Industrial Coast
Chatting with Steve Kirby, the face behind experimental cassette label Industrial Coast.What inspired the name Industrial Coast
An easy one! I was born in Stockton and spent much of my childhood in East Durham. You can keep your palm trees & beach huts, a proper beach to me has a blast furnace or remnants of a coal mine as a back drop. South Gare, Blackhall Rocks, Cattersty Sands, Seaton Carew. These are my favourite places anywhere in the world. I’m also very proud of the amazing industrial heritage of the North East, which I think should be something to be heralded and utilised, rather than wiped off the map. I know I would have paid for guided tours around the old Steel Works at the Gare!
Align this to the fact that whilst being multi-genre with our releases, we do include Industrial music in there, then there you have it – Industrial Coast.
A Monday Night in Middlesbrough
So, the programme is quite ambitious! For one, nearly all are on the dead day of Monday. The first show of last year was an amazing performance by Jeff Witscher & Jack Callahan (September ’22). It happened to be on a Monday. Hence, A Monday Night in Middlesbrough was born - & I’ve stubbornly stuck to that.
In 2022, I was trying to tempt artists whom I had label links with & who were playing in the UK (generally 1 date at Café Oto in London) to come north if they had a spare day in their calendar. The funding has allowed me to schedule a full programme of events off my own bat.
The general idea is to bring internationally renowned sound exploration/experimental artists to Middlesbrough who would rarely play beyond London and maybe 1 or 2 other big city shows, aiming to make Boro a centre of excellence if you were for this musical genre. We will include a number of workshops, hold artist talks & there is a sound walk planned too. For supporting acts, we will be drawing heavily on Teesside/North Eastern artists, across multiple genres – not just music, but spoken word & contemporary dance too.
Headliners are pretty much locked in and include John Wiese, one of the most consistently compelling composers/improvisers of the US noise scene, Leif Elggren, Stockholm based and one of the most constantly surprising conceptual artists to work in the combined worlds of audio and visual, and Nick Klein, who runs the Psychic Liberation imprint out of Berlin, and has releases on L.I.E.S, Alter, BANK Records NYC, Viewlexx, Ascetic House and Unknown Precept.
The shows will be across town, in various great spaces & we will be kindly hosted by The Auxiliary (of course), Disgraceland, Pineapple Black Arts & The International Community Centre.
I’m very excited about the whole thing!
Funding has now been granted
A very pleasant surprise! I had ran the label & distro as a bit a very time consuming hobby since December ’18, but late summer ’22 decided to give up on the corporate grind and go full time. The plan was to start vinyl releases in 2023 & put on a schedule of events in Boro.
I put on 3 self funded shows pre Christmas, submitted a bid to the Arts Council for a 2023 programme & crossed my fingers! Due to time taken to process any funding bid, the January – March shows were again self funded…funding has now been granted, so the 12 shows from April to December 2023 are with the generous support of Arts Council England.
Bed-rock of the noise scene
I don’t think tapes ever went away in certain sub-genres. They have always been a bed-rock of the noise scene for sure. I’m a big fan of physical product over digital formats (I listen digitally to discover new artists, but not much beyond that), be it cassette, CD or an LP. It then becomes much more than just a piece of music, rather an artistic product, to keep & return to time after time. I’m not sure folks listen much to a digital download from 3 years ago that now sits dejectedly at the bottom of a random playlist on your phone.
I started the label with tapes for very obvious reasons…they are the cheapest format to produce, professionally produced runs can be for as low as 20, and turnaround is super quick (circa 2 weeks). So, for a small, self funded label just starting up & wanting to get music out there, it’s a bit of a no brainer.
I just hope digital doesn’t become the only thing available. Listen to records, tapes & Cds that you have to remove from sleeves to play. Read books that have well thumbed pages. Don’t watch a movie on you phone! Maybe I’m just a big massive Luddite?
Coming soon: Cassette release with DIY zine
We have done numerous compilations in the past, all in aid of various charities with a 100% of profit donated…Shelter, Cancer Research, Liberty UK, Refugee Council etc. A great supporter of the label suggested something around the Battle of Stockton.
In 1936 there was a famous street battle in Cable St, London, where locals fought back against a rally by Oswald Moseleys Fascist Party/Blackshirts. Of course, Teesside had got there 1st, in Stockton, in 1933…but as its here, not there, its not so well known!
Basically…Far Right agitators were bussed into Stockton, having identified it as a deprived community, ripe for swallowing fascist rhetoric. Sounds very familiar 90 years on! But thousands of working class Teessiders turned out & chased them all over town. A victory for the common man over bigotry & hate.
We will accompany the cassette with a little zine…details of the day in question, with imagery of Stockton today. Its still working class. It still has pockets of deprivation. So it still remains a potential target for the Far Right to sow their seeds of discontentment (as already seen in various towns around the UK, with the demonstrations outside of hotels housing asylum seekers). Worrying times.
Sonic Arts Week
Well, Sonic Arts Week is a celebration of Sound, Music & Art, ran by the great folks at The Auxiliary. Unfortunately it didn’t happen in 2022, so I’m delighted its back in July of this year.
I’m hoping to be involved in a couple of aspects of the programming, but the one we have locked down is a performance by Russell Haswell on Friday 21 July at the International Community Centre in town. Russell is a multidisciplinary artist who has exhibited conceptual and wall-based visual works, video art, public sculpture, as well as audio presentations in both art gallery and live show contexts. Extreme Computer Music is one specialized area of activity!
I’m expecting a very special evening!
Find out more about Industrial Coast and the next up and coming shows here
Photos: Industrial Coast presents Autumns, Knurl + The New Blockaders, The Miillion, HAAR at The Auxiliary 20/02/23