It's been a couple years since the last kimdawn release (061). I want to thank all the supporters of this little microlabel. I did things in a peculiar way I know. I wanted to keep costs down so I could sell these little morsels of sound at a very low price. Initially I was able to sell the mini-cdrs at $4 a piece with FREE POSTAGE ANYWHERE. That seems so funny now, but I was able to do it for most of the releases up until postage rates finally got too high to ignore.
More about the format itself (the elephant in the room for sure). Undoubtedly there was some novelty involved, but I really did love those dumb little mini cds. I was first exposed to them through my roommates Nintendo GameCube and later through my writing gig for Foxy Digitalis. I bet a few of you reading this worked for the old Foxy site. Remember getting those huge boxes of media in the mail to sift through? It was awesome, but also a daunting task. I'll never forget labels like Small Doses and Rusted Rail (pictured) who used the tiny disc. Seeing those things meant I could count on some sort of a concise E.P. I connected them to 7" records in my mind, and Japanese culture and forgotten technology in general. They were always the easiest to write about.
Not everyone liked the lil' cds though. In fact, I would find out later that some of the artists I worked with didn't really support the format. Oops. They were hard to play for folks without the proper type of cd player (spindles and trays... are okay!), and I even got one heated e-mail from a customer who put the dang thing in his car stereo and couldn't get it out (pretty tense situation, with him calling me out on using such a "cute" format).
I connected with some great artists. Mossy Throats, Pink Priest (William Cody Watson), Summons of Shining Ruins, Froe Char, Quiet Evenings crew, With Moths, Paintings for Animals, Dusted Lux, Sound Pressings, Villages, Inez Lightfoot (Jackie McDowell), Rambutan, Cruudeuces, et al, and was lucky to release some material from my college and high school friends that I love (Geoffrey Sexton, Stephen Molyneux, Patrick Singleton, TJ Richards) - fucking incredible music that I was so lucky to be involved with. I wanted to have some sort of curatorial rationale like the labels I loved. It would be a dream to assemble a team of kimdawn favorites to create an album of cover songs like Ivo Watts-Russell did in the early 4AD years. Imagine that alternate universe for a second!
The last Kimberly Dawn thing I did was a tour-only reissue tape (gasp) that I did for the Stephen Molyneux/Sparkling Wide Pressure tour that we did last summer (2015). What a crazy/interesting/fun/exhausting event that was. Maybe I'll write a little about it later.
I can't really say that the label is totally finished. It was one of those rare successful experiment that worked for a nice little window of time.
Talk to you soon
-Frank
