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Steve Burhans (Selection Records and Matador Direct) Interview
Steve Burhans is the man behind Selection Records. Steve’s built an eclectic catalog of amazing vinyl and cassette titles with Selection, uncovering some of the best esoteric music from Japan, New Zealand and, of course, the United States. (For the uninitiated, Selection should appeal to fans of Xpressway and P.S.F. Records.) Along with Sloow Tapes, Selection has been a supporter of Yuka Ijichi and Hiirago Fukuda, making their titles available Stateside. Now in its sixth year, the label’s latest release is a 7” split between Tokyo’s Sadahiro Yamada and Watery Love.
Approximately two years ago, Burhans joined Matador Direct, taking over for Dave Martin, now at Captured Tracks. Steve’s had big shoes to fill, since Matador Direct has always been one of the best distros for underground music—handling such seminal labels as Crypt, Flying Nun and Siltbreeze back in the ‘90s. If there was anyone right for the task, with the requisite knowledge of the underground and the catholic tastes necessary for the job, it’s Steve.
Lastly, and on a personal note, Steve Burhans is one of the nicest guys I’ve met in this “micro-label” milieu we both stumble around in. He’s been a tireless supporter of the fledgling label Mor Fleisher-Leach and I run (Spacecase Records) and one of the reasons we keep going. I’m certain other independent labels working with Steve will report the same. There are exceptional people in the record game. Steve’s proof they exist.
Interview by Ryan Leach
Selection Records: www.selectionrecords.com
Ryan: Are we close in age? I was born in ’82.
Steve: I’m four years older. I was born in 1978.
Ryan: Have you always lived in New York?
Steve: I was born in Peoria, Illinois. My dad got a job working for Mobil Oil, which was shortly thereafter bought by Exxon. He was a programmer. Before I was ten, I had lived in five or six different states. I had lived all over Illinois and a couple of places in Ohio and Kentucky. I lived in states I can barely remember. I ended up in Rochester, New York, where I went to high school.
Ryan: What got you into music?
Steve: I was lucky. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, my mom owned a record store in downtown Chicago.
Ryan: How cool was she?
Steve: Really cool. My mom would tell me stories about the ‘60s; I was never sure how true they were. But then Skip Spence would come up in conversation and she’d pull out an original copy of Oar: “This was my favorite record of 1969. I sold five copies to my friends.” By the time that I was really into music, I realized that all the older records I liked were down in my parents’ basement. Every Byrds, Beefheart and Moby Grape record was down there. My dad really loved Captain Beefheart.
Ryan: You were creating fanzines in high school?
Steve: I did a few, just locally. I helped my friend with a zine he created called C.T.A. which ran for four issues. I did a lot of prank zines and absurdity stuff. We’d get in trouble for doing a bunch of flyering and putting up Xeroxed stickers within the high school. In retrospect, the school I went to was fine but it was stale. I’m not afraid to say that Rochester, New York, is a pretty stale place to grow up. Anything that was strange or out of the ordinary was frowned upon.
Ryan: Did you work at a record store?
Steve: Right after high school, I worked for one of the two great Rochester music institutions—Record Archive. They’ve been around for forty years. That’s where I got my true musical education. They literally had a warehouse of records that at eighteen I was in charge of clearing out. I still remember specific buys that came in where I bought every single record. I worked there for a while. I went to college sporadically but never got a degree. I then split to Buffalo, New York, which is one town over.
Ryan: You know Rich (Kroneiss), right?
Steve: I do.
Ryan: What were you doing in Buffalo?
Steve: Buffalo is an awesome town for rock and rock fandom. There are some legendary people up there. Rich is one of them. Bernie Kugel is another. Bernie had a zine in the ‘70s called Big Star. When I was living in Buffalo, the Box Tops came to town. I went with my friend Mark to see them and Bernie was there; he had brought old copies of his Big Star zine with him that he wanted Alex to sign. Alex came out onto the lawn—it was an outdoor show—and he recognized Bernie. He told the security guards, “Keep that fucking guy away from me.” It didn’t work because later on Bernie cornered Alex and got him to sign his zines. I realized then that Bernie went deep—way back with music.
In the ‘60s and ‘70s, Buffalo was happening. When steel kicked the bucket, the local economy started to go south.
Ryan: Pittsburgh’s steel industry was gutted too.
Steve: Right. But when the economy was still strong, Buffalo was vibrant. Rick James was from Buffalo and he lived there in the ‘70s and ‘80s. The Weinstein Brothers got their start as concert promoters in Buffalo before going into movies. There are all these old rock tales floating around the city. There were legendary punk clubs like McVan’s that are long gone. Black Flag and Alex Chilton played there.
I realized I wasn’t going to be a musician, but I wanted to get more involved with music so I started booking shows in Buffalo. I booked a lot of the freak-folk stuff that was going on at the time; a lot of noise and experimental stuff. I worked with Tony Conrad.
Ryan: That’s incredible. What was working with Tony Conrad (1940-2016) like?
Steve: It was a trip. Tony was cool and very, very sweet. If you went up to Tony and talked with him as a normal person, he was great. If you came up to Tony and mentioned the Velvet Underground, Lou Reed or John Cale, it was war. He would not talk to you. I’ve seen him chase kids he overheard saying, “That’s the guy who named the Velvet Underground.” “What’d you say?!”
Tony taught at the University of Buffalo in the early ‘70s. People like Tony Conrad coming to Buffalo had a big impact on the arts scene. Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo went to school in Buffalo; they started a space called Hallwalls that’s still there. There remains a strong art scene in Buffalo, but there’s another side to it. The Termbo side known only to a handful of residents. Buffalo is cold and dark. People drink a lot. Right before I left town in 2005, I moved to San Francisco, I scheduled a two-day festival with some very non-Termbo acts like Matt Valentine, Burning Stare Core, Tony Conrad and a bunch of other bands.
I worked at the Amoeba store in San Francisco. I met a lot of people out there. I was just working and hanging out.
Ryan: Did you start Selection in San Francisco?
Steve: I didn’t start Selection until I moved back to New York. I’m a pretty latecomer to it. But all the other stuff helped, like meeting people who put out records. I had tried my hand at putting out local bands before in Buffalo but it didn’t really go anywhere. I got a good gallery job in New York with better pay.
Ryan: That’s the thing with record labels: you can have the desire, but you’ve got to have the bankroll to get it going.
Steve: Exactly. It took a long time to get into that position. And I’m kind of happy it did. If I had started younger I would have put out some garbage.
Ryan: It seemed like P.S.F. and Xpressway were early influences.
Steve: Definitely. I first heard about P.S.F. in Buffalo. When I moved to Buffalo I was exposed to record stores that ordered from Forced Exposure. It was totally different from Rochester. It changed the way I thought about music.
Ryan: How did you start making all these inroads with Japanese artists like Hiiragi Fukuda?
Steve: Hiiragi was really the key. I had been a longtime fan of P.S.F. I got to a point where I was hearing contemporary Japanese psych stuff—not just older P.S.F. titles—that I really liked. Hiiragi did that My Turntable is Slow (2010) cassette on Sloow tapes. I thought it was incredible. I wrote to him to see what was up with it: “You only released ninety copies of this on cassette?” He said he’d love to do a record, and I thought it’d be a perfect title to rerelease. That’s how that started. Hiiragi brought a lot of stuff to my attention, including Sadahiro Yamada. He’s been received well, at least critically. So has Hiiragi. Hiiragi is a slow worker. The last record came out six or seven years ago, and he’s still working on a follow up. We did do two later 7”s though. Hiiragi had projects that he wanted to release himself, but from what I understand it’s just impossible for a normal person to get records pressed in Japan.
Ryan: Sadahiro runs a record store in Tokyo?
Steve: A CD shop. I asked him if he’d like me to send him some records other this his own. He said, “No. I just sell my own records. We don’t sell any other records here.” They still have a complete CD culture in Japan. It’s incredible. I’ve tried to bring Japanese records here with larger labels; they wanted me to do the vinyl. They’ve told me that the artist wants to have records out, but that they don’t want to release them. If you don’t go through the artist, the licensing demands are typically insane for Japanese albums. The label will want a certain amount for free; the cover has to be a Stoughton gatefold and the vinyl will need to be 180 to 200 grams. And the price has to be $20. I just go, “That sounds great, but it’s not going to work.”
Ryan: Japanese album covers can get really ornate. Even the cassettes you’ve released on Selection for Sadahiro Yamada are really intricate and striking.
Steve: That’s all Hiiragi. He has a guy that he works with exclusively. I let them do what they want. Four colors. They come back with crazy covers. Thankfully, no one has asked for a gatefold or Stoughton cover.
Ryan: How did OK to Exist Doing Nothing come to your attention? It’s a pretty incredible record, featuring Kiyohiro Takada from Les Rallizes Denudes.
Steve: That was something that Hiiragi had. He told me he had this tape of a live show where he played drums—which was strange because Hiiragi is a guitar player. Yuka Ijichi, who I also released a tape by, she plays guitar which is not her main instrument. The bass player, Kiyohiro Takada, is Yuka’s husband and, of course, one of the bass players of Les Rallizes. When you hear the record, it’s him. He’s playing all the classic basslines from those stellar Les Rallizes bootlegs. That was a real thrill—putting out a record Kiyohiro played on. But it was an insane live record.
Ryan: The record smokes. Les Rallizes Denudes was a real force. I remember talking with James Arthur about them. He had just heard them for the first time, and I told him it was a band that’d likely mean a lot to him.
Steve: I ask Hiiragi about the band—are you ever going to play together again? Of course, there’s a language barrier. It can difficult to get information or I’m not reading things correctly. It’s strange. I don’t think that lineup is going to get together again. The members of the band seem to be really into home taping. Drums machines and rhythm aces. That’s what I’m hearing from that crew right now.
Ryan: The Adam Payne record (Famous Blondes) was really good. That one took a while to come out, huh?
Steve: I’m really proud of that record. It might be the only album I had a slight hand in with picking the songs. I’ve known Adam for years. We worked at Amoeba together in San Francisco. We had talked about doing something for a while. He always sends me songs. I think he sends a lot of people songs, but I certainly listen to them all. Over the course of three or four years, I kept track of what he had sent. It’s sort of like the stories you hear about Robert Pollard from Guided by Voices. He’d send in a tape saying, “Here’s the record. It’s done.” Then three weeks later, another tape would come: “No. This is the record. It’s all new songs. They’re all done.” That’s kind of how it was with Adam. The first record we were supposed to do, none of those songs made it to the final version. There’s probably twenty songs that were supposed to show up on Famous Blondes that didn’t. That said, there were songs that I fought for that did make it to the album. I think records should reflect what the artists wants. But there were a couple of older songs that I felt passionate about; that deserved to be on the LP. A lot of the records he did previously, either solo or with Residual Echoes, were really heavy guitar psych. There wasn’t a lot of weird prop, goofy or psych stuff. That’s why I like Famous Blondes. It was a different side to Adam’s work.
Ryan: What direction are you looking to take Selection in?
Steve: I want to try do something—for lack of a better term—“archival.” A project more in depth. I want to find something that needs to get done and do it. That’s what I’m interested in doing these days.
Ryan: I sort of explored the Electric Blood (Robert Scott’s first band) stuff. It’s great. Are you still looking at doing an LP of that?
Steve: I’ve still got it. Robert painted the cover. I’ve got all the audio. It’s a really early cassette.
Ryan: From ’78?
Steve: Yeah. It’s a bunch of early stuff with Robert and his friends. One of them (Phil Tomkins) passed away.
Ryan: Yes. I released one or two tracks from that session. It’s really shambolic.
Steve: Right. Robert’s a really unique individual. That’s one that I’m looking at. I just released the Sadahiro Yamada/Watery Love split, although I think Watery Love pretty much stopped playing shows, at least for the time being, which shows impeccable timing on my part. Honestly, working at Matador it’s a challenge to do that stuff all day. I’m dealing with production delays for huge records—things like that. When I get home, I have to deal with it on a very micro level for my own label. I think that the next thing I do, I have to be very passionate about.
Ryan: I noticed you’ve slowed down the mail order with Selection just to your own titles.
Steve: I had to. It just got to be too much doing it all day for work, then coming him to do it again.
Ryan: Matador Direct was always on top of things. Every friend or acquaintance I had with a relevant small label seemed to be distro’d by them. A lot of that had to do with Dave Martin. How did you get the job and what’s it been like taking over?
Steve: I came to Matador because I had known one of the salespeople there, Helen (Johnson), from way back when I was buying albums for the record store in Buffalo. I had heard that they needed somebody as I was getting ready to exit my old job. I went in and I happened to have the right qualifications; it didn’t hurt that I knew somebody. It worked out great. At the time, I think Dave was ready to move over to Captured Tracks. When I was young, in the ‘90s, the mail order catalog for Matador was intense. I kept several old copies. In addition to Matador, they had the full Flying Nun, Siltbreeze and Crypt catalogs. Then they had the small labels, like on the level of the ones you and I do—they’d have thirty pages of that stuff. I’d go to the grocery store with my mom to get money orders to send to Matador. There was no other way to get a Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments record in Rochester. So when I started working at Matador, that side of the label was so important to me. Not to say the other (Beggars Group) labels weren’t important, but that aspect of the Matador meant a lot to me when I was a kid. It’s like what people older than me did with issues of Forced Exposure. That’s one thing I really want to keep alive with the label.
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