Trevor Jackson has announced the launch of two new labels. The first of those is Pre-, which is being set up as a home for his wealth of unreleased archive recordings. The second is Post-, which will focus on entirely new material.
Since the mid-1990s, Jackson has been recording lots of his own music but has released little, which means that he has a vast archive of unreleased material going back over the last two decades. Amongst the projects that he started in that time was PINKLUNCH, and material from that makes up the first release on Pre-, which Jackson recently returned to, reworking it and adding to the tracks.
Above, you can hear one of the tracks, called ‘On the Floor’, from the new PINKLUNCH record which features Nitzer Ebb’s Douglas McCarthy. An EBM-laced techno cut, the track drives forward with the help of McCarthy’s distinctive, raspy vocals.
Jackson views releasing the music that is set to come out on Pre- as a way of putting his creative past behind him. "I strive to be forward thinking and progressive with my musical selections in my DJ sets and NTS radio show, and long to be at a stage in my career where any own musical output is coherent with my current musical tastes," says Jackson. "That’s very difficult to achieve with decades of unreleased music still a major part of my life.
"Part of me regrets not releasing these recordings much sooner, but for a long while I’d lost confidence and perspective in what I’d been doing. Finally releasing all this music is a huge weight of my shoulders; I’m enthralled at the thought of being able to make brand new music again without any expectations, or restrictions."
The coming months will see a series of limited edition album and EP releases all created or produced by Jackson on Pre-, covering multiple genres under different monikers. Pre- will exist for a limited amount of time and will be followed in 2018 by Post- on which Jackson will behind releasing new music.
You can keep up with Pre- here. You can also read an interview with Trevor Jackson about his PINKLUNCH project, and his plans for the two new labels, below.
You rediscovered the PINKLUNCH recordings in 2014 after over a decade away from them. Did you make many changes to it from that point in order to refresh the recordings for yourself?
Trevor Jackson: I actually dug out tapes and hard drives with over 200 demos and unfinished tracks in total, the PINKLUNCH project being part of them. Sonically they all sounded pretty good but many needed re-editing and some additional recording to add extra elements. I’d lost all the the original recording sessions so only had stereo masters, which was frustrating at first in terms of being unable to mix or remove individual elements but in the long run actually made the final creative process much simpler and quicker via the limitations I had.
When you’ve listened to a track thousands of times, it’s impossible to keep any perspective. The fact I’d slowly developed the music over a long period of time kind of helped. I’d work on things for a day, leave them for months and come back to them again without deadlines from anyone or any personal pressure. i continued working on them until they started to get worse – that’s when I knew when to stop.
Why wasn’t the record released when it was originally finished?
TJ: I’d spent 10 years running Output. During that time it was very difficult to make time to finish any of my own music and by the time I closed the label in 2006 I didn’t want anything to do with the music industry anymore anyway so put everything I’d recorded up to that point into storage and forgot about it. I got distracted by other things afterwards and spent my time concentrating on visual work rather than music, kept on making bits of music every now and again purely for personal enjoyment but had no plans for releasing any of it or playing it to anyone else. I started to listen my archive again around 2014, and after my Metal Dance compilations for Strut came out I began to feel it might be time to finally start releasing my own music again. Developing the idea of my Format project for The Vinyl Factory gave me that final push I needed to start going through all the tracks, editing, compiling and finishing all of them.
This is the first release on your new archive recordings label. Do you have a lot of unreleased material going back over the last couple of decades, and what can we expect from the label in the future?
TJ: Yes, tons of it. There’s been two Playgroup Previously Unreleased album collections on sub-label Yes Wave. The PINKLUNCH album is the first on my label Pre-Recordings and that’s going to be followed by four diverse releases over the next couple of months, covering all aspects of musical output, as well as a Trevor Jackson album at the start of 2018. There’ll hopefully be some Underdog stuff too in early 2018 as well as couple of other things I’m still finalising. As much as it’s really exciting to finally get this music out there, it’s also a huge relief to move on from the past. The label’s only going to last until the final archive releases are out around mid-2018, then I’m starting a new mail order only label called Post-Recordings which will be a home for my new music.
You invited Douglas McCarthy and C.A.R.’s Chloe to appear on the record when you returned to it. Why did you decide those tracks needed their additional vocals for the updated version?
I didn’t want to have an album of only instrumentals, and knew I needed a couple of vocals. Douglas and Chloe were the first people that came to mind. I wanted to work with people I respected and have some kind of relationship with – something natural and uncontrived, minimum amount of stress too. It was really fast and easy to work with them. The last thing I wanted was to spend months getting something done after spending over a decade getting the music out.
