An Interview with Ian Nagoski
Talking records, books, and Baltimore with the Canary Records founder
One of my most cherished musical rabbit holes over the past few years has been the Canary Records page on Bandcamp. Originating with a series of compilations on Mississippi Records, Canary has become one of the most venerable archives of early 20th century non-anglophone music. Though the label is digital-only, the music is endlessly illuminating and always complemented by extensive, rigorously-researched liner notes. I spoke with Ian Nagoski, the man behind the project, about his process for putting together releases, his experiences in Baltimore, and everything in between.
What brought you to Baltimore?
Well, my girlfriend at the time, of course. But also, I was living in Philadelphia, and culturally, Baltimore's very different. Baltimore was really this kind of neglected backwater that was very cheap, and a place where you could do anything you want creatively. And you were never, ever going to get famous, so there was no ladder to climb. You could just settle here and live cheap, and do something strange. So that tended to attract people who did very strange things, and they tended to be supportive of one another. They were free.
I’m from Washington, DC, so I have a lot of fond memories of going up to Baltimore on weekends. Were you affiliated with the music scene surrounding High Zero?
Exactly, yes. In 1999 I came down and I played at the Red Room at Normal’s Books and Records. I guess the first High Zero was in September 99’, so I came down for that, I met the aforementioned girl, and a year later I was one of the collective of people who were booking High Zero. I was involved with them for several years. They were my people.
When did you start collecting 78s and non-English records?
Well, the foreign language music stuff starts because I was a Beatles person, so when I was 14 or 15 years old I started looking for Indian music. The 78 thing starts when I’m 18 or 19, somewhere in there. I kind of grew up in thrift stores and flea markets and stuff like that. My dad had an acquisitive disorder, I guess is the way to put it. He was a collector who was sort of compulsive about it. And he spent a lot of time looking at and looking for stuff that other people didn't appreciate. So I kind of learned to do some of that from him, and I bought a lot of records.
What’s your process for researching and putting together the releases on Canary?
Oh, it kind of happens every which way. It sort of depends on what records come my way. I have to get my hands on a group of records that seem like an interesting story, compelling music that I personally like. Once that group of material comes my way, nowadays the process is “how do I begin to find out about this? Who do I have to talk to? How do I get translations?” Those kinds of questions.
For instance, there’s a guy from Germany who goes to Thailand and buys records. Somebody put him in touch with me and he asked me if I wanted to buy some Thai records from him. They were reasonably priced, and it was good Northern Thai folk music. I happen to have a friend, Peter Doolan, who runs this amazing Thai music blog Monrakplengthai. I sent photos of them to Peter, and said “this stuff looks good to me, what do you think? And he goes “yeah, yeah, good stuff.” So I ask him if he wants to work on a project together, and he says yes. So that’s how that’s happening.
Then meanwhile, somebody else got my contact information, and his grandfather used to run a Arabic language bootleg label in the 1950s in New Jersey, pirating Arabic language material for the American market - straight up my alley. He sends me this list of like 55 records, and of course I’m interested, but he’s in California and doesn’t know anything about shipping records, so I sent him all the shipping materials with instructions on how to pack them and everything.
Sometimes I have stories already lined up that I wanna get around to telling, and sometimes it’s just dumb luck. I’ve got another friend in Nova Scotia who really wanted this expensive Greek record I found, and he couldn’t afford it. So instead we’re trading, and he’s gonna send me a whole group of copies of some Javanese material that he’s collected over decades - wonderful music, very difficult to find. So I said “look, can we produce a Canary compilation from your material and trade for this $300 Greek record that you want?” And he was like “yeah, let’s do it.”
Are there people who regularly contribute to these releases or collaborate with you?
Over the past 6-8 years or so, I’ve worked regularly with a couple of Armenian guys. I already started working on a lot of Armenian material 10, 12 years ago or something like that, and got in touch with a couple of guys who were super smart and really helpful, who could help with the language, who were really good researchers, etc. So over the years, Harout Arekelian and Harry Kezelian and I have done a number of things together as a trio, including having published a book last year that was authored by the three of us. Those guys are definitely regular contributors. I have friends in various fields that are of interest to me who I’ll sometimes call on for help. But I tend to pretty much just do everything myself in my basement. I do all the transfers and restoration myself and I try to write all the notes myself.
Relatedly, I’ve noticed Armenian music is very well represented in your catalogue. Is there any specific reason you gravitate towards that music?
It was available, I just came across it. It just so happens that, particularly in Massachusetts, one simply encounters the disks themselves, and I just managed to get my hands on piles of that stuff. Outside of DC there’s also significant Armenian populations, Philadelphia too. One thing would lead to another and somebody else would hand me another pile of 30 or 40 discs, and that would just give me more fuel to work with and fill in the gaps. It’s been really gratifying. Oddly enough, there’s almost no Armenians in Baltimore.
Yeah, I wasn’t aware that Massachusetts and DC had big Armenian populations. I know there’s a large community in California.
Right, but the first big settlements were around Boston and Philadelphia, and then Detroit. But what Baltimore does have is a lot of Greek people. So that’s actually kind of the source of the Armenian thing is running into Greek records in Baltimore, which then led me to make connections with other Turkish language stuff, which includes lots and lots of Armenian stuff. Then from there I had to find out more about Arabic stuff, because it’s all sort of at the same time coming from a similar part of the world.
So the Greek music was kind of a gateway for you?
For sure. I used to have a record store 15, 20 years ago and one day some guys who were cleaning out a house brought me two milk crates of Greek records. Two thirds of the records were not very good or interesting, but I think I paid them 10 cents a piece for the records - I didn’t know what I was looking at because I only read and speak English - and there were several that were just life changing. Really opened my eyes and my ears. In particular, there was one singer, Marika Papagika, who really was this huge gateway for me, where I began making connections and understanding some things about the history of the record business and immigration in this country. She’s just such a compelling individual. So I spent years trying to learn everything about her, and that led me down all this history.
Where do you find the time to do all this research?
Well, for years and years and years, it pretty much all happened between 10 o'clock at night and four in the morning. I don’t do anything else. For many years, I had to work all these really tedious jobs - lot of stuff in unheated or air conditioned warehouses, I drove a cab for a while, etc. I just did all this stuff that eats up so much time and pays so little money. And then I would just use all of the rest of my time to go to libraries or to read and dig around for books, or call people and ask questions, get on the bus, go to New York City, show up at somebody's door with a tape recorder and just ask them a lot of questions. Whatever it took. I was really obsessed. Thankfully, now, I haven't had to go show up at a job in three or four years. But I'm almost 50 [laughs]. I've mostly just squeaked out the time wherever I can, and just poured all of my money into more books and more records [laughs]. It just seems like the only thing that really matters to me.
When you’re transferring material from 78s and other really old recordings, how do you go about determining what to clean up and what to leave in?
This, I feel, is something like an art. A craft, at least. I’m proud of the kind of care and thought that I have put into that over the years. Some projects have turned out better than others, but I always give it a lot of consideration.
There have been projects that I did where I spent time cleaning up the sound, and I would think it's really great, and I put it out and I listen back to it and go “this is terrible, I totally overdid this, I screwed up.” And then I'll go back to it years later after that and go “I can no longer reproduce work this good. This is fantastic. I was at the top of my game then.” And then I always think I'm doing my best work now. I really believe that it deserves a lot of thought and attention and energy because you’re representing the artists, and, potentially, the sound you produce of their voice is how everybody is going to remember them. You’re now responsible for indicating who this person is, maybe forever. So I take it very seriously.
There was a big project I was working on in 2011 of immigrant music called To What a Strange Place, and I really got crazy about the sound restoration on that project. Definitely not my best work, but at the time, as I was learning how to do it, I was really thinking about things like the shape of the singers’ sinuses and the cavity of their mouth and the shapes that their faces were making while they were singing. I was reading about this stuff and trying to understand how that would affect the equalization of the records [laughs]. I really was convinced that I was not just throwing something out there into the world that was going to sound like a bunch of crusty, crunchy, crackly old records, but that was going to stand as a living, breathing representation of this artist's purpose in life.
You were involved with Mississippi Records at one point, right?
Yes, exactly. It was because of Eric Isaacson and Mississippi that Canary became a thing. I had a record store and I was buying all the early Mississippi stuff that was coming out. I’d made a CD for Dust-to-Digital that he really loved called Black Mirror, and he wanted to do a reissue of that on LP that didn’t really pan out. But I wanted to start my own little label to put out stuff. Initially the idea was to do it as a collective, coming out of Baltimore, where different people would kind of take turns putting out records. Thankfully, that didn't happen, because that would have been a catastrophe [laughs]. But when I brought up that idea with Eric he said “give me a couple days” and he came back and said “yeah, we just want to give you your own label.” I was like “what do you mean” and he was like “you just send us a master and liner notes, I have to make the cover -” he was very insistent on that - “and we’ll pay you $1000 a record and just put them out.” So then we made like 12 records or something together from 2009 to 2014, 12 or 15 records in five years. He was very kind to do that, and God, I wish there was a situation for me like that now. I am so desperate to put out physical media, and I just have no one who will do it. No one will put up the money for these crazy projects that I dream up, because clearly you’re not going to make any money. And the only reason Eric did it is because he’s crazy. He was out of his mind! [laughs] Just throwing money out the window. But you know, a blessing on his head.
It does seem like running a digital label gives you a lot of freedom to do whatever you want. I can’t think of a comparable physical reissue label.
Yeah, I’m free to do the best work I can do and do it at my own tempo. And it’s malleable, you’re not stuck with a final draft that’s fixed in time. You can add tracks and take tracks away, changes notes, etc. For example, the Zabelle Panosian record is probably the most important thing I’ve done in the past number of years. We made it into a book and a CD. But I’d like to go back and revise the book, there’s several things in it I’d like to change. Same with the CD. There were mistakes in the notes that began circulating on Wikipedia, and I had to fix those notes myself because I was the source of those mistakes. But I can do that on Bandcamp. It started out as 6 or 7 tracks initially, and now there’s 27. I just kept adding to it and adding to it. Bandcamp has its pros and cons, but your friends need to listen to half of one of your songs somewhere.
What was the name of the record store you ran?
True Vine.
That’s what I thought. I’ve been there before, great place.
Yeah, it’s had several incarnations over the years. That one opened in 2004 and closed in 2008.
And you were the first owner?
It was me and two other guys. The guy who still runs it is named Jason Willett, and he’s run it since I left in 2008. And there was another co-owner at the time named Stuart Rostowski, he’s a High Zero person. Neurologist professionally.
Are there any records you’ve uncovered that you really love but have been unable to release for some reason or another?
Yeah, almost certainly. The first thing that comes to mind are records I broke [laughs]. Maybe I bought it sometime between 1993 and 2005 and somewhere in some move it just got broken. Or maybe I lost it or I gave it away, or I sold it. I don’t keep records, I don’t have an archive. When I die, there’s not going to be a collection to donate somewhere. I'm constantly moving stuff along to whoever would be the right next person to have it. The stuff that I keep is stuff that I think relates specifically to an ongoing project, or that will be useful as reference to something in the future. But yeah, there must be a million of them. I’m going to be releasing a collection of Javanese music with my buddy in Nova Scotia, Michael Robertson, which is kind of a longstanding dream because I did at one time have six or seven early 1930s recordings made in Bandung in West Java that I loved. Some of which I made dubs of - badly - in 2005 or something, some of them I didn’t, but they all had to go at some point. But that’s life. The records will last a lot longer than I will. They’re made of stone, I’m not.
Do you have any favorite labels / resources for this kind of music?
My way of finding music tends to be looking over left over remains of record collections. But certainly the people who are working on the Arab Music Archiving and Research Foundation in Beirut and in Paris are doing fantastic work that’s very affordable. Very early 20th century recordings in Arabic. I’m such a huge admirer of the quality and depth and thoroughness and care that they take with those, I think they’re really admirable. I’m a great admirer of the work that’s being done at the University of California in Santa Barbara at the Discography of American Historical Recordings (DAHR), who are doing this incredible discographical work. And along those lines, the archivist and discographer John Ward. I couldn’t sing his praises enough, just the sweetest guy, nobody has a bad word to say about him. So kind and helpful and super smart and really knowledgeable in a way that I will never be. He runs Excavated Shellac.
Oh, yeah.
Also Dust-to-Digital not too long ago. John’s the absolute tops, I think the world of him. I’ll embarrass myself by leaving people out, those come to mind immediately though.
It’s been exciting seeing pieces by early modernist composers like Ives and Messiaen showing up on Canary recently. How did those come about?
That’s sort of going back to my roots. I thought I was going to be a composer when I was young. My mother and sister are both PHDs in voice, so I grew up around that kind of stuff. I was always very interested in that stream of 20th century music. In fact, I just finished a restoration project and am finishing the notes now of a reissue to be done of a string quintet published in 1976 by a guy named Harley Gaber called The Winds Rise in the North.
Oh yeah! I’ve heard of that one.
It’s extraordinary. I. Love. That. Record. We’re doing a reissue of that. Someone in Milan is going to be publishing that in this very deluxe edition, we made a new master and I’ve done a lot of interviews and research about that. Harley was someone I was very personally fond of, so I’m taking on as a gift to him and his memory.
I started out as an avant-garde music kind of guy. I had gone when I was 21 to actually live with La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela.
I was going to ask about that!
Yeah, I was really into that stream of culture. Tony Conrad’s younger brother remains my only real friend in Baltimore. We’ve been close collaborators for decades and I’m very fond of Dan Conrad.
Being interested, for instance, in the Armenian stuff took me down the pathway of looking into Maro and Anahid Ajemian, who it turns out are these really important transitional figures. I mean, there just would not be a John Cage as we know him without Maro Ajemian. And the fact that they’re women is important, you can always find more stories about women that are not well known. Finding these stories and getting to tell them got to be another fun angle on all of this.
I was pretty young when I started out collecting 78s. I was 22 or something when I went over to somebody’s house, and he’s playing me this Blind Willie Johnson gospel stuff that I love, and he goes “oh, you’re a classical guy too, right?” and he pulls out a Columbia disc from almost exactly the same time, and it’s Varese’s “Ionisation.”
Wow.
So it’s all going on at the same time. The whole record business is going on at every level of culture. It’s the middle stuff, the popular stuff that you kind of have to weed through to get to the extremes of culture [laughs] which is where I have the most fun. And it turns out that there’s a lot of records that are very good that are being left behind by any number of the machinations of the record business. Stuff’s just getting left behind all the time.
In the age of the internet it feels like everything’s there but it really isn’t.
Well this is one of the points that I’m constantly making to people. There is, in fact, nothing on the internet, compared to the amount of books that have been published. Any information that’s up on the internet is basically there for one of two reasons. Number one - somebody thought there was a financial incentive in putting it up there, or two, they had some ideological reason for putting it up there. In my case, it’s both. But the only other reason that anything would go up on the internet is because somebody is bored or needed a hobby or was on some kind of ego trip. But there’s basically nothing there, still. The fact that everybody has the internet in their pocket, and there does seem to be so much, certainly more than anyone can possibly take in, available to you all the time - young people think that it’s all there, and there’s just nothing there.