"What we have here is a result of an idea ignited almost 15 years ago with its roots deep in the era of subculture 1990s, when its teenage protagonists started listening to records. But the comradeship between the three of us started in the early 2000 when I was pursuing my first Utopian idea of an art commune in the form of a counter-festival in the Southeastern Slovenian countryside on the border with Croatia. An idea from which, years later, another Utopian project was born - an international gathering called Improcon, a congress for improvised music.
Going back to those formative years, when by the fireplace as the center of a counter-festival I was talking to Vid Drašler about another project I was invited to curate - the festival of improvised music called Mariboring in the city of Maribor, that later on became a regular meeting point and a concert cycle for improvised music among other borderless genres of experimenting with sound and the social community of noise. Around 2008 things start to progress since local and national environment had established places and communities for what later becomes the so-called Slovenian free improvised scene with its center in Ljubljana and then quickly spreading to other places around the country. With its roots in the late 80s, a strong alternative culture communities started to establish various independent venues catering to music and other art forms in the begging of the 1990s.
One of those places is Klub Metulj in Bistrica ob Sotli, a small village by the border river Sotla in the southeast of the country, where Vid and Jošt were growing up and started their musical journey. In 2011 we launched a Sunday concert series there, called Sunday Noise, where we started free improvised music gatherings in an »get together« form called The Rezidentess. And in one of those gatherings a band from the north – Miman from Norway - joined a three-day residency in Bistrica ob Sotli. During the sessions we realised that we have common friends from the Mariboring era and also common views on music and its distribution in the era of late capitalism and music industry taking its turns. There started the talks about future collaborations which has now become a partnership in distributing each other’s music through different DIY underground channels such as Norway`s »Subversive Vibration distribution« and now the “Non-Aligned”.
And since we hadn’t had a label yet, it was time to finally establish one and what better way to start it than with a record featuring a Miman member – Andreas Røysum with Drašler brothers on it. And here it is. And before you spin it, let me just make a statement: »The North – the position, Southeast - the geographical position. And the West - a political position of shameful and hostile acts, such as the barb wire forced on us on the border, just a mile from the center of things – where we want to be open for the public - creating a space for humanity and music. This label and this record is a product of necessity, as is everything else we will try to do in the future and have done so far.« - Mitja Hlupič
