FRANS de WAARD
America’s Greatest Noise
(Korm Plastics)
Ron Lessard opened his record shop, RRRecords, in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1984. “So what?”, I hear you say. Well, hold on a bit and I will tell you. Aside from running an extremely interesting record shop in a backwater town, Ron also ran the RRRecords label between 1986 and 2009, releasing the albums of Blackhouse, F/i, PGR, and, importantly, the first album by influential Japanese Noise musician Merzbow, along with regional compilations, widely acclaimed lock groove records and a series of anti-records, records with no music but a confrontational conceptual and visual edge. There is also the RRRecycled Music series, which has over 300 releases on re-purposed cassettes, which he copies himself. Ron Lessard also played music (of sorts!) with his group Due Process and solo, under the name Emil Beaulieau, performing dressed up like a businessman, using a four-armed turntable (dubbed the Minutoli), releasing a string of cassettes, LPs, and CDs. So, lets just say he is a busy and interesting character, and has a story well worth hearing. That is the job of Korm Plastics label boss and musician Frans de Waard in ‘America’s Greatest Noise’, and a great job he makes of it too. You read about the highs and lows of running a label and a record store, weird projects, unfinished projects, encounters with other musicians, being on the road, and more. Also included are re-published historic interviews from fanzines and websites and a chapter from Michael Tau’s ‘Extreme Music’ about the anti-records released by RRRecords.
That anti-records concept is an interesting one, as it runs counter to the whole model of what a record label should be. By way of illustration, the first 1000 copies of this book come with an anti-flexi of a conversation about anti-records between Ron Lessard and Frans de Waard. It is chopped in half, so is unplayable, but you know the conversation is recorded on there. Or half of it is, anyway. That is both frustrating and brilliant at the same time. The blurb on the back sleeve promises no lists, no photos, and no record covers, again, in contrast with the many other books about record labels. You do get a few reproduced flyers, invitations, and fanzine extracts, but in the main what you get is text, based on interviews with Ron proving what an unconventional personality and innovator he is. Here is an example. “I have a series of records that are called ‘The RRR in-store series’. These are only available inside my record store and nowhere else. There are ten LPs in this series and each is an edition of 100 copies. Every copy requires that I take six polaroid photographs of the customer who is buying the record. Four get mounted to the front cover, one gets mailed to the artist, because he has a scrapbook of every copy that I sell, and the sixth stays with me because I have a similar scrapbook. The title of that record is the name of the person buying the record, and has your picture on the cover. Every single copy sold is a performance piece in itself, it takes me a good 30 minutes to fabricate each copy.” That process also involves a long conversation with the customer about the whole process and the thinking behind it. By the time you walk out of the store with, say, The Alan Rider Album tucked under your arm, you know you have been a part of the creation of that release and will never sell that record.
The book is crammed with anecdotes like that, covering not only his attitude towards running a record label, but his experiences playing concerts and touring the US under section headings like ‘Nihilist Assault Group’ and ‘Spontaneous Actions’. There are sections on Ron’s forays into cassettes, meetings with other artists, failures, and missed opportunities. Then there are the Anti-Records. Describing the two Anti-Records he released as Due Process, one entitled ‘Do Nothing’, which were just blank vinyl discs, and the other entitled ‘Do Damage’, where the record grooves were scraped into the vinyl using nails hammered into a block of wood, you quickly get the point that these would all be unplayable, and it was that fact that made them unique and desirable. Releases by other artists included a record that you were instructed to rub dirt on before playing, and a blank 7” single peppered with holes and scratches.
We hear about RRRecords truly whacky and uniquely confrontational, humorous, and off-the-wall approach to running a label, playing concerts, or operating a record store, along with those rare fanzine interviews re-published. As promised, there are no record sleeves, grinning pictures of the protagonists, or long boring lists of records (with one exception; the Anti-Records series is listed), all wrapped in the RRRecords logo, a repeating squiggle.
Frans de Waard is the perfect person to write about RRRecords, as he has a pedigree in performing and releasing what others might charitably call ‘challenging’ music, both through his Korm Plastics label (now a book publisher) and through his acts Bee Queen, and Kapotte Muziek, as well as previously working at Amsterdam’s legendary Staalplaat label and shop. Reading this makes you realise how boringly conventionally and ‘production line’ most music is, pressed in the same way and packaged in standard packaging, churned out en masse, hoping to shift lots and forge a career. RRRecords disrupted that convention, personalising their releases and turning those industry norms on their head. As I contemplate my chopped-in-half flexi disc, I realise that personalities like Ron don’t come along that often, so the fact that Frans is able to produce this book capturing his story is a very good thing indeed.
Essential Information
‘America’s Greatest Noise’ by Frans de Waard can be ordered from the Korm Plastics website here. As they say, it is not a hardcover, not on glossy paper and is not expensive.
