Three Stars: Sockets Records
Sockets Records first came across our radar due to, surprise surprise, an old Three Stars interview. This one. Then suddenly, they were everywhere. There were Sockets artists like Layne Garrett performing at the Sonic Circuits Festival. Then bands like Buildings and Imperial China put out releases under the Sockets imprint. Then they put on a showcase, selling out the Black Cat Mainstage and demonstrating that they also put out funky hip-hop acts, like the Cornel West Theory. A recent spring mix posted to the Sockets blog shows the depth and breadth of their roster in greater detail.
The man behind this impressive output is Sean Peoples. Peoples started Sockets Records five years ago as a way to document his friends' live performances on his radio show, but Sockets has since expanded to include the aforementioned acts and albums, sprouting from a youth after-school program in New York. Keeping up with all of the Sockets releases has been relatively easy, as Peoples regularly updates the Sockets blog with artist information. We chatted with Peoples about Sockets' evolution, growth and his own appreciation for all things weird.
Where are you from originally?
I’m from New Jersey originally. A very rural part of New Jersey. One light, lots of cows. Lots of corn, too. It’s the part of New Jersey people don’t really think of when they think of New Jersey: the Garden State part. It’s called Jacobstown, and it’s near an Air Force base. And I went to school at American and I’ve stuck around ever since, ’98 so, 12 years. It’s been a long time. And D.C. feels like home. It’s not necessarily my birth place, but being here this long and being really really connected to people who have lived here for a long time and people who grew up here makes you feel a little bit more connected than if I was just somebody who had come here for two or three years, did my Hill stint and then left. I like it here.
Tell me about the origin of Sockets.
I started doing a radio show in 2003 and started doing these live sessions. Bringing in bands that were friends. Cornel West Theory was one of the first. We recorded them and I realized after doing a couple of these that it would really behoove me to document them somehow. So out of that was born Sockets. Just trying to document the stuff that was coming through the radio station, the show that I did on Sunday nights. And it was really fun, we had these jam sessions too where we’d just come in and people would grab whatever instrument and then play. So we recorded those too and it was fun. A lot of the Sockets releases I met through the station. So it was an instant community which was great. I’m still putting out releases for some of them, too.
Was the Sockets blog in existence from the beginning?
The Sockets blog started in, maybe early 2009. Right around when the Fly Girlz came out and and I was like, "Alright, I need to get in gear here." I promised myself to have six posts a week and I’ve kept up with it. It’s been great.
Is the music that you give away on the blog from Sockets artists or from your own personal collection?
As much free music as possible. I feel like the only way to keep people coming back sometimes is to give away a lot of stuff. And the blog has pretty good numbers. Anywhere between 100 and 200 hits a day. On the weekends it dips down, so it’s more like 50, Saturday and Sunday. But my thinking was, OK, start doing a mix series: stuff that is music oriented, stuff that I like, stuff that I know influences my decisions on music. But also, there's definitely free music in terms of Sockets mixes. I have this thing called "Forgotten Vinyl," where record vinyl but may have been forgotten and I try to offer it as much as possible in a free way. A lot of Sockets artists I try to keep one or two tracks per release to give away to give a sense of the bands.
You’ve also put on a couple of Sockets sponsored shows. One at Red Lounge and the big one at the Black Cat. Is this something we should expect to see more often?
We’re trying to do more it’s just that logistically, it takes time and the Sockets showcase took a lot out of me. It was all worth it and I had a blast.
The Red Lounge show was a pretty good success. A small success, but I think from that I learned a lot. How can I do this better, and do this on a larger scale? I really want to do something in the summer, but I want to do it outside. So, I’m looking for a spot right now to do something outside. Try to make it an all-day thing and try to really make it a destination, so really pick some good bands and get something that everyone can sort of get behind.
It's really tough to make any money off of releasing music. Putting out records is not going to make back money necessarily, so you have to have something to augment all that. Events is something you can do. And a lot of people have realized that, especially in the blog world. BYT and ReadySetDC and some of these places are like, “Oh, we’re a website. How do we continue doing what we’re doing and make money off of it?” And a lot of people figured, "Well, events." Because people will come out and if you have the right mix of stuff, people will pay for it.
Is that the biggest challenge of running this label? The financial issues?
The money thing is new, because I wasn't going at a rate where I would need to have more money. And it's not like I crave it. You realize that if you put out 1,000 copies of a CD, it's going to be a long time until you get that money back. So doing something to be able to put out the next CD and pay the bands and do this stuff...you've got to get creative with it.
The biggest challenge right now is just that I'm juggling a lot and that's a personal problem. I love doing this label, but I know that I really love doing my job, too. I love DJing, so how do you sort of fit this stuff in and give everything the proper attention it deserves. So, finding balance is really tough and never happens. It only happens in hindsight. "Oh yeah, it was really great two months ago when I only had three things going on!" But I like that feeling. I need to keep going, I'm a little overwhelmed, but manageable.
The challenge two or three years ago was,"What the fuck am I doing?" This was a small-scale CDR documenting label. It's a total different entity. It didn't have a blog. It didn't have anything to sort of build a community around. It was very lost in its ways. I think everybody is realizing that running a record label now is very different from even two or three years ago. Bands can put out their music on their own, which is awesome. I think that's amazing, and I do it. So, I'm fully supportive of that kind of thing. But, how does that change the dynamic? I mean, you get music faster. Do I want to put more plastic in the world? That's the question that sometimes I ask myself. No. So the challenge three years ago was really, how do you combat the growing number of people who get their music for free? How do you do it in D.C. where, honestly, three years ago, it was a little different. There weren't as many bands. There wasn't as much of a creative economy that there seems to be now.
So, I took a year off and really thought about it, then sort of thought, "I want to do this right. I want to, every day, have a blog post. Sort of pull people in and whether it's music related or my life related, but then I feel like I can at least get people's eyes on the website where music is coming. And through that I got distribution. Instantly. I started doing these youth oriented hip-hop records and that did really well. And then I did the Cornel West Theory record and that did really well. The Imperial China record. That's gotten a lot of stuff. Buildings. People love Buildings. I think they were just waiting to get a bigger release behind that, and there's a lot of bands I'm working with right now and I'm excited.
Tell me more about the youth-oriented hip-hop records program that you're doing.
So this is a really good friend named Sam Hilmer. He's part of Zs. He also does a lot of other music. He's a saxophone player and he started this after-school program for kids that the curriculum was to try to bridge the gentrification divide and get artists from the neighborhood that these kids live in to provide music, and these kids to rhyme over this music, and in that way just really merge two worlds that might not necessarily have been merged before. I thought it was an amazing idea and he included me from the beginning. And it's been great. Fly Girlz is the first release, and 9/11 Thesaurus is the second, and that's coming out next month.
The Fly Girlz stuff has taken off. There are five girls who are rapping over the weirdest beats ever. It's a merge of styles that you would not necessarily hear. There was a fashion week designer that took three Fly Girlz songs and used it in a runway show. It's cool, but at the same time, it's weird and there's a number of ways you can look at it. For me, I'm sort of torn. It's like, wow there's all of these really skinny women walking down the runway with this couture to girls who are talking about their lives in Brownsville, Brooklyn. I don't know that world and I don't claim to know it, but I don't know the fashion world either. I don't really want to know it. But those two worlds coming together is a clash, and you have to sit and think about it. No matter what you think in the end, it begs you to analyze it in some way. And it's still selling. It came out in the beginning of 2009.
It seems like you like the weird.
I have to have a little bit of weird. Why would you just want to put out some stuff that you feel is so derivative? Imperial China -- let's take them. Some of that stuff sounds Dischord-y. There's an aggression to it that's a little unrestrained, in a good way. And I'd always heard of this band and I was like, "Everyone always says Dischord when they say this band." But when I heard the record, Phosphenes, I was like, man, they're incorporating other stuff! They're getting ambient. There's electronics in it. There's stuff that's pushing that sound into a new realm. Which for me was a little weirder and it wasn't just Dischord. Because Dischord isn't weird anymore. That stuff is the canon. So, that's what really drew me to that record.
Most of the bands on Sockets are based out of D.C.. Do you think that music in this area is headed toward that experimental pop framework?
I think so. I think what's great about D.C. right now is there's a lot more sites getting calendars of things to do every single night. Which there wasn't really four or five years ago. So, there's a lot more opportunities to go out, but there's not as many people still. It's just not that big of a city sometimes. There are a lot of people who live in Virginia and Maryland who probably like this stuff, but just won't come in necessarily for a show. But, I think given the sort of excitement around D.C. being more of an arts/music/culture center is manifesting in stuff coming out. Bands are getting better. There's a lot more of a community around some of these bands, too. I just don't think it's there yet. We've got a couple years to go.
But D.C.'s funny, man. We have these peaks and valleys of it being the musical town and then dying down for a little while and then being the music town again and then dying down. So hopefully we're headed for another peak, I think. It was kind of scary for the last couple of years.
What's upcoming for Sockets?
I just did a big news update with all the new releases. I'm really looking forward to the Hume recordings. I heard a couple, and they are amazing. So that EP's going to be ready to come out probably in the middle of the summer. They're going to go on an August tour, so we're going to try to have it out by then.
I'm working with Laughing Man right now. They're in the studio. They don't have anything recorded. Ever. I mean, they have things recorded but they don't have a physical form to be like, "Here." So we're working with them to make the music that they make as good as it can be on an EP. Really excited for that.
The thing I'm most excited about because it's the thing that's coming out next month is the Extra Life Remix EP. It's going to be a DigiPack I think, which I'm really excited about. I don't like plastic. And it's going to be a limited release. Only 500 copies. Buildings is going to be recording. Imperial China will probably have another record out by next winter. Things are moving. I just need to keep up with it.