{"id":4311,"date":"2012-06-01T09:11:45","date_gmt":"2012-06-01T15:11:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stylusmagazine.ca\/?p=4311"},"modified":"2012-06-01T09:11:45","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T15:11:45","slug":"label-profile-woven-records","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/2012\/06\/01\/label-profile-woven-records\/","title":{"rendered":"Label Profile: WOVEN RECORDS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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by Darcy Penner<\/strong><\/p>\n

A city with world-class emerging musicians, a city lacking an organized grassroots music industry, and a city not receiving its fair recognition on the national scene; this is the Winnipeg that Jesse Dub\u00e9-Smith and Nico Wlock saw when they formed Woven Records in the beginning of 2011.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou realize a lot of bands are not organized or are mismanaged,\u201d explains Wlock over beers at Cousins. \u201cThey\u2019ll put out a great album. They will release it, but then they will just fizzle out after one show and there is no follow up because there is nobody taking care of them in that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joined by Winnipeg\u2019s party-producing king-pin, Mike B., Dub\u00e9-Smith and Wlock have put together an eclectic roster over the seven releases they have orchestrated in the last year and a half \u2013 from the pop-rock of J. Riley Hill, to Tim Hoover\u2019s dense electronic instrumentals, to the self-coined \u201cSeavibe\u201d of FM Sea and JPEG.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want to bring people together \u2013 people that play good music. Bring them together and try to create a scene. That\u2019s pretty much it,\u201d says Dub\u00e9-Smith. \u201cWe are not genre based at all. You only live once, and you gotta listen to as much music as you can.\u201d<\/p>\n

A lot of the inspiration for Woven Records comes from the music industry in indie-strongholds such as Montreal and Toronto. With organized industry to support emerging artists, the cities attract their fair share of respect for their scenes, and Woven believes Winnipeg has as good of a talent pool. \u201cI realized how the music industry and the business side of things in Winnipeg, on a small local scale, wasn\u2019t really developed compared to places like Montreal where there are huge machines,\u201d explains Dub\u00e9-Smith, \u201cI mean, here there is so much talent, but there is so much talent that is not being pushed.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, a lack of respect for Winnipeg from these scenes may be working to hold back excellent Winnipeg artists, and the frustration caused by this drives Woven. \u201cI went to Canadian Music Week last month, and I was there with one of the guys from The Lytics,\u201d recalls Wlock, \u201cA girl comes up and says, \u2018Oh you guys are from Winnipeg, there is no good music in Winnipeg.\u2019 I hate hearing that.\u201d This is the perception they want to change.<\/p>\n

By bringing together artists from various disciplines, from writers to graphic designers (and of course, musicians), Woven wants to provide the appropriate infrastructure for ensuring creative projects are properly seen through to the end \u2013 a central step to shedding the perception that Winnipeg artists can\u2019t compete with the best. According to Wlock, the plan to do so is to \u201cnot make it based on artists, but a label in Winnipeg now putting out music from different artists that are all good.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, the guys give due credit to those attempting similar roles, noting Disintegration Records<\/a>, Head in the Sand<\/a>, and I\u2019m Trying Records<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This year will see Woven release J.R. Hill<\/a>\u2019s new self-titled full length on June 12th, and a release from The Blisters in the fall. Although there will be fewer releases than last year, this should not be seen as a deliberate change in pace. Woven plans to spend the summer re-engaging their back catalogue to ensure every release has received its due exposure. \u201cWe have a pool of artists that have released things, and in my mind they are not fully out there as much as they should be,\u201d says Wlock. \u201cWe have a busy summer, but it will be more on the promotion side.\u201d<\/p>\n

The label has also launched a new, collaborative content-generating website. \u201cIt will be a whole other project. We are getting collaborators to help us and it will be aggregating stuff that makes sense to the eyes and ears of people who like Woven music and to the eyes and ears of the artists,\u201d explains Wlock.<\/p>\n

The architects at Woven are purposely leaving their future open ended. \u201cWe have a loose plan, but things change so much. We encounter a lot of situations where [plans] have to be changed a bit and adapted,\u201d says Wlock, \u201cI think we\u2019ve learned a lot.\u201d An ambitious end goal is to bring the label and its artists to the level of national attention. Dub\u00e9-Smith lives in Montreal, and intends to \u201cbring the scene to Montreal, Toronto, Halifax \u2013 all over the East coast.\u201d Tim Hoover<\/a>\u2019s Woven-released full length, More Napkins<\/em>, receiving a nomination for a Western Canadian Music award is certainly a good start for the label, and plans for starting to organize tours for their artists this fall will ensure their acts get the publicity they deserve.<\/p>\n

Easily approachable and well spoken, Dub\u00e9-Smith and Wlock have the ideas to ensure Winnipeg artists get their due respect, and considering their main idea is organization, it is a promising mix of ambition and practicality. This can only be good for the city at large, for as Dub\u00e9-Smith says, \u201cWe want to change the perception of Winnipeg, that there is no good music here. \u00a0It could not be further from the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Check out Woven Record\u2019s new website at unwoven.ca<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

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by Darcy Penner A city with world-class emerging musicians, a city lacking an organized grassroots music industry, and a city not receiving its fair recognition on the national scene; this is the Winnipeg that Jesse Dub\u00e9-Smith and Nico Wlock saw when they formed Woven Records in the beginning of 2011.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[499,536,563,1122],"class_list":["post-4311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-features","tag-jr-hill","tag-label-profile","tag-local","tag-woven-records"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ckuw.ca\/stylus\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}