of music or art that is what it is. But it doesn’t have that rich backstory and that made me think that actually having a genuine concept, a genuine thing that comes with it and is rich and is kind of layered or knotty, stuff that you need to untangle, becomes quite interesting… and given there is not a huge forum for that it felt like a niche to follow through…
Is that why it’s important that a release is not just a bunch of songs, it’s a multimedia object?
Yeah, absolutely. I kind of feel like art and music have a weird and sometimes demeaning relationship where you’ve got the music and then the art is only there to frame the music. So I became interested in receiving this whole event, this whole package… nothing has priority, nothing has dominance. We’re creating something that really allows that. We’re saying we’re gonna have a tape, a print, a sculpture, whatever… for that particular work. It just comes as part of that package.
So how do you discover these pieces? Is it through connections or are they sent to you?
On the back of the ‘Brexshitting’ release there was a lecturer at Falmouth University (Johny Lamb aka J.Lynch) who then got in touch with me and said: “I’ve got a piece (‘The Tender Appropriation’) that’s not hugely dissimilar which has been sitting on my shelf and I’ve had nowhere for it to go – would you release it?” So that became the next issue. Since then it’s sort of been off and on between me knowing and wanting to release something or someone approaching me.
And the Faroe Island horror story TV soundtrack ‘Raedsel Fra Manekatten’ how did that happen?
Yeah, it was really fortutitous, it kind of happened quite a while ago long before I had the idea of the label. I was sat next to some researchers at a conference and as I was a musician they just mentioned coming across these reels in a box in a museum marked ‘Terror Of The Mooncat’ which I kind of used for a while as a story to bring out at parties or whatever… but once I started doing the label I suddenly thought oh yeah let’s get back in touch with them to see what’s happening. They had been quietly working on the pieces and so I got someone to master it all together to make something a bit more releasable and yeah, it’s kind of a lovely thing.
What about ‘Minature’ by Nobuka, the latest release, what’s the backstory there?
So he’s a Dutch composer who was doing these kind of whimsical walks around Berlin and he became very interested in this idea of wandering . He started writing what you would call miniatures – very short things – he’d kind of walk through Berlin in the day and then write these very short sound pieces that reflected that wandering. Then he began looking at other artists who had walked around the city and it turned out Nick Cave had done a very similar thing, wandering through Berlin and then writing all these lyrics. So to accompany the piece he took all these Nick Cave lyrics and ran them through an AI text generator creating all these phantom kind of words to go along with his own music.
So what’s coming up in the next series of releases?
There’s three things in the pipeline. In July it will be a year since the label started so I’m aiming for a compilation of some of the previous tracks, plus hopefully some new pieces by some of the artists we’ve worked with before. In addition to that we’ve got a release by a Brazilian sound artist who has done an exploration of composer La Monte Young who did ‘The Well-Tuned Piano’ and he’s done a granular synthesis variation on it called ‘The Well Frozen Piano’. Then the other thing that we’ve got is a Brighton band, a group called ‘Be Kind Cadaver’ who are two dads who are exploring male postpartum through post punk which I thought was an interesting idea…
DAAM has always released cassette tapes – why the attraction?
Well, I would love to be pressing vinyl – speak to most small labels and they’ll tell you if they could do vinyl they would. Right now that’s not an option for many people, as the whole vinyl production thing has fallen apart. In addition to that I have always hated CDs ever since I was a child. I never quite understood the attraction, I always found them really ugly objects. So when DAAM became a thing I thought okay, tapes are at least interesting objects. There are some foibles to the format… people complain they wear out and stuff, well they do but that’s quite nice, quite real, it makes them a tangible thing that I am attracted to.
What does Brighton offer as a platform for performance for this area of music?
I think on the one hand we are very lucky in Brighton as it has a lot of very small venues and promoters doing interesting stuff. The issue for me is that a lot of the contemporary composition stuff that I’m interested in has a bit of a set-up, it takes a bit of organising, it takes a while to make a piece performable. It’s not necessarily noise music or experimenting on a modular synth, some of these things are often a little more convoluted. It takes time, it takes money, you can’t necessarily turn up half an hour before you play and throw it on stage and hope for the best. You need a bit a longer to put it on and places that allow for that don’t exist to any great degree, for very practical reasons. I am trying to change that, my plan is to put on a night in August with the aim of creating a space where people can spend a bit more time preparing their performance or whatever with something more than just a soundcheck.
DAAM has got its year anniversary coming up – what’s the year two plan for the label?
I suppose two things. One, as I said, is trying to put some nights on around Brighton to try and build a bit of a local community around these ideas. The second is boringly pragmatic. You know, you start a label and every release is a battle to break even so you can afford to do the next one… and you hope that several releases down the line you’ve built up enough of a name for yourself that you can almost automatically sell just enough copies to not lose money and feel a bit more secure in taking risks or doing something a bit more lavish. So it would be nice to get to that point quite soon so I can relax a bit.
And how’s that going at the moment – are you edging towards that equilibrium?
It’s up and down – it’s very interesting because the first release came out just after Brexit, but it was just before all this mad shipping and customs stuff so the first release sold really well quite quickly and we were shipping all across Europe and from the second release onwards no-one in Europe can buy it easily… it’s very very difficult to sell to anyone else outside the UK which makes your job a hundred times harder.
It felt like a sombre note for our chat to end on, but our time was up. Listening back though, Daniel’s closing honest reflections have resonance. It’s a poignant reminder that without ongoing support the creative treasures that DAAM and other niche labels like it are trying to preserve may never be seen or heard… and that is very much our loss.
You can buy all the DAAM releases from their fabulous Bandcamp page at: difficultartandmusic.bandcamp.com