Many students have money set aside for various types of graduate programs or other academic endeavors with the idea that it’s a viable long-term investment, but recent UCLA alumnus Brian Simon had other plans for his postgraduate savings fund: He founded his own record label. Now Simon, in addition to being the founder, is also the CEO, publicist and general hype-man of the Los Angeles-based label Non Projects.
Simon, a 2008 graduate who studied music history, founded Non Projects last year. He described the formation of Non Projects as a natural conglomeration of music by his friends who wanted to express themselves and who all had a similar aesthetic vision.
Simon had been making music in his free time before and throughout college, and had eventually wanted to release it but didn’t know how he wanted to go about it.
“I had friends who were just blowing me away with their music,” Simon said. “I knew they wanted to release it as well, so it just got to a point where if we wanted to carve out our own niche, we had to do it ourselves. … I have all these friends that are doing cool (stuff), so why don’t we combine our efforts?”
Last week, Non Projects celebrated its first official album release with the self-titled debut of Asura. Asura is Ryan York, a 2009 UCLA graduate who studied sociology and currently works as a research assistant in a physiological science lab on campus. The album was released only through digital and vinyl formats (no CDs were made), and while it’s not yet possible to track how many people have legally downloaded the album, it was the third most downloaded album on the music Web site Boomkat, an influential underground music site checked regularly by Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke. So far, 110 vinyl copies have been sold.
Currently there are four total artists on the label: York as Asura, Simon himself under the moniker Anenon, fourth-year psychology student Anahita Navab as Ana Caravelle, and Nicholas Morera, the only non-UCLA-affiliated artist on Non Projects.
The four Non Projects artists have very different sounds: Asura, Anenon and Morera all play various styles of experimental electronic music, while Navab plays gentler acoustic folk. Despite the aural differences, all agreed that there was an underlined aesthetic that unites them under Non Projects.
“We all have our own influences, but at the same time there’s this pool of common influences that we draw from,” Simon said. “But it’s mostly just wanting to express in general.”
Much of the reason for this cohesiveness can be related to the musical bonds that their college friendships created.
“A lot of us have been friends for a long time, and we’ve all grown up in similar musical environments,” Navab said. “There’s a very good flow between all of us because we understand each other.”
York, who entered UCLA to study in the jazz studies department, said that they wouldn’t have met if they hadn’t been involved in the university’s music programs.
York eventually decided to take advantage of the other academic options.
“UCLA is unique in that we’re able to study all these different things, but we still knew each other through this network of musicians,” York said. “We realized we could get together and make music that was of a quality that other people might want to hear.”
York began playing instruments as a child, including piano, trumpet, guitar and double bass and gigged regularly in the Bay Area jazz scene in high school. He eventually got hooked on recording his own music and imitating the music of musicians he admired, even attempting to recreate Radiohead’s “Kid A” when he was 14. The first day he met Simon, they played their music for each other and decided to collaborate musically. Over time, York had created a steady stream of songs but didn’t think of going pro until Simon sprang the possibility on him.
“Brian said out of nowhere, “˜I’m starting a record label, and I want your album to be the first thing I release,'” York said. “For the next couple of months I went through the stuff I’d done and had bursts of creativity that led to the album.”
While Simon is primarily a musician himself, he said he enjoys the creative benefits of running such a business.
“As much as I like being an artist, I like being a curator, too,” Simon said.
He had cultivated his curatorial skills from collecting records and DJing, which he described as being a curator on the fly.
Simon’s involvement in the music industry has led to some rather obscure influences. He cited German jazz label ECM as influencing his own totalitarian managerial style ““ Simon handles all the administrative tasks and publicity himself.
As much as Simon touted the artistic integrity of Non Projects, the fact is, it’s still a business, and without money, it can’t sustain the types of creation and quality that he has in mind.
“For every release, we’re doing legitimate mastering,” Simon said. “We’re not putting out sub-par audio quality.”
York’s album was mastered by Daddy Kev, head of Alpha Pup Records, a label that Simon himself interned for in 2005. The vinyl was cut in London by the same company that cut records for Björk and Aphex Twin, and it was not cheap, according to Simon, who ordered 500 copies of “Asura.”
The relationship that Non Projects has had with Alpha Pup is crucial to much of its hoped-for success. Navab recorded much of her upcoming album in the Alpha Pup studios, and the label is responsible for the digital distribution of “Asura.” But Daddy Kev said that most of the work has been done by Simon himself.
“He already had the label idea fairly fleshed out before he approached us,” Daddy Kev said. “We’ve seen the promise and want to see it get a bigger push.”