ABOUT

Music For And By Weirdos

Arachnidiscs Recordings was a purveyor of fine audio curios on CD-r, cassette, and vinyl from 1999-2019. We specialized in adventurous and experimental independent music.

A note on the subject of submissions…

UPDATE FOR 2019

THE LABEL IS CLOSED. NO LONGER ACCEPTING SUBMISSIONS.

UPDATE FOR 2017/18

We are once again open to the idea of releases by international artists including straight, white, cis males. Though preference will be given to Canadian, LGBT, female and PoC submissions.

UPDATE FOR 2016

For the 2016 release season, and possibly into the future, we are only considering submissions of UNRELEASED material [please don’t send us links to six month old public streams] from CANADIAN artists with preference being given to female, LGBT or PoC submissions.

We’re are always accepting demos but please keep in mind we stand by our motto: Music for and by weirdos.

We’re not interested in releasing “quirky” music or “left-of-centre” music. Arachnidiscs Recordings is  a home and/or refuge for “weird” music and “weird” musicians.

Obviously this is a subjective judgement. And we’ve released some pretty “conventional” music. So to help you understand what we might not consider “weird”, let us use, as an example, the words “garage rock.”

If those appear anywhere in your bio, you’re probably not weird. Even if you dress in drag and make The Cramps’ pill consumption seem tame, that’s not weird. That’s just fulfilling the bare-minimum requirement for being a decent garage rock band. 

Singer-songwriters, no matter how depressed, no matter how literate or how “unconventional” are probably not particularly weird. Have “unique” influences that make you an “outsider” in an otherwise completely mainstream genre (metal, punk, indie, country, whatever)? Not weird. 

Weird—to us—is music the average person in a shopping mall would say, “My three-year-old could do that,” or, “A monkey could do that,” or, “My three-year-old monkey could do that.” 

Better yet, we want to hear from artists where another musician would say, “My three-year-old monkey could do that.”

But we also have no interest in noise for the sake of noise. Noise where a monkey or a three-year-old human really could have been involved and the end result would have been the same. We’re not interested in that noise. There’s so many labels putting out so much of that noise, it’s hardly weird anymore.

We’re interested in misunderstood music. We’re interested in genuinely beautiful musical expressions. Maybe they’re challenging, maybe they’re not. We want music that’s had thought put into it—but not a single thought about what anyone else would think (including us, especially us). Music that’s not even trying to be weird, music that just is despite of itself.

Ultimately, the above will have little bearing on what we’ll get excited about, but hopefully we’ll have to write fewer rejection letters to people who clearly have not taken the time to listen to a single artist our roster or, if they did, didn’t take the few extra seconds to figure out their punk-pop demo doesn’t belong here.

(Also, for gods’ sakes, say “Hi” at least and don’t just paste in a link to your Soundcloud or Bandcamp. Jeeeezuz!)

That said, you can find a number of out-of-print indie-rock, pop and punk from our former life and misspent youth on our (now-hidden) FREE DOWNLOADS page, which I think was causing some of the confusion (obviously, duh!). AS WELL… to confuse things even more!

NO LOVE the indie-rock imprint of Arachnidiscs Recordings

On December 31st, 2014 we launched NO LOVE, an imprint dedicated to “indie-rock”, whatever that even means anymore. To us it means things like shoegaze, noise-pop, ’90s college rock, maybe even some hardcore punk.

The past: NO LOVE was a cassette label started by Arachnidiscs’ Jakob Rehlinger on Vancouver Island in 1989 and was retired in 1999 when he began issuing CD-Rs as Arachnidiscs. Over the years Arachnidiscs Recordings’ mandate (see above) has evolved towards more challenging, experimental music and NO LOVE is a way to release some of the more accessible sorts of bands they’ve regretted having to turn down in recent years.

The future: After four releases, No Love is once again a defunct imprint. To be resurrected again in the future? Maybe. But not in 2016.