Black Bough Records
Black Bough was formed in the early winter light of 2007 out of an overwhelming need to kick back against the corporate interests that are destroying the seeds of originality and growth in local cultures. The label is dedicated to music that crosses, without prejudice, the boundaries between the forward thinking punk rock that grew out of the 1980's hardcore, experimental music, avant and art rock, electro-acoustic music, old world Gospel, and contemporary left-field music.
This is an independent label, and wherever possible, we endeavor to do everything ourselves. Our releases are not dictated by the cycles of grant agencies, or corporate favors. This is not a farm team or a stock house for major label interests, nor is it a holding company for copyright or publishing. The music resides with the artists who created it. The label works with artists to record and to release the records under conditions that are sustainable and responsible to their views and the local cultures that they grow out of.
A live presentation is integral to the artists that we work with. Live performance has always been the most visceral and sustaining experience of music, and it is the most honest way of presenting music to people. Our lives have been changed by the bands that we have seen, and we want to work with musicians that will pay their debts to their influences by dedicating themselves to leaving the culture of live music in a better state than they found it in.
We are besieged on all sides by the detritus and garbled noise of an industry and popular culture that continues to claim that it is engaged in a sincere promotion of creativity, while its means and methods of promoting music as bottom line products that are cast off as soon as their marketing budgets are exhausted betrays this sentiment and results in a grinding socialization of homogeneity. We are uninterested in engaging in this poverty stricken race of cultural production that only seeks that which can be trumpeted as perpetually new, at the expense of history, and the wonderful music and musicians that have laid the foundation and enabled us to move forward. There is a healthier and simpler way to treat people, and to present music publicly.
There is so much more that music can do to make our lives better, and we hope to cast a tiny voice into the maelstrom to offer a small fraction of what sets our hearts and ears on fire.