The Return of Dekema

Ed Dekema started his own record label, Dekema Records, in 1991. He said he “ended up” in Seattle just when the music industry was taking off here. “It was easy to jump on the ship,” he said.

The label was noteworthy for releasing an EP by the group The Fire Ants, which included former Nirvana drummer Chad Channing. The legendary grunge music producer Jack Endino produced the EP, which was named “Stripped.”

Ed abandoned the label a few years later. “I put things on hold because I started having kids,” he said.

Recently, Ed decided to start the label up again. Right now he divides his time between his family, his day job at ShareBuilder, an online share-trading Web site with offices in Bellevue, and the label.

“In the 90s I had to work with the local scene,” Ed told me, contrasting the earlier work he did with the label with what he’s doing now. He said he now prefers long-distance relationships with his bands.

“It’s time consuming to have a personal relationship with the band,” he said. “Now there’s no pull to go out to the clubs.” New technology allows him to promote and distribute music from bands from all over the world without leaving his desk.

“Promonet” is a software package that independent record labels can use to promote their music on internet radio stations, online magazines and online music stores such as iTunes and Rhapsody. Ed said he’s been using Promonet, but since he’s had a lot of trouble getting anyone at the company to return his phone calls or emails he’s looking into some of their competitors, such as Tune Core.

Full disclosure: Dekema Records is releasing a single for my band, White Helicopter.

The Hideout

I spoke with Alan Chizmar, owner and operator of The Hideout Studio, earlier tonight.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have worked with Al before on recording projects. Most of the people I will write about in this blog were introduced to me in the course of my musical work. I hope this will serve to illustrate the importance of networking, and how it is done, but I will always let you, the reader, know about my connections to these people so you can make up your own mind about my objectivity.

The Hideout has been in operation for three years, since Al moved to Seattle from Arizona. His experience as a performer and sound engineer goes back more than 20 years.

“Something I learned about 10 or 15 years ago, sometimes I can apply that knowledge to a project we’ve got here,” he said.

“Money’s always a concern—it’s a struggling thing,” he said. Although the returns on recording projects are not usually great, Al said it’s “a passion for creating” that drives him. “I like sharing my knowledge,” he said.

Right now the studio is outfitted with an ADAT HD24 for the actual tracking, and the music is dumped into a computer running Adobe Audition for automated mixes.

“Everything is gated and compressed at the front end, which makes clean up easier,” Al added.

In addition, the studio just acquired a Tascam ATR-60 analog tape machine, which is used during the mastering phase to add what Al calls “presence and depth” to the computer mixes. Basically it gives the music a vintage ’70s or ’80s sound, he said.

The studio’s chief sound engineer, James Sullivan, has been “monumental,” Al said, both in terms of choosing equipment and knowing how to make the sounds work the way the musicians want them to.

Al will be judging a battle-of-the-bands contest this weekend as a way to help increase the exposure of the studio. “Basically what builds a great studio is reputation,” he said. Roy’s Rehearsal Studio is sponsoring the contest, and Roy is friends with James Byler, a local promoter who first introduced me to Al. I’ll probably write more about James later on.

Pleased to meet you.

Seattle is a city that gives itself a lot of credit for its music scene. It nurtured the careers of Quincy Jones and Ray Charles. Jimi Hendrix grew up here, and even though Kurt Cobain was from Aberdeen, people all over the world still associate Nirvana and the grunge music of the ’90s with Seattle. Kenny G attended the University of Washington (he majored in accounting), and in our decade Seattle has become an important center for a new genre, indie.

My name is Milo Anderson. I live in Seattle too, and in this blog I hope to give you, the reader, some news and information on some of the important people and places in Seattle’s music industry, told from the point of view of a cynical underdog.

I am a musician who moved here four years ago from Alaska to seek my fortune. I was a music theory and composition major in college before I switched to journalism, and in fact this blog will satisfy a major assignment for one of my reporting classes in this, my last quarter at the UW.

In addition to attending classes full-time, I also play in several bands here in Seattle–you can find their Myspace pages at www.myspace.com/americannight and www.myspace.com/whitehelicopter–and this has put me in touch with a multitude of characters. I have met many other musicians, sound engineers, nightclub owners and bouncers, intellectual property lawyers, agents and people from record companies.

This blog will provide an inside look at the people who make things happen in the music industry here–and the people who are all talk.  I hope this information will be useful to other musicians who, like me, are trying to find success here, but I also hope it will interest music fans who want to know more about how, and why, music is made.