George Chen has been a friend of Spinning Platters for many, many years. In fact, we’ve interviewed him before! And I’ve appeared on his podcast, Sup Doc to discuss 2020’s documentary on The Go Go’s. With all the years I’ve known him, we’ve never talked about his record label, Zum Audio. So we decided to chat about Zum’s history as well as his upcoming Noise Pop Showcase! It’s happening at Bottom Of The Hill on Tuesday, February 22nd, and features Body Double, The Acharis, and My Heart, An Inverted Flame. You should buy your tickets here and then read the interview:
Spinning Platters: So, I will make this kind of a low-key quick interview, like I’m in a Parade Magazine style interview. So, mostly going to ask you about your favorite Target purchases. No. Kidding. Kidding. I do want to get a little bit of history with Zum Audio. Zum Audio is the right name for the label, right?
George Chen: Yes. I call it Zum Audio on Bandcamp. The first thing I ever put out was this compilation, but the whole thing was originally a fanzine.
So, we did want a differentiation at one point between ‘this is the magazine, this is the record label,’. So we had a paper magazine, so the website is still Zum online. I’ve tried to make it Zum Audio, I have that URL, and it just redirects back to zumonline.com. So, I’ve just kind of been like… It’s too hard to get people to update links at this point…
I’m not doing the magazine anymore; it’s only the label. Zum Audio is like the URL. So, it’s funny until you get to the point where like… I think different distributors have me under both. It’s like sometimes I’ll get a check and it’s like to Zum Audio, or it’s to Zum or to George Chen, and I’m like, “These are all the same thing. It’s fine. As long as the bank takes it.” The bank doesn’t know the difference so. But if it’s for branding, I probably should have one answer.
So, what was the first… It’s “Zum,” and I keep wanting to pronounce it “zoom”…
If it’s in written form, it barely matters. Also, I found out that you pronounce the Acharis “Ack-Uh-Ris” and not the “Uh-car-ees.” Not until we talked on the phone did I get that’s how it was pronounced. So, I’ve heard it pronounced “zoom,” but I don’t usually correct people when it’s usually written out.
The first thing we did…Like I said, I started as a fanzine, and I did it with my sister, who went on to do Little Otsu, which is a boutique that used to be in the Mission and is now in Portland, Oregon.
We had been doing a kind of music fanzine. We asked a bunch of friends to give us songs for a compilation when we got to our 10th issue. And so the first thing we did was a CD that came with the magazine.
Your first release was a gift of purchase, and your second release was something people had to pay for.
CD compilation.
At what point did you jump to focusing on individual bands?
The year 1999, there were a few…It might have been the busiest year we had put anything out. That year, I think we had put out three or four things in a year, which is a lot for us. So, in ’99, we got a record with this band from Tasmania, Australia, called The Sea Scouts, and CD from a band from Italy called Giardini di Mirò.
I think we were pretty ambitious that first year… There was some vinyl, some CDs, and two different international acts. We had really no knowledge of the business handling international acts in America. But we gave it a shot.
So now you’ve got a Noise Pop showcase at Bottom Of The Hill, and you lucked into 02/22/2022!
It is nice. The fact that’s it Tuesday, it might be easier to say it’s Tuesday two 22, twenty 22. That’s like a good acronym; it’s a good mnemonic device.
I had sort of in the back of my mind that it’d be great to have some kind of label tour or label showcase happening. And this is like the closest we get at this point because the Acharis actually moved to Detroit. I think I’ve asked them to do the show before they told me they were actually living in Detroit, so they’re just going to be back in town to do the show. And then it’s also My Heart, an Inverted Flame – it’s their first live show.
Both of the members of My Heart, an Inverted Flame are on the compilation I put out 1998, in other bands. So It brings everything back together. It’s now nice to think of this as some 24-year cycle. You know it’s also Chinese Zodiac, it’s like my Chinese Zodiac year, I’m a year of the tiger. It goes back 24 years. Kind of crazy to think that was that long ago. It’s a good way to check-in, for 12 years, see where you’re at.
Body Double is doing incredibly well. When you signed Body Double, were you expecting them to kind of explode in the way they did? Like, they seem like they’re the band that everybody I talk to loves right now.
I knew that they were really good songs. And I hadn’t even gotten to see them live, but I had put on a show for (band leader Candace Lazarou’s old band) Mansion before. And I was like, I know that there’s something here that if they don’t get someone to help them, they might just get frustrated. I knew that there was a lot of potential there.
I was talking to them at one point, I’m like, “Yo, did you send this (demo) to other labels?” And they’re like, “Yeah, we did. We didn’t hear anything back.” I’m like, “That’s crazy that you didn’t hear back.” because when I heard it, I’m like, if this was on Sub Pop, if this was something that had that engine behind it, it would be big. I took a thought process because we talked a little bit before COVID started, and then I was just not sure where they were at because they were like, “Oh, we are sending it to a bunch of other labels.”
And then, after COVID started, I took this moment to be like, well, I’m not really performing stand-up comedy right now. I kind of have a lot of spare energy to put into some projects. And I was like, I really think this band is great. And I was just like, you know, an actually kind of good thing about putting out a record in 2020 is that you’re not competing for tour press. I was thinking that the fact that live (performance) is off the table could equalize the playing field in a weird way. And so I took that in mind and worked with Daniel Gill at Force Field. He did a great job with the PR. And it really was more like that combination of Body Double having been around for a while and had a degree of professionalism about them.
I knew when live shows happened again, they would be able to deliver, and we’ll be able to sell these records. That was the thought process going in. And I was, like; I got a day job, I’m willing to take a little bit of a risk to do this. So that was kind of all I really wanted to do when it came to this project.
So I’m glad that they have high regard in your circle. I also was like, this is exactly the kind of music that rock critics will love because it has references from the past, but it’s building on them. So I was like, yeah, this is like, kind of catnip for rock critics.
