I subscribe to CREEM magazine because I love physical media. I was flipping through issue #11 the other night when I came across a full page ad for Touch Of Chaos, Vol 1, a new punk compilation by Mild Chaos Records. Suddenly I remembered that I had made contact with Mild Chaos over a year ago and they had been kind enough to send a copy of Touch Of Chaos. So over the weekend I got back in touch with label founder Marc Kravitz via Zoom to talk about their exciting debut release. We ended up covering several bases, from compilation albums, to physical music, to the music industry's unknown future. Below the Touch Of Chaos playlist here is the condensed transcript from our conversation:
Angelo: How did you first get the idea to put out this compilation? What inspired you to make this happen?
Marc: So I’m not a musician by trade but music means a lot to me, like it does to many people. I wanted to get involved somehow and when I think back to my musical discovery experience growing up I was really influenced by the old punk compilations: Punk-O-Rama, Survival of the Fattest, The Thing That Ate Floyd, those types of things.
I thought that if I’m going to start a label, that would be a good first project, because it doesn’t involve signing bands and going through promo & developing. It seemed like I could achieve a goal a little bit sooner by putting a compilation together.
You’re based in Orange County, CA. Is that also where you came up? What music scenes were you involved with when you were most involved with them?
I wasn’t born in California, I moved out to San Diego when I was 10. But I did all my formative growing up in Southern California. I went to high school in San Diego, went to college at UC Riverside, and moved to Orange County after I graduated. As far as music scenes, my punk journey started with my dad bringing home a Clash record, Sandanista!. I was still young and something about that record spoke to me. I was too young to form coherent opinions about music but the Clash sunk their hooks into me and that was the beginning.
Growing up I definitely was not a cool kid and I didn’t understand until many years later the concept of independent music and non major label types of scenes, I grew up listening to the radio. 91X in San Diego, 106.7 KROQ in LA. I was exposed to some punk, alternative, new-wave music. Not necessarily the cool stuff, but enough to plant the seed. In college I went out to see local bands at small bar venues. Southern California has always had a great punk scene, a great ska scene. I was going to bars and seeing bands like Voodoo Glow Skulls and The Skeletones, a lot of punk inspired ska music.
And those Punk-O-Rama CD’s. Firstly, they were cheap. I was a college student, I had no money, and I think those CD’s were like $4.00. You’d get twenty songs and of course NOFX and Bad Religion were on those comps but you’d also get exposed to eighteen other bands.
I want to talk more about this compilation era. I came up in the digital age and the closest compilation experience I had was the Punk Goes... series from the mid-2000s. Punk Goes Acoustic 2 and Punk Goes Crunk were full of the Myspace era pop-punk/emo bands. They were great records but were a mostly digital experience. The same thing happened that you described though, I would listen to it for the one or two big names that I knew but got exposed to all these other groups by going through the whole record.
In the early 90’s when I formed a lot of my musical tastes and these comps started coming out there was no Bandcamp, there’s no Spotify playlists. You had to rely on your friend's cool brother that was in the Crust-punk scene to find out about bands you don’t know about. But when these comps started coming out, they were like the Spotify playlist of their time.
It sounds like these compilations were key music discovery platforms, pre-algorithm.
Absolutely. Otherwise, I’m trying to think... one other place where you could get some good music recommendations was KROQ, Sundays at midnight, Rodney on the ROQ. I don’t know how well known he was nationally but he was a local celebrity. He broke a lot of bands, I think he broke Depeche Mode, he was instrumental in getting Oingo Boingo listened to. So if you stayed up between midnight and 3:00AM on a Sunday night you could get some stuff.
And they were cheap?
Ridiculously cheap. In the era where CD’s were fifteen to twenty bucks the $4.00 price tag really sticks in my head.
That probably made a difference.
Huge difference. That was back in my ramen eating days. My budget had to stretch a ton so you think “Holy shit I like the music and it’s good value for my money”. And that was part of the pricing strategy for what I put out as well. I wanted to recreate that same type of feeling. I sell the CDs for $7, vinyl for $22. It’s cheaper than most CDs you can get, it’s cheaper than most vinyl you can get. Hopefully I can capture some of that lightning in a bottle from the 1990’s, in the 2020’s.
About the compilation itself. It’s not a throwback record, it looks like all these artists are still making music and still performing, correct?
Yes, absolutely. Since the comps were how I found new music, I wanted my comp to also be new music. I’d love for someone ten years from now to say “Hey, I got a copy and it introduced me to all these new bands”. I hope that someone ten years from now feels the same way about Touch Of Chaos as I do about Punk-O-Rama.
Has the experience of putting out a record been like what you thought it would be? Did you have any preconceived notions?
I did not. That being said, it was so much better of an experience than I thought it was going to be. I got to meet and work with so many cool people, and work with twelve great bands. The only negative thing was a few production problems that delayed release by a little bit.
Having gone through your first album cycle now, do you have any advice for someone that is interested in putting out their own record?
Yes. Especially if a band is newer, set up the business the way it needs to be set up first. Set up an LLC for the band. Make sure you’re registered with one of the PRO’s. Make sure your music is registered. It’s the least sexy stuff in all the music industry, its paperwork and fees. But when you get that boring stuff out of the way and do it right, then you can get to the business of making music and getting it out to people in the most effective ways possible.
With an emphasis on physical (CD & vinyl) it would probably make an impact to get support and distribution from local record stores and things like that. Have you found support?
Record stores are very supportive. The number one channel right now is direct sales through our site. We’re in about six retail stores throughout California. I’ve found that record stores that either specialize in punk or have well curated punk sections are really supportive of the local scene. It’s a great community.
Where do you think the music industry is going from here? How much deeper can we sink into this abyss of the streaming era.
I was thinking about this just recently. On Spotify premium you’re allowed something like 15 hours of audiobook credits a month. If you exceed those hours, you either need to wait until next month when it recharges or you can pay Spotify to purchase extra chunks of time. Maybe music needs to switch to that same kind of model. Because when it is unlimited, as a consumer, it’s a great deal for me as a person that loves music. But Spotify still gets my same monthly membership fee to put into their royalty pool to distribute between all the streams. If you want to make Spotify more fair, especially for smaller artists, you would put a cap on music similar to a cap on audiobooks. Part of the problem is the pool of money. Tons of artists, limited pool of money. If you make the pool of money bigger, you can pay the artists more.
That's why I think physical matters so much more these days. If you go to a band's show and buy their CD at the merch table and they make $5 from it, that’s over 1,500 streams they just earned.
Exactly. And I think more fans are getting attuned to that. They’ll buy a CD or a record or a shirt, anything that puts a few bucks in the hands of the bands is so much more profitable to them than the Spotify stuff. Because the unfairness of streaming gets so much mainstream press, I think the average music fan now understands the economic reality for musicians a lot better.
I don’t know how much things for artists have changed for the better in the last five to ten years, but a big change I have been seeing is this increase in awareness at the public level of how the streaming era doesn’t work for many artists. The question now is what will come from this development in public perception.
At first I thought streaming was going to be really good for the industry because during the Napster and Limewire era people were just pirating music and nobody was getting any money. The subscription services seemed like a solution but the fairness of it never materialized.
Before we started you said you have an announcement?
Yes. It’s not official yet but my next project looks to be a re-release of an album that came out about 20 years ago but never got a vinyl release. It’s looking super positive and I think it’s going to happen. People want vinyl, so I’m excited to put some stuff out on vinyl for the first time.
One last thing. Your sick logo, the skull that's tattooed on this hand on the cover of Touch of Chaos, do you have the tattoo?
No, I don’t have the tattoo, at least not yet.
Maybe someone out there does.
I had a couple people joking say “This is awesome, I’m going to get it”. I don’t know if they’ll follow through on it or not. I worked with a great graphic artist who helped put together the logos and the cover art, Chris McClary. That was really fun, going through the iterations of ideas and then him bringing those ideas to life.
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We discovered 12 killer bands on Touch Of Chaos, Vol 1. Get a copy for yourself or your Crust-punk friend and they will too. We’re excited for the next Mild Chaos release and thankful we found the time to talk comps with Marc. Rock on, Rrrat Pack!
