Dreaming of a Future Past: 100% Silk in Profile

100% Silk - the dancefloor-focused sublabel of Amanda and Britt Brown's seminal US Noise/psyche-lashed, cracked-sky imprint Not Not Fun Records - have been releasing high grade avant-leaning jams since their inception in 2011. The label launched with Ital's semial "Ital's Theme," a pockmarked, battered, bleached chunk of see-sawingly warped grooves, and it has continued to pump out tracks that thrill and confound in equal measure ever since.

Artists like Octa Octa and Maria Minerva have helped craft the backwards-referencing-but-future-thinking aesthetic and the label has quietly become one of the most significant of the past decade - a decade where retrofuturism bled into retromania and back again. The Silk aesthetic, both visual and aural, is one that is an inherently playful take on a set of signifiers that negate the potential for being seen and heard as staid through restless and relentless innovation.

Anyone can make a jack track, everyone talks about Ron Hardy like they were sweating it out in the Muzic Box way back when, all of us like to act like we were the first to fall for Cherelle or Carmen, but it takes something extra to do something with that information. that knowledge, that content and context, and that is what sets 100% Silk apart.

When we spoke with Amanda Brown we decided to initially think of the label in terms of its visual context. "When I first started buying actual records - instead of just R&B CDs - I was most turned on by homemade-looking sleeves: K, Kill Rock Stars, 90's Matador," she tells us. "Those all had this iconic-but-intimate vibe, like craft projects by art punks." Drifting further into the deep realms of the dollar bins that sit sadly in thrift shops nationwide, she alighted on disco, soul, and dance records, the kind of music that came in sleeves adorned with "leggy ladies and lipsticked lips floating in skies full of rainbows." Her choices weren't dominated entirely by the packaging. "My deciding factors were track length (longer the better), instrumentation (synths were a plus; horns and strings a warning sign), and label (the lesser known, the more appealing). Pre-eBay, even basic Salvation Armies had plenty of gold, just sitting there for 50 cents."

That combination of being acutely aware of the un-ignorable importance of external, outward appearance and simultaneously conscious of the way taste is developed through a set of criteria that we individually apply to the unimaginably vast entirety of music seems central to understanding what 100% has done, is doing, and will do. For the moment, lets think about the record sleeve as a platform for exploration of a carefully crafted visual aesthetic that connotes and denotes certain things. In this instance, the designs crafted by major studio movie poster producer and frequent collaborator Bobby Houlian, along with the work commissioned to the likes of Spencer Longo, Rohan Newman and Jesselisa Moretti, are a gradient heavy deconstruction of notions of glamour.

Take something like Beat Detectives' Music 2, a gravity-free, bad acid trip of a house record, all clanging percussion and obtuse 303 blatts. Rather than housing it in some anonymous sleeve, the album is wrapped in what looks like an homage to king of 80s softcore/noncore design, Patrick Nagel: a pensively gazing, lipsticked woman diverts herself from giving us her full attention. The colours are soft, employing a sensually charged palette. That's the glamour. Then comes the twist. The album's format - cassette - immediately strips it away by baldly presenting the track listing, the label details. the things that ground it firmly to what it is: an object to be bought, a product of market forces. There goes the glamour.

That's not to say that Brown and co don't aspire to a kind of aesthetically derived pure form of pleasure, and aesthetics clearly matter deeply to her and the operation as a whole. When asked about the possibility of format fetishism when it comes to slavering (my word) over 12" sleeves she is forthright about the essential nature of aesthetics. "Whether or not you live a lifestyle where you own physical objects, or bother paying for music, aesthetics exist. The day people are too passé to give a shit what something looks like is too bleak to even think about. Even if you don't own any records you still prefer some jpegs to others, so your eyes are registering colors and shapes - you're not dead yet."

When it comes to future Silk releases she dreams of a world where teaming up with the hypercolourful, now defunct Italian design and architecture collective Memphis Group, best known for their pomo Bauhaus meets Fisher Price furniture is possible. Other fantasy hook ups include "re-appropriating some haunting Nan Goldin photo, with a subtle font on top. Or a disco-hole David Hockney swimming pool piece."

Outside of the releases she's "soaked in and danced to and paid for out of my own stupid bank account," Brown is eager to pick out a few recent records she views as visual wonders. "I love the recent Andras Fox covers: "Embassy Cafe," "Cafe Romantica," plus his Overworld album. They look so classic, and out-of-time, like they've existed forever but no one discovered them till now." Expanding beyond individual artists, like all of us Brown has labels she keeps a literal and figurative eye on. "The one I listen to most lately is ECM probably. Its elegance is a healing force. That said there's a difference between intention and sound. There's plenty of labels who I follow and love their mission -1080p, Ecstasy, Rush Hour, Mood Hut - even if I don't personally connect with the music itself on every single release. It's about the big picture, not the small one."

If there's a kind of aesthetic singularity at play within the 100% Silk back catalogue, there's a sonic one too. What ties together the abstract-disco, the house-not-house, the moonlit, magic-carpet rides round dancefloors that never were and never will be, we asked. "A synthesis of jubilation and melancholy, in motion. It's more a feeling than a sound. An atmosphere, and an intimacy." That intimacy comes from the way Brown looks for and finds artists to work with. "Sometimes they pick me. Sometimes it's friends, or friends of friends. Or acquaintances of acquaintances. A decent amount started out as strangers, or fans, who reached out to me and our mutual love of their music brought us together. That's a beautiful thing, even though most labels mock if not scorn that practice."

Brown notes that running Not Not Fun didn't prepare her for just how territorial the dance music world could be. "It's kind of like how I imagine old-school hip-hop crews used to be, with the labels or promoters listed in parentheses after their name on a flyer being of massive significance. So much so that most of the time if someone's put out a 12" on a label vaguely parallel to SILK that means they're off-limits to work with, either due to some kind of tribalism or scene politics, or who knows. General community behavior is often treated as lame, or for posers, which reminds me of tired high school snobbery. I've very rarely been made to feel that way in weirder experimental circles. It's fine though, I'm used to it now, I just didn't know that's how it was before I started putting out house records."

We ended by asking Amanda what else running 100% Silk had taught her about the house that jack built. She didn't hold back. "Plenty. Referring to musicians' pasts pejoratively, like people should have been born making austere techno and never been in other random bands in their lifetime. The idea that if you've heard one or two SILK releases and didn't dig them then you can write off the entire label as shitty for eternity. The obsession with ghettoizing anything that draws from a classic palette as "retro" unless it's made by some untouchable scene hero. Lazily using the word "hipster" like it's some withering insult. Awesome music is always hip; it's a meaningless term thrown around by people who don't have anything to say."

"To me true dance music is kind of like folk art - the author's less important than the subject. Of course craft went into it and the responsible parties should be celebrated, but the point is the rhythm and invention and color of the song itself in the moment it hits the ears, not its place in artistic history. It's why a worthless garage sale no-name house 12" with a budget mastering job on a defunct label can still have a genius remix on the B side that transcends everything it came from. It's a music that should be made by anyone, discovered by anyone, and enjoyed by anyone, for any reason. The rest is noise and vanity."

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