Interview: Ten Years of Sacred Bones

Founded by bushy-bearded, Denver-born punk Caleb Braaten in 2007, Sacred Bones started out releasing scuzzy post-punk records. When fellow record shop nerd Taylor Brode came on board as the general manager in 2010, Sacred Bones teamed up with Secretly Canadian for a distribution deal and the label became a powerhouse for a beguiling style of new Americana – an intricate medley of gothic rock, dream pop, earthy folk and psychedelic soundscapes.

Releasing artists such as noise-pop queen Zola Jesus, body horror provocateur Pharmakon, gothic folk singer-songwriter Marissa Nadler, bleak techno powerhouse Blanck Mass, Norwegian storyteller Jenny Hval, psychedelic duo The Holydrug Couple and ragged punks The Men, among others, Sacred Bones has become a label that can twist darkness and light together with a playful sincerity that’s hard to describe, but glorious to get all caught up in. In a Fireside Chat with Harley Brown on the occasion of the label’s ten-year anniversary, the pair revisit the history of their label.

How did you two meet?

Taylor Brode

We met in 2009, I think. I used to work for Touch and Go, and Caleb was a buyer at Academy Records. We just immediately bonded and had really similar tastes in a wide variety of genres of music.

Caleb Braaten

She was a Blank Dogs fan.

Taylor Brode

I was. We love Mike Sniper, who was in Blank Dogs, [they made] the first 12" that Caleb ever put out. They used to work together at Academy. When they started their labels, they both worked out of the basement of Academy Records. In 2009 I had been at Touch and Go for five years, and they went through a big transition. I got laid off and was like, “Fuck, I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself.” I’d met Caleb in 2006 on email and we really bonded. No one would hire me, and I was really experienced, so it was a huge bummer. I was living in Chicago and I was really depressed and I didn’t know what to do. Caleb was my best friend at the time. I was like, “Let me just move to New York and do the label with you.” He’s like, “I don’t have any money, dude. What are you talking about?”

Caleb Braaten

At the time, the label was running out of the basement of the record store.

Taylor Brode

No internet, no phone. He’d put out two 7"s. At the time I moved out here to do the label, it was still very much a side hustle for Caleb. He was not at all making enough money to pay himself or me. I loved him and I loved the label and I really believed in what he was doing from a music standpoint and also from an art standpoint. We both have backgrounds in film and photography and design. The aesthetic of the label’s always been monumentally important to both of us.

Caleb Braaten

That’s a huge part of the success of the label, people really latch on to that. It’s very intentional, just from being a very serious record collector, record nerd.

Taylor Brode

The way that we do A&R is pretty nontraditional in the sense that we’re a family and we won’t sign bands unless we really bond with them intellectually and spiritually and emotionally. There’s a lot of labels that sign bands because they want to make a lot of money, and we’re not one of them.

Caleb Braaten

We definitely are not making money.

Taylor Brode

We’re definitely poor as fuck.

Going back to the very beginning and The Hunt and Blank Dogs, and being a record nerd and a record collector, what was it about those bands that made you believe in them so much that you were like, “I need to release this”?

Caleb Braaten

It started with The Hunt. They were my very good friend’s band that I loved, and I wanted to help them out. They were looking to put out a 7". I had been working at record stores for a very long time at that point and thought, “How hard could it be?” I knew enough people and enough record stores, I could probably convince a couple hundred people to buy it. That’s just how it started. Then all the guys at Academy – Mike Sniper, Mike Catalano, Mike Davis – they all helped me a lot, because they were maybe a little more experienced on that end of it. Then Blank Dogs just blew up right away, in a small way.

You moved to Greenpoint in 2011, and in the label’s earliest years Williamsburg was changing so much. Did that impact the growth or the direction of the label at all?

Caleb Braaten

The early days were a really a big boom for independent DIY music in Brooklyn, Williamsburg specifically. A huge reason why people were paying attention to what we were doing was because there was a lot of stuff happening. Woodsist and Captured Tracks and Mexican Summer and all our friends’ labels were starting to get a lot of attention, and people were looking to Brooklyn for lo-fi music.

Taylor Brode

Yeah Yeah Yeahs and TV On The Radio were blowing up in the very early 2000s, and it trickled down to labels like Sacred Bones. Lo-fi definitely had a moment.

Caleb Braaten

For most of the people that we were working with in the early days, they were projects, so it was people making music on their computers almost exclusively. The first, I don’t know, ten records besides The Hunt were just people recording on their computer and uploading it to Myspace.

Taylor Brode

That was how Caleb and I started doing A&R. He signed a couple bands based on who was in their top eight [friends] on fucking Myspace.

Caleb Braaten

That’s how I found out about Zola Jesus. She was in Dead Luke’s top eight. She was always the most ambitious of anyone I worked with, and still is. The Spoils was perfect for its exact moment, because it’s this beautiful lo-fi, industrial bedroom record that was just so much more ambitious than that.

Taylor Brode

I remember the video for “Clay Bodies” coming out. That was the first video on Sacred Bones I’d ever watched, and it was so spectacular.

Caleb Braaten

Jacqueline Castel directed “Clay Bodies.” That was the second video that we worked on together, and we’re working on a documentary right now. She’s done a million videos for us. Jacqueline actually is the very first person to put on a Zola Jesus show in New York. She brought her out here for the very first time. The “Clay Bodies” video is really cool because we drove out to Detroit and broke into all these incredible abandoned places and filmed that video. It was absolutely terrifying, and Nika was 18 years old at the time. She brought one of her high school friends along with her, she so was so green around the gills. The video, it’s definitely one of my favorite videos we’ve ever done. It’s so beautiful.

Taylor Brode

Nika was the most responsive on email of all of our bands. I would write her and she would write me back ten seconds later, and then she’d call me. I’d be on the bus going to my other distro job, and Nika would be calling me at nine in the morning like, “Can we hire a booking agent? What’s a publicist do?” She just wanted it. I was like, “Yeah, we should definitely get all this stuff. Absolutely. You’re going to kill it.” She’d done South by Southwest once, for The Spoils.

Caleb Braaten

That was the first time we did South by Southwest. I feel like that show garnered a lot of attention for us. It was the first time that Nika really got a lot of press, because there was a big Pitchfork article about how they went to go see Blank Dogs, but the times got switched at the last minute, and so they saw her instead, and it really blew them away.

Taylor Brode

Right after I started working with Caleb, I went to go see Nika for the first time at Empty Bottle in Chicago. We had been talking on email. She was so excited Caleb had hired somebody. We became really close, and about a month into working with her, she was like, “I feel like you’re more than my label manager.” I was like, “Yeah, I guess. You’re really proactive and I definitely talk to you more than I talk to our other bands.” She was like, “Do you want to be my manager?” I was like, “Yeah, sure, I can do that. I haven’t done it before, but I know how all the parts work and I’ve been working in it for a long time.”

That was in 2009, and then I moved here in May of 2010, and she had [already] recorded Stridulum,. She wrote the EP, in, I don’t even know, a week? It just poured out of her. She’s a deeply psychic artist. She’s able to channel things very quickly because she’s a reader. I remember hearing that and just being like, “Holy shit, she just reinvented goth music, and that’s a pretty big fucking deal.” I think both EPs set the template for how to be a weird, dark, experimental woman and sell records. I really think Nika was the pioneer of that movement coming back. Even though she doesn’t like to call herself goth and we don’t like to call ourselves goth, at the end of the day, she was making electronic music that was very much rooted in a new wave place, and no guitars, so it’s not post-punk.

Caleb Braaten

She has such a talent for making pop songs, though.

Taylor Brode

She writes hooks, just under this layer of dark, crumbling apocalypse.

Speaking of apocalyptic darkness, let’s talk about Destruction Unit.

Caleb Braaten

It’s really Ryan Rousseau’s project that has grown into the huge band that it is today. They’re a full-time five-piece band, then they expand. It’s anywhere between five and 15.

Taylor Brode

And 100 people onstage. It’s insane. They do all these shows under Destruction Unit and Friends, and people can just get up and jam with them. Logan from Cheena plays with them sometimes, Pharmakon has played with them, Puce Mary has played with them, Varg from Sweden plays with them. They’re a true commune fucking socialist band. They’ll just be like, “You want to be in Destruction Unit for the week or whatever? Get in the van.” Sometimes it can get expensive and dramatic, but that’s how they roll.

They built this whole community around Destruction Unit and around Ascetic House, which is their label, and they’ve built a really interesting scene out there based on being in the middle of the desert and being weird kids that grew up with no immediate access to culture. When you live in Tempe, Arizona, the closest place you can get is Phoenix, and that doesn’t have a fucking hell of a lot going on as far as art and music, so they just created this world for themselves.

Another legacy band for you is The Men, because they’ve been in this for a long time and they’ve gone through so many different changes, so I just wanted to ask about their Open Your Heart album, because that was pretty big.

Caleb Braaten

That was really their breakthrough record. It was just the right place, right time. They were on fire. It’s one of the few records that when I heard it for the first time it was like, “Oh my God, this is insane. From the very beginning to the very end, this record is perfect.” They’re such chameleons. On one record you’ll have so many different genres, but they’re able to do it well, where it doesn’t feel like they’re posing in any kind of way. Leave Home was basically a psych hardcore record, like hardcore shoegaze. There wasn’t really anything gentle about that record. Then Open Your Heart came and there were the pounding punk songs that you wanted, but there was also these tender – I wouldn’t say love songs, but-

Taylor Brode

I would say love songs. I think they’d be okay with saying love songs.

Caleb Braaten

There were these tender moments that were really special.

What are your recollections of the two volumes of Occult Architecture by Moon Duo.

Caleb Braaten

We’ve put out more records for Moon Duo than anybody else at this point. Six full-lengths or something like that. They’re the hardest-working, most talented band, and just so lovely. They understand psych rock. I know it’s cheesy, but psych rock, krautrock, all this, it’s all based on a groove, it’s all about a trance. They understand that so well. All their music has that baseline Moon Duo stamp, that psych trance. They’re able to bring in influences from post-punk and all these other things to just tweak it just slightly to make it their own. Every time it’s really incredible.

Taylor Brode

Their live show has gotten so spectacular too, because Sanae does light design, so she has these projections, but it’s not just like when you go see a band and there’s projections. It’s like the whole room is lit.

Because they’re also our age and they’re both pretty Buddhist, Caleb and I get stoked when they come into town because we can have dinner at 7:00 PM and be in bed by 10:30 PM. We’re so thankful we can see them because they understand how hard we work and how tired we are. They never ask us for too much.

Caleb Braaten

What a pleasure it is to work with them. They’re really the best.

Some other artists who I also think are the best are Jenny Hval and Rose McDowall and Pharmakon.

Taylor Brode

I don’t even know how to describe Jenny, but she’s the most Bowie-like, psychic reader, writer. She’s written two novels, she’s working on her third right now. She just got a publishing deal in the US, so her first two novels are going to come out in English, finally.

Jenny is the most multifaceted artist I think I’ve ever met. I’ve never met anyone that is more well-rounded and stable and grounded that’s also an artist. She can just make art every day and she does. It just flows through her.

Caleb Braaten

What I think makes Jenny so spectacular is that she has the ability to make something that is so complex and thoughtful, but still accessible on a level where you see it and you’re like, “Wow, that’s really incredible,” but even just on the surface, you’re able to enjoy it. Once you really dig into it, she’s such an incredible thinker. She intimidates me.

We were fortunate enough to reissue Rose McDowall’s lost album, Cut With The Cake Knife that she self-released on CD in the ’90s, I think limited to a few hundred copies. This was an album that was a collection of songs that were recorded from I think ’86 to ’88 that were originally intended to be the follow-up to the Strawberry Switchblade record that everyone loved so much. These were the songs that she’d and written and recorded for the follow-up record that never happened. I’m a huge fan of all of her stuff and Strawberry Switchblade and all the bands that she’s worked with. It was mindblowing when I heard this record. I was like, “Someone has to reissue this. We have to reissue this.” We found out that Night School Records in the UK were planning a reissue it, so we got in touch with them and said, “We would love to do this in the US, maybe we could split it and do it in our own territories?” Now we have Rose coming to play in America for the very first time ever, which is really, really exciting. I can’t wait. I’m dying.

Taylor Brode

Rose actually opened for Jenny Hval last time she was in the UK. They did two shows together, because Jenny’s in more of a headline position right now. Promoters were like, “Yeah, we have 50 bucks for openers.” I’m like, “Do you know who the fuck Rose McDowall is?” I had to school all these promoters.

Caleb Braaten

Pharmakon, what a powerhouse. So, so intense. Definitely the most intense music that we release. In person she’s one of the sweetest, thoughtful people that you’ll know. Her music is incredibly...

Taylor Brode

Cathartic. Exorcism-like.

I feel like Contact is especially that way.

Caleb Braaten

She really rises above a lot of the noise stuff because she’s different. It’s song-based. It seems more focused. I’m not a huge noise head, but I definitely like a lot of it. I like the live experience more probably than I like the sitting at home listening to tapes.

Taylor Brode

Margaret’s live show is unbelievable. She’s in the audience and she’s performing right in your face. She wants this connection. Most noise dudes are twiddling knobs on a stage without looking up once the whole time. It’s a very different thing to see Margaret play than it is to go to a typical noise show. She’s so unfuckwithable as a live performer.

The very physical element in her music, for me at least, is a link to Dumb Flesh by Blanck Mass and that kind of corporeality.

Caleb Braaten

That was the first record where we started working with Ben Power. I was already a huge Fuck Buttons fan, and I think I saw them play at ATP, then Blanck Mass played. I didn’t know that first Blanck Mass record. I was surprised. It was much more ambient when I saw him play at that ATP, but the album had this grimy, dirty, techno-y kind of thing underneath it all.

We were talking afterwards and he was telling me how he’s recording a new record, I was like, “Sure, man. Hit me up.” We became really good friends, then he makes this insane, epic, noisy, dance record. I think that Blanck Mass lives somewhere in that Pharmakon world where it’s noise music, but it’s so much more than that.

Taylor Brode

Ben is amazing because he’s so supportive of the other artists on our roster. Every time someone is playing somewhere, if Ben can get there, he’ll go. He’ll buy them beers and hang out. He’s just really lovely in that way that he’s very hospitable and he’s a grown-up, so he’s very like, “How can I help you?” and very loyal and responsible. We’re very fortunate to have him.

Caleb Braaten

Definitely someone who appreciates being part of a family.

Obviously family’s a big part of Sacred Bones. The next person I want to talk about was John Carpenter and Lost Themes Remixed, how you met and the degree to which he became a part of the Sacred Bones family.

Caleb Braaten

First of all, what an honor it is to work with John Carpenter. He’s such a hero. The way it happened was John works with a music lawyer named Mae Ho. One day Mae is just like, “Hey, just so you know, I started working with John Carpenter. If you have any ideas, let me know. I’m his music lawyer now.” At this point, all of his soundtracks have been reissued by Death Waltz or one of these horror soundtrack labels, and I love those soundtracks, but I was like, “I don’t think that there’s anything else that hasn’t really been done yet. Well, maybe you could ask him if he has old material that got cut from the soundtracks laying around. Maybe we can compile some sort of something.”

She gets back to me and says, “No, he doesn’t have any old stuff, but he has been making music with his son and his godson, and do you want to hear it?” I was like, “Yeah, of course.” John sends us a CDR–

Taylor Brode

In the mail, unmarked, with no return address.

Caleb Braaten

We put it on, and it’s incredible. It was unmistakable. It sounds like his music. We went back and forth on a bunch of the songs and came up with Lost Themes, and then we convinced him to play live. It was very, very exciting for his fans, and also for him.

Taylor Brode

It’s nice for him to be a fucking rock star. They had an excruciating tour schedule last year and I think it was a little bit too much trouble because it’s so tiring being on tour. He headlined Primavera. He’s only been a touring musician for a year, but he was one of the headliners on the the second to main stage. It was 40 or 50,000 people going crazy like they were watching the Rolling Stones. People were holding up lighters. It was fucking insane.

Lastly, speaking of legacies, I’d to ask you to talk about working with David Lynch.

Caleb Braaten

We started working with David Lynch on the Eraserhead soundtrack. He is probably my biggest inspiration. His movies really opened up a totally new world to me. Eraserhead especially was just such a dark, mysterious place, and I loved the music to it. Just everything that he does is spectacular. I had this idea a long time ago that I wanted to work with him in some way, probably 2008. I had started crafting this idea where I would take a record, a copy of every single record that we did in every single version – which we always do multiple versions of every record – and I started amassing this collection that I was going to send to him, and with a letter, in hopes to maybe get to work together one day, or at the very least, I thought that maybe he would at least see what I’m up to, and that alone would mean something to me. I probably did this for a couple of years, and I had this giant box of records that I was ready to send. I’d found an address that I was confident would reach him or his team.

As I’m about to send it, I meet Mae Ho. She is like, “Oh, why don’t you just send it to me and I’ll hand it to him, and that’ll be much easier. A cold call’s probably not going to work.” I was like, “Dude, that would be amazing.” She did that, and he saw the stuff and thought that it was cool. I got an introduction to Dean Hurley, who was his music producer. He runs his studio and he’s in charge of everything on the music end and sound end of David’s work. I pitched the idea to Dean of doing the Eraserhead soundtrack, and he brought it up to David. David said, “Sure. Why not?” Boom, we were in. We gathered all the art and we worked on the packaging for about a year. We finally got it to the point where it was absolutely perfect. We made mock-ups of it. We went to Los Angeles and got to meet David, have a meeting with him, present our ideas. We had three different packaging ideas. He loved it. From there on, we just had this really good relationship with him and with Dean.

We put out Eraserhead around the same time that the first David Lynch solo record, Crazy Clown Time, comes out on another label. When it was time for the follow-up to Crazy Clown Time, The Big Dream, I said, “Dean, we could probably do this for America, because the label for Crazy Clown Time is a British label. We worked out a deal and we got to do the US for that record. It was really, really fun. It was really, really cool.

We continue to work with Dean and David all the time. I think we’ve done four records with them now, there was a 12" and a bunch of stuff around that The Air Is On Fire, which was this really cool atmospheric sound piece they did for an art show, and Polish Night Music, which is a project that David does with Marek Zebrowski, a Polish composer. It’s a minimal classical type piece. It’s all improvised.