For the past eight years, Sockets Records provided D.C.’s music scene with a distinct curatorial voice. Founded with a series of CD-R releases highlighting the city’s noise scene, Sockets expanded into production of CDs and vinyl encompassing a wide range of interesting acts hailing primarily from the District of Columbia.

The label’s final showcase last Saturday—featuring longtime Sockets artists Buildings, Hume, Imperial China, and Deleted Scenes—marked the an end of the label and, seemingly, a chapter in D.C.’s musical history. While many of the people involved with Sockets over the years feel that cool, creative projects will continue without the label’s support, the appreciation for what Sean Peoples did over the past eight years runs deep.

As told in the words of the label head, his collaborators, and his artists, here is the history of Sockets Records.

DJs are those tastemakers that have a sense of what sounds good and the conviction and enthusiasm that convinces others to listen. Sean Peoples had a very good sense of what was interesting.

Sean Peoples, founder of Sockets Records: The decision to start the label was the fact that at that point in time—2004, 2005—a lot of bands were breaking up that I was really into and it didn’t seem like there was an actual scene in D.C. except for the fact that it was much more experimental than a lot of folks at that time really knew. I was a part of this radio station that was doing really weird, off-the-wall stuff that I was really excited about. And, so, where was the home for that? Where was the home for the experimental noise, drone stuff that was happening in D.C.?

Hugh McElroy, founder of Ruffian Records: I met Sean back in 2003 at a Black Eyes show at Warehouse Next Door and we ended up staying in touch. Shortly after, he started DJ-ing and I started listening to his show. It was amazing to hear two consecutive good hours of music radio, which I think I’d never heard before in my life. I was like, “Wow. This is what good radio could be like.”

Peoples: Layne Garrett was, for me, a revelation. It’s guitar but it’s also so much more. He’s making instruments that then he could manipulate himself but no one was really documenting it. I thought there was a home for that but I also realized that a CD-R label is probably better not to have a ton of copies of this stuff. So, for me, he was one of the quintessential artists at the inception of Sockets.

McElroy: He started helping me out with Ruffian. Then, after a while, he started talking about starting his own label to do CD-R stuff—to do stuff that would be harder to release in a more accepted format like commercially replicated CDs.

Rebecca Mills, played in Caution Curves: When it was still CD-Rs, he did a series that he let other people curate and I had a curated CD of just a lot of local musicians at the time.

McElroy: We also did a couple live sessions. We did the Japanese group Na live on the radio, which we recorded and put out and then random improvised sessions live on the radio show. Then around the same time, I was doing some recording with the Cornel West Theory. Then we did a session with them live on the radio, which we recorded.

Sam Hillmer, played in Zs: In 2005, I had a side project called MOTH. I was kind of an improvised music duo for saxophone and trombone. I can’t remember if he suggested it to us or if he agreed to me but we ended up doing two CD-Rs for us.

McElroy: He would also do audio zines where he’d collect a bunch of audio onto CD-R and it would be people like Caution Curves and Cutest Puppy in the World and mostly people from the weirder end of music in D.C. along with field recordings from a documentary project about the guys from the Halfway House on Columbia Road.

Hillmer: He did a Zs CD-R single, which is one of my favorite Zs releases ever actually. We were asked to make a piece for a compilation that was coming out on John Zorn’s label, and we made the track and we were very, very happy with it and it was 14 minutes long. They wanted a four-minute version so we cut the track down to four minutes, which I think is much less effective but Sean agreed to put out the 14-minute version of the single as a CD-R single.

Peoples: Between 2004 and 2008, I was putting out CD-Rs left and right. At some point it was 50 to 55 CD-Rs and anywhere between 100 and 400 copies each. I started realizing that I need to not necessarily fill all these orders that come in by myself. I was stuffing the art, burning the CDs, all by myself.

Chloe Maratta, former Sockets intern: When I hear him talk about [the days of the CD-R label], it’s like a really heavy emphasis on documentation. Even if it’s only him and his friends who care about it, he thinks that it’s important that it’s saved.

Peoples: We realized that the only way to get distro or the only way to move beyond just a kind of little sort of document of the scene and get other people to pay attention was to start making more copies and throwing much more energy behind the promotion of stuff. That began with Caution Curves.

Mills: There were a lot of musicians in and around D.C. at the time who were doing interesting things, and the majority were male, so the fact that we were a trio of women doing experimental music that didn’t really sound like anything else that was out there made us stand out, I think. Sean took notice.

Peoples: They just seemed like a good fit and a natural statement about what I thought the label should be about which is exercising what people thought might be noise music. It wasn’t made by all dudes. And it was kind of questioning the model of how to think of a record label.

Mills: I put out the first Caution Curves EP on my own label, and by the time we got around to recording our next record, Sean had several releases out under the Sockets CD-R name, and he was ready to take it further. We had recorded at Inner Ear with Hugh producing, got a grant from the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and I was intending to put it out myself, as I’d done with the first record, but Sean told us he wanted to start putting out actual CDs and that our next release would be a great fit. We agreed, and so our full-length record was released as Sockets 001.

Peoples: We didn’t care if it sounded like pop music. It was going to be something I believed in. That kind of was unconventional and was D.C. and was based in D.C.

Mills: Sean told me once that the tension within the band interested him and you could feel it in the music. Tristana [Fiscella] and I had a good creative partnership, but we also got on each other’s nerves a lot, which happens with any close working relationship, or so I like to think. Sean told me that he was just waiting for the show when I finally got up from behind my laptop and started throttling her right there on the stage. I admit I kind of wondered if that was the whole reason he wanted to put out the record.

It’s popular to talk about what D.C. isn’t. It isn’t Baltimore or New York. It isn’t its former self. But enough people were making new and interesting music and creating these “I was there!” moments for D.C.’s music-loving populace. Several of them were caught in Sockets’ orbit.

McElroy: What’s interesting is that he really started to move very quickly from doing the CD-Rs or kind of sound mixes to doing stuff that was a little more formally released. He’d been moving from releasing CD-Rs to releasing CDs and vinyl and I think that was around the time of the Fly Girlz record.

Hillmer: I live in New York City and I’ve always had a teaching practice to some degree. And in 2007, I was really going hard with that. I wanted to do [the Fly Girlz record] where I approached teaching the same way that I approached doing a band. It was not so much that notion as it was, okay, we’re all bringing assets to the table here and I represent a network for pushing culture into the world and you guys represent raw ability. So it would be cool if we could possibly put a record out and it’d be awesome. And Sean was the first guy that I went to about, “Hey, would you want to do a limited edition CD-R run for this record?” In my initial conception, the idea that we were putting a record out was going to be largely symbolic. Like, they do the work, we go into the studio, we make a record and Sean prints up 100 CD-Rs, we sell 50, they give them to their families and that’s a wrap, I see them next year. But the project really expanded and there was a lot of other interest in the project, which, quite frankly, was really alarming to me, actually.

Britton Powell, played in Hume: I wrote the Phat Daughter String Quartet, and I was working with Hugh McElroy then. Then slowly, over a period of all those sessions he started flirting with the idea of putting it out and like me not having to pay for those sessions. So, he introduced me to Sean. I was like, “You’re going to put out your own record? These people are paying me for this thing I created? How magical is that?”

McElroy: We’d both been working separately and together in different ways with the Cornel West Theory at that point and I know in 2007 that he started talking to them pretty earnestly about putting out what would be their first album and I think a lot of stuff really came together for him as far as Sockets’ visibility and working with a bunch of different people. The record release show for that record—Cornel West was there and onstage performing with them. It was a mind-blowing. I can’t believe that friends of mine just made this happen.

Christina Harper, played in Big Gold Belt: Sean was there for the first time that we played out which was interesting because it had just been something that we were playing around with. But it ended up being something that worked live as well as just recorded. So when Sean heard us play live, he was from Day One, really psyched about the whole project. I was just so honored and pleased that he really loved my sound and encouraged me to produce more which was—as I said, it was my first time doing that so the beats that I wrote and programmed into the drum machine and all that stuff. Especially as a female artist in sometimes what’s mostly boys doing that kind of stuff. He was really into that too, that I was a girl who was able to make some pretty cool beats and stuff. He was really into my group playing that role for him. He was looking to get female artists involved.

Peoples: The best moments for me are the yearly showcases where it literally seems like a rally. It’s such a positive vibe. People show up and it’s always so chill.

McElroy: I remember being at one of the ones where Buildings was playing and the Black Cat main stage was half-packed and the first three rows were all cheering Buildings playing this weird instrumental psych-rock and probably wearing dashikis and thinking it was really kind of remarkable that that spirit and energy of vocal enthusiasm could be directed at music that was that un-commercial and sort of out of the indie zeitgeist.

Powell: Yeah, that was kind of the theme of Hume—to present new music always and just to always have something new to show people. I remember being pretty nervous about [the first Sockets showcase] and just being really excited about it and I think it was definitely the first time we played for that many people.

Maratta: I think that the Buildings guitar orchestra was really cool and that was something where a lot of people were kind of talking about it. I think because it was a Lightning Bolt show, too, there were a lot of kids there, which I think was really cool. I feel like in D.C., I feel like I go there sometimes and I’m like, “Where are the kids? Where’s the crowd of ninth-graders that are really excited to be here?” At that show there was a lot of those kids and all my friends were there too so that show has good memories.

Powell: When Hume started to get a bit more serious, we started about doing Penumbra, and that was a really heavy release for both us and Sockets because it was the first time that we were putting in serious work. We recorded during the snowstorm. So we were actually locked in the studio because all the roads were closed. So we stayed there for three or four days and recorded that record.

Dan Scheuerman, plays in Deleted Scenes: Hume was a big part of why we were attracted to Sockets. I was in love with Britt as a musical mind and a thinker. He had big ideas and visions for what music could do conceptually and what music should be spiritually. I’m just remembering that spark that Britt had and that he was involved in Sockets and I wanted to be part of that.

Peoples: The release of the Deleted Scenes record? For me that was huge. That was a statement, not only of what D.C. was capable of but also what that band had worked so hard to do. The fact that Imperial China and Buildings records came out and were so much more fully realized than I ever could have imagined was huge for us. And a lot of that was fueled by the record that Hume did. Everybody took a look at that Hume record, Penumbra and were like, “We’ve got to up our game or we’re not worth our salt.” Those four albums from D.C. are some of the best albums in the last decade. Like, hands down.

Maratta: There was a show at Everlasting Life that was really cool. I think it was Hume, Dustin Wong, and Bird Names. Just a cool storefront. In my experience in D.C., it seems like those spaces kind of come and go really quickly. So, when I was living there and when I was in high school there, those shows felt even more precious to me.

Powell: When I moved to D.C., I was 19 maybe. I moved from Virginia and I moved into the Lighthouse. So, that was a really important time for me to just get thrown into the whole DIY world and how that works. I guess at that point, I started going up to New York and I started going to Baltimore and I went to spaces like [The Coward Shoe] or the Market Hotel or the Floristree where I was experiencing the same sort of ethos, the same sort of community vibe that I was experiencing at the Lighthouse, but I was experiencing on this much bigger level. And it was so exciting. I just always thought that there were all these people in their basements with five or six other people doing the same thing almost everywhere but there were these huge venues where everybody was going wild and there was this element of danger and it was just beautiful. So, I got really excited by that prospect and started looking for spaces in D.C. and that’s where the Paper Sun came from.

Peoples: No one respects buying records like they used to, and in some ways that’s the reality. So, stop crying over spilled milk and start doing something different and innovative around it. That’s what was really cool about working with bands like Bluebrain. The release was an A- and B-side where you’ve got two different tracks but if you buy two records and you play it on a DJ setup where you’ve got one turntable and another turntable and play one album on either side, that combines to be a C-side where those two tracks are actually working in tandem with each other to create a new track. That shit’s awesome. That’s what I want to do. I want to kind of figure out what the convention is and blow it up.

Harper: I also appreciated that he wasn’t just trying to get the trendy sound. He appreciated individualism and diversity and not just what’s trendy.

Peoples: I think for me the big watershed year was the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011, when I think I put out eight releases and there was so much excitement for me because I knew I was putting out such quality stuff because the bands around were doing some really cool shit. At the same time, just because bands were doing cool shit doesn’t mean that it was translating into that band actually selling records.

“Never run a record label, Valerie. It’s a terrible idea.” Peoples said this to me more than once over the past few years with a half-smile but usually in a state of exasperation or exhaustion. “I’m not saying that nobody should,” he later backtracked, but he eventually found that running a label is an energy drain. But personal stamina wasn’t the only resource that was sapped by the time Peoples knew that he could not finish this on his own.

Hillmer: Towards the end of us working on stuff together vis-à-vis Sockets, he was definitely getting a little burnt out on some of the realities of working in the recorded music industry, which can be very, very grim and sort of debased. It’s hard to do something like run a label without a big social kind of milieu totally on your side. And Sean did it for a long time. That’s awesome.

Peoples: With a label like Dischord or Drag City or Thrill Jockey, a couple of these labels that I look up to, they have these bands that basically funded the label. One band funded six or seven releases. I never had that. There was never any true profit involved here. And that’s where at the end of the day, you take a look at, if this is a business, and I’m running it, what’s the cold hard look at the numbers? Holy shit, these numbers aren’t going to be kosher at the end of the day. I need to take stock of why I’m doing this and whether it’s viable. And it’s not. For me. Without an infrastructure or collaborators who are also working with you on the label, it’s really hard sometimes to not succumb to the vicissitudes of the lack of support.

Hillmer: Major labels supposedly are going to phase out CDs entirely in the next year or two, which is just a real game changer. So that’s just an addendum to the discussion about Sockets phasing out vis-à-vis the scene in D.C. sort of phasing out and then you add to that the changing life of physical media and the world of cultural commodities. It’s sad to see these labels go, but it’s also a totally understandable function of what’s happening in general.

Powell: It’s challenging unless you have a team because not only is there the handling of all the manufacturing but band relationships, PR, booking, and then all the aesthetics that are entwined. That’s a full-time job. That’s more than a full time job. It’s a couple of full time jobs. So, the fact that Sean was able to ride with it for as long as he did is awesome.

Mills: I couldn’t have guessed how far Sockets would go, but Sean really persevered with his vision, which kinda floors me and also makes me really happy that there’s that sort of documentation of what’s been going on in this city and beyond over the course of the past eight years, because it’s really important to have that.

Scheuerman: If I talked to Sean tomorrow and said, “I’ve got 13 MP3s for my noise project.” He’d probably say, “Cool. I’ll put it out on Sockets. I’m not going to put money into it.” He’d put it on Sockets’ name and put it on the website. That’s free.

Peoples: The thing is, I probably would.

Scheuerman: I guess what I’m saying is I don’t believe Sockets is over. Maybe I’m in denial.

Peoples: I’m going to do something else eventually. I just need to figure out what that is, what it looks like and then releases or physical manifestations of music are probably going to be a part of it, but not the overarching thing. There’s got to be something a little more to all of this stuff. Running a record label isn’t just putting out records anymore. It’s got to be a dynamic model. It’s got to be online, it’s got to be physical. It’s got to be video. It’s got to be something else that can make money so that that physical product is covered. But I don’t know what that is yet, but I’m excited to get to the point where I do know.

Maratta: I feel like anything that Sean does is going to be really awesome. It’s not like all those bands are breaking up, too. Sockets won’t be putting out their records but they’ll still be out there.

McElroy: It’s always great to know that you have buddies that are putting out consistently awesome music. Even if Sean wasn’t someone I love deeply, it’s good to know that someone’s on it. But now some other people need to get on it.