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The Family guerrero John Askew has managed to build something beautiful out of a name nobody can pronounce. by Arthur Wiley Over the past four years, John Askew has established FILMguerrero as one of Portland’s most respectable record labels, releasing records from eleven artists, including Norfolk & Western, Gabriel “Naim” Amor, Adam Selzer, and Tracker. What’s unique about this label though, is what a strong and prolific community seems to have sprung up within, or around it. All in all, FILMguerrero has put out seventeen albums, and browsing the various bands’ biographies on the website, one can’t help but notice that the same names keep popping up. John himself is/was part of Wasted Tape and currently plays in Tracker. Norfolk & Western’s main songwriter, Adam Selzer, has released a solo album on the label, was part of the original Tracker lineup, and has played with The Graves, not to mention having recorded many FILMguerrero releases at his studio, Type Foundry. Another early member of Tracker was Eric Herzog, who was also the drummer for Buellton and Wasted Tape. Zak Riles is not only the man behind Peace Harbor, but has also contributed to Norfolk & Western. Rachel Blumberg, who plays drums in Norfolk & Western, has also played with The Graves. Confused yet? While all this member-swapping can make it somewhat difficult to keep track of who’s doing what, it also makes for a strong FILMguerrero family that continually puts out beautiful music, as opposed to the common tactic of having a roster made up of completely separate, unrelated bands. One of the benefits Askew sees in this approach is, as in any family, the safety net. “Since I’m one of the artists on the label, it seemed like if I wasn’t able to go on tour but Norfolk & Western was, but we were still connected; and then he couldn’t go on tour and I did—if you just spread that out to be bigger it could only help.” John says that the community model of the label is not 100% deliberate, but just sort of worked out that way. “There was kind of a collective mentality, so I was working at Adam Selzer’s studio, Type Foundry, freelancing there. And I had a project that I put out called Tracker and he had the Norfolk & Western record and we kind of just needed a place to put it. So that was sort of where FILMguerrero started.” But it’s not always the ideal way to run a business. The downfall to that, in John’s eyes, “was that as a collective you rely on other people to help you out, and that’s not always the case. And so once distribution started getting kind of heavy and I just inevitably was taking on those duties myself, I realized well, it’s not a collective really, in that sense.” Of course, not everybody on FILMguerrero is in everybody else’s band. There are some acts that exist solely on their own, such as Transmissionary Six and Gabriel “Naim” Amor. These are a couple of the non-Portland bands on FILMguerrero. The label’s newest addition, a “borderline mathrock” band that goes by the name of Manta Ray, is from Spain.
It’s not surprising that John is unsettled by this experience. He tends to place more importance on his relationship with the bands on his label than on whatever sellable aspects they may have or how much indie cred they possess. Somewhat refreshingly, he notes that he’s actually more likely to be impressed by having a conversation with an artist than he would be by listening to their demo or reading a flashy bio. “If there’s a way of striking up correspondence with me, that’s always helpful because then we can just talk about it and I can learn a lot about the project or the person involved pretty much right away... If I have a correspondence with somebody and something kinda works, even if we were just talking about like, ‘what do you buy at the supermarket?’ or something, I can learn a lot about that, and how they’re going to present themselves in terms of just music. And then I think I’m more willing to be like, ‘alright, well I’d love to hear what you’re doing’”. However, most people don’t feel comfortable calling the label they want to be on and striking up a conversation. For better or for worse, the common method of “applying” to a record label is sending a demo. There are things people can do to make theirs stick out among all the manila envelopes, according to John. “If someone were to send me a demo, the thing that would probably grab me first, is the way that they present what they’re doing... It’s like you could go online and say, ‘what to do if you send a demo’ and it’d be like a checklist because every single demo is the same thing. You know, it’s a cdr with a sheet that says, ‘hey, this is what we’ve done’. And I mean I send those things out to labels, but it’s kind of hard to know what would be different, and there’s a couple demos that I received recently that came in the coolest package. And it was also really general, like, ‘hey, here’s our record, hope you like it’. It wasn’t a request, it wasn’t anything, it was just like, ‘check it out, it seems like you might like this from what you’re doing’... If I have a stack of demos that I haven’t listened to, I don’t feel bad for listening to this one first.” There’s also the simple fact that different people are attracted to different types of art, John included. Even though there is ample diversity of styles within the FILMguerrero roster, the bands all share a similar aesthetic. “If there’s a visual element to it, where I can kind of get lost in it, then it works for me.” This helps explain the somewhat perplexing title. “FILMguerrero” isn’t exactly the most straightforward name for a record label. John is (sometimes painfully) aware of this fact. “Yeah, I’ve received a couple emails that were resumes for acting, or people that are drawn to the name from ‘film’. I mean, it is unfortunate you know, people can barely even spell it, so those are things that I maybe would’ve thought about more. I mean ‘guerrero’ came from a bag of tortillas that I was eating, it didn’t have this story. “But I definitely wanted to do something and I still want to do something where it has the opportunity as a label, or just as an entity in itself, to do anything that happens. It doesn’t get stuck in a genre or get stuck in a format, ‘cause maybe something down the road will happen where it’s a book or whatever.” This open-ended attitude is key to understanding what FILMguerrero is trying to accomplish. It started off as a few guys
That philosophy has endured over the years and is still a big part of the way John operates. While he doesn’t have any regrets about how FILMguerrero started out, he isn’t shy about admitting that he’s made some mistakes, and that he does certain things differently these days. “Probably the one thing that I try to do is spend a lot of time with the record in my hand, physically, before I actually tell people that it’s going to be released. Because I inevitably set release dates when I have printing problems and nothing shows up and I’m freaked out... And to give a record a couple years to grow, to really keep working it. I generally do that as a rule, but from the beginning, the first few records—it’s kinda like putting something out into space and just seeing where it goes. And now I have a feeling that I know where it’s going”. Perhaps the most valuable lesson has been to simply take his time, not release so many records. In a way, FILMguerrero’s growth has been backward, releasing as many albums as possible for the first couple years, then gradually slowing to it’s current pace. John has released only two albums so far in 2003. He recalls FILMguerrero’s first two years, and points out that he initially bit off more than he could chew. “We released...maybe four records that [first] year, and then the next year it kind of took a couple big risks. And now it’s back down to a more realistic pace.” John’s plans for FILMguerrero’s future are fairly simple. He wants it to evolve into a more inclusive entity, insofar as format and geography. Most of all he wants to keep doing what he’s doing, taking whatever challenges as they come. Hopefully, he’ll be able to make FILMguerrero his full-time job. “I would love to be able to have it be that FILMguerrero’s just a network of people and they just start inserting projects into it and it starts to work. And then that becomes FILMguerrero’s sound.” He may be closer than he thinks. John Askew will be hosting a full night of music on Saturday, Sept 5 at the Tonic Lounge. It’s FILMguerrero’s contribution to MusicFest Northwest 2003. 8:00 - Peace Harbor
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John says that he hasn’t even met the members of the band, something that would be strange for any label owner, but considering FILMguerrero’s emphasis on community, it’s pretty incredible, and he is admittedly a little uncomfortable with it. “I’ve been working with this one guy from the [European] label. So I’m not even dealing with the band. And that is a completely odd experience, yet I really like dealing with the label. He’s a great guy, there’s no pressure, I feel like I can ask him questions and not feel like a dork... But I mean, I’ve never talked to anybody in the band. I mean, it’s completely weird, and that is definitely not the way I’d like to do it. I don’t want to ever duplicate the experience, except in a weird way I sort of feel like the guy I’m working with is the band. That’s an unusual experience, but I’m hoping it works out.”
who were “all kind of confused about the label, and the duties of a label, so let’s start one and do it, figure it out.”