Archival Records

the proprietor of Revenge r VN International. When Matt founded the Revenge label in two thousand three, he came in with a lot of hands on experience before running a record label. I was running a record label. I've kind of always been running record labels. I was a part of the punk rock scene in Little Rock, Arkansas, where I grew up. In high school, an established record label was handed down to me and a kind of ceremonial

or maybe non ceremonial way. The previous tenant was leaving on tour and needed someone to kind of look over mail order. I walked into a situation with a label with international distribution and a big catalog and learned my way around from there and never looked back. I moved to New York City, discovered dance music, electronic music. I still love punk rock, but I was participating in that world quite a bit more than the scene that I grew up in. Revenge was kind of like a punk

rock label in a dance music community. Akin to punk rock, Revenge was founded on the basis of a moral code, one that emphasizes the ethic of doing it yourself. It's just fair d I Y is the fair shake almost literally. Not that we still rely on handshake deals, but we still maintain a fifty fifty net profit deal with all of our artists. We still encourage artists participation and autonomy and self starting, keeping their principles in the driver's seat.

Revenge is mutated a lot over the last eighteen years. We went from kind of applying the same punk rock practices spray painting the DJ mix covers, hand collating everything, to finding distribution shape shifting from dance music into more as a teric avant garde experimental music. We've never really followed one specific genre. Instead just kind of followed an instinct that's essentially informed the evolution of the label more than anything, adaptability to new music and a very open

attitude and heart toward new sound. Well, Revenge does a tremendous job breaking and promoting new artists, their efforts also extend into reinvigorating existing mater room. Just like Revenge is agnostic to genre, it's more of an intuitive feeling which

kind of new music we get involved with. The same concept applies to archival music, except maybe the spin is that we choose to focus on artists that didn't really have a fair shake the first time around, or whose music was appreciated but maybe under explored at the time. We tend to favor musicians that we're doing it themselves then too, so you'll see throughout the archival division a

lot of home produced music. There's that spirit of autonomy, the idea that these musicians were doing it for themselves with some hope that it would transmit beyond their home studios or beyond the fifty cassettes they were duplicating and sending out. Our first archival record was Synthesist by Harold Groskoff, Originally released early eighties. Grosskoff was a staple in German crowd rock bands and then went off to make this extremely synthetic record compelled by his live drumming. There was

not a huge market for reissues at the time. There were certainly a few labels that had started as reissued labels and had huge catalogs from the beginning, but in our sector, there just wasn't a lot of people going deep on reissues. Honestly, it felt like Harold's record was contemporary to our catalog and it just made sense to contextualize it with what we were doing. Synthesis was like a straight one to one reissue, and we had fun

mutating the experience around the album. We used different artwork. We included a disc of reinterpretations of Harald's music, obviously created all new context with liner notes too, add a little bit more tech, sure, a little bit more colored. The next one was Sensations Fix, the project of an Italian musician named Franco Falsini who was making music in the early seventies through the mid seventies of Sensations Fix.

For that one, we went through his archives and compiled two LP set that covered the full Sensations Fixed gamnet and lasted. Apart of the chronology, it wasn't like seventy one through side A to side D. It was how we responded to the sequence. From there, we visited the archives of k Limber, an amazing bedroom producer composer from Seattle, and then we reissued Craig Leon's No Moos and visiting a pair of records that he made in the early eighties.

Craig was a fixture in the downtown New York scene, famously the producer of the first Ramons record, Blondie the Fall, and then went off to make this highly experimental electronic record.

From there we went through Oriel Kalmas archives, French saxophone player two, melded his wind instruments with synthesizers, Bred Woman, the character the myth making of Anna Homler, which was also a collaboration with Stephen Mosher, went back to kay Lymber's archives to release Savants Ensemble with other Seattle musicians doing like a Brian you know, David Byrne sample vibe

and the grules of this. I need to like Syrinx, which was a Canadian trio pioneering mogue, synthesizers, Pauline and a strong again an archival effort to go through all of her independently released work. Mark Renner, the musician from Baltimore, in the eighties, making Drudy column esque shimmering UK influenced guitar driven music. Michelle Mercure the collection for her self released music from the eighties, and that was the most recent before Peter Iver's, which was our Catalog number nine,

and then took another six years to actually release. Developing the album that would be titled Becoming Peter Ivor's began a unique journey from math through the archives of another person's ephemera. The best way to get to know Peter is through his music. I really wish I could just like carry around the little Peter toy box that I could open and crank and it would play Miraculous Weekend

or eighteen and Dreaming. Peter grew up in Massachusetts. Bypassing his fildhood, he ended up at Harvard in the late sixties, joined by so many other wild, imaginative characters Fight Harvard, Fight, Fight, Fight, demonstrate to them our skill from Doug Kenny, who founded National Lampoon. By their friends and neighbors Stargard Channing, John Lithgow. There's explosive creativity happening all around Peter. He gravitated towards music.

He would make trips out to Chicago to study blues heart players and come back with that knowledge sharpening his

harmonica playing skills. He would help create music for his friend Tim Mayor's theater productions at Harvard, and then ended up making his own record still in college or just out of college, called Knight of the Blue Communion COMMUNIONCOUM, which is kind of the Zappa esque Free for All that somehow ended up on Epic Records because Peter barged in on a meeting that he wasn't really invited to. This is all happening to Peter before He's tonight, another

myth from Massachusetts. Fresh slices of Osiris littered the city, The cock of the walk, the talk of the town, waits for his hawkheaded son to come down and assemble him. Will the result resemble him? The record flopped, but Peter was determined and headed out to California. He eventually was signed to Warner Brothers by Van Dyke Parks, who at the time was in r but had more notably produced The Beach Boys music and his own fantastical orchestrated music.

Peter had another shot at stardom or pop success. The Academy and Fellow with this new deal and submitted a highly avant pop record called Terminal Of for his debut on Warder Brothers. It's a masterpiece by my estimation, but again it didn't quite connect space sound. But even with a string of less than successes, Peter's individualism remained intact and doors continued to open before him. I think there was a belief in Peter around the label. He really

brought such a magnetic energy to any environment. It created a support system for his antics. Around the time Eternal Love he opened for Fleetwood Mac. Famously, he wore a diaper on stage and through hot dogs at the audience. A lot of people look at that as this self sabotaging tactic, but Peter was genuinely interested in transforming the audience expectations and felt that that was the best way that he could go out and win over a Fleetwood

Mac crowd. It didn't work so well, obviously, it makes a great story, but he remained connected in the music world. Got to make another record with Gary Wright, who famously wrote and produced dream Weaver for his second Warner Brothers album,

m M, that again did not perform. Around that time, he was introduced to David Lynch a friend named Steve Martin, not to be confused with that Steve Martin, nonetheless a very instrumental figure in Peter's life who ran a midnight cinema in l A that kind of broke David Lynch's career by showing eraser Head for several years. I thought

I heard a stranger. We've got chicken tonight. The soundtrack of David Lynch's seminal film is made up of mostly amplified ambience, Fats Waller's swinging pipe organ, and one signature sing along. As our main character lays awake in bed, we peer inside the radiator to reveal a checkered stage upon which a smiling blonde with swollen cheeks dance is the two step and sings to Cameron Peter wrote in Heaven,

which became a centerpiece of that film. That's Peter's voice, By the way, a lot of people primarily know Peter through that song. You know the most famous song I wrote, It's called Him and Diana. Are you sure? The song in a razor Hood is called which certainly is a testament to his songwriting. In the weird effect of Peter's sensibilities, but is just one part of a huge catalog of music.

Everything is everything is everything. He was a studious home recorder in the house that he and Lucy Fisher, his girlfriend of many years, lived. He almost had a monkish ascetic practice of recording music every single day, and he left this incredible trail of music in various stages, which ultimately became vocal to our collection. He was also a black belt in karate. He was a yoga master. He

was on the scene. He was a social butterfly and clubs and all these different contexts, and I think that's how he ended up hosting a new wave theater WelCom. The New Wave Theater was a customer accent increased to pass a skeleton around the table before every banquet to remind every one of their mortality, which was a seminal cable access show in Los Angeles in the early eighties.

New Wave Theater fearlessly documented a scene which arose from the discontent and uncertainty of the youth of the country that broke a lot of punk rock bands Janitor, Suburban Lawns, Dead Kennedy's Black Flag. He kind of walked into that situation treating it as a gig. What are you projecting, by the way your presentention of the music. Most of our songs are rags, you know. I mean, we're just we're talking about outmoded sensibilities, outmoded sensibilities like read him,

like surf culture. Famously, as host, he presented all these monologues before bands would play that have become so synonymous with him. Hey, every Gigel has an unconscious idea of what good art is. The New Way Theory drill Bits Survey says real art always has some stack of the unknown woman into its spine. Yes, there's nothing like the unknown to make people stop to fulfill art's purposes. Change maker art and music as art is truth in a play.

Only Geegle set limits on their future, not understanding that the unknown as a friend. A New Way Theater Bible bulletin says it's better to spend more time on where you're going than where you've been. Does that mean we're timeless and we can just bounce off the bumpers of burger them like somebody abandoned shopping cards. And the sixties it was never trust anyone over thirty and the new music eighties has never trust anyone who's alive. In the fifties,

it was banned the bomb. In the eighties, it's which bomb, we've forgotten, the atomic lessons of yesterday and a hopeless frenzy of shredded plastic and vital vitriol. But is still time to him the Hackles, provided we the pioneers, share the same blend o vision, the people will not perish, enjoy the show. But these were monologues that he actually didn't writes today. In Regan Country, it's only at funerals and times of loss that we allow ourselves to see

the tranjiance of life. For no one wants to be reminded of the passage of time, especially when they're having a good one. Peter Tree Neway Theater as a day job when he really wanted to be working on his music. That's sadly where Peter's story ends. He was murdered in in his downtown l a loft. It remains an unsolved case. Maybe that's the third thing that Peter is most known for, and obviously the most tragic thing that he's known for. Though they never met, Matt found a personal connection to

Peter through his music. You and New Yez just Carny Lights, Dream, I wanted you Way Well and a dream. My infatuation with Peter started about ten years ago, finding all of his albums, which they're probably so they weren't a ton of becoming familiar with New Way theater. This fact has not been lost on the young, who today, at the very least, are making enough poetic noise to waken the

dead and chill the living. And a couple of years after I discovered his music, and oral history of Peter's life was written, which eventually led me to his archives. Lucy Fisher, as mentioned, was Peter's longtime girlfriend. She became a quite powerful executive at Warner Brothers and has gone on to produce a number of films. A story like

mine has never been told. Very humbly, I approached Lucy to see what was being done with Peter's music archives, knowing that she was so close, and finding out that she was actually administering Peter's estate, she granted permission to visit Harvard and go through Peter's archives, which had been sent there for safekeeping after his murder. It was the first of many, many times, because the first experience was just so overwhelming. To Harvard's credit, they had at least

put everything in boxes. Once opening those containers, though, there was just no organization whatsoever. It was like Peter's brain overflowing. There was sheet music, magazine clippings, tapes, BHS, cassettes, stoodles, notebooks, just a really random assortment of ephemera. The first couple of days was more of a psychological gestation phase. What am I walking into? What am I contending with here?

But if you've ever been through a personal archive, like sorting the belongings of a late family member, you know there's more to contend with than the materials at hand, going through the belongings of someone else, reckoning with that spirit that looms over you. I know, I don't love people going through my ship. So it's a very personal experience and a reverent one. You kind of have to respectfully acknowledge the mess. When it comes to cataloging one's

own stuff, everybody has a different approach. He was thorough, he was not exact. So once we actually got to the audio portion of the archives at Harvard, it was a total game of whackamrole. The tapes were largely unmarked or they work marked critically and there were over seven hundred cassettes and reels. Instead of being scientific about it and looking for like exact brands that may have matched the years that we were trying to capture audio from,

we just transferred everything. We transferred every single reel and essentially created the database for Peter's archives at Harvard along the way, which was fun and also ruling over seven tapes, there's just going to be a large amount of unused, sometimes unlistenable music or just audio detritus. Speaking from my own experience, what keeps your head down during that exercise and tedium is holding out for the eureka moments? How far would you go before you sold yourself? Martin? We

set up these impromptu tape transferred studios. I was in one very barren, vacant room. There was no heating, there were no curtains over the windows, lonely environment, super conducive to having an intimate experience with the project at hand. Going through mostly unmarked consumer grade cassettes and pulling out of super nondescripts C sixty cassette that had ain't that a kick written on the label, putting it in and

then hearing in a totally different way. Six or seven versions of Peter songs that I knew and adored one day love the camp new orchestration is added level of production and sheen. It was truly astounded and probably like an experience that only I could have at that time as someone on that mission, as someone so invested in infatuated with Peter's work. But yeah, for me, it turned my brain inside out. And now, of course we have to cut to a commercial, and Heaven everything is fine,

and Heaven, everything is fine in heaven. You got your good thanks, and I've got mine gone gone, gone gone, And Heaven do you have it on take? When can we get a Copye? How do you go from that massive archived transfer to paring it down and turning it into a record. You don't do it by yourself, that's for sure. I enlisted my friend Matthew Sanders to help me go through everything. We weren't working in the same room because we would just be too much, and we

were allowing ourselves the leisure of time. We set up a pretty elaborate Google spreadsheets that linked to all of the transfers on a Dropbox server. Big shoutouts to those huge corporate platforms. We would make notes on these linked reels in different fields, clearly being able to mark music that could possibly make the cut, that was definitely going to make the cut, and that was definitely not going

to make the cut. Walking in a through collaborative feedback, we arrived at a much more lean track selection, no knock to Peter's capabilities, but surprisingly, after going through seven reels, it was not insanely imposing. What we landed on was like, Okay, this is the best of the best, seeing you face the taste of there's no time just stop myself haunted by your careful stacreously looking through just to see if that wasn't paying. But we still need to slim this down.

In that process, we started sequencing, working with really long sequences of songs just to see what was working and what wasn't. There was another process of elimination, and then we ended up where we needed to end up, but still didn't have everything we needed to complete the story, so we had to go to Warner Brothers to license a few tracks. I'm a little hot dog, really yeah, your love is hot, but that's the thrill of happy on the ground the Harvard Boxes. In addition to audio

recordings contained a hodgepodge of other ephemera. All right, here we go again. Now we came across a lot of amazing photography of Peter that had never been seen before, which ended up on the cover and ends up on the liner notes. Come on, come on, give me a smile. None super intimate, but quite a few professionally shots revelatory photos of Peter during that time. Problem here, I can't

make up my mind. Which one do you? This was the time when major labels were splashing money around photo shoots. Anyone would do? They're all good. Lots of contact sheets and then an enormous amount of his notebooks with lyrics, with to do list, phone numbers, a lot of anecdotal questions, what do you look for in a relationship? Written mostly in pencil, posed to himself, posed to other people, because

any expectation makes it? On spontaneous notes to Lucy that you could tell he'd fixed to the front door of their house. And then there were tons of formal proposals, Hi, I'm Peter Iver's you here to do a presentation of my musical Nirvana Beach. Those jolly themes are set deep depression and death that's right, Rision you like an angel

shine miraculous Weekend. There were multiple copies of various scripts for the screenplays that he was working on, plays that he had written xerox from tight to originals, and tons of sheet music that spoke to his musicality. When his friends would come over and jam, presumably he was handing out with sheet music for everyone to follow. Get the style rack in this Weekend You This Weekend back at the Vortex. The song ends with the audience blewing the

band on two three D four you. While Peter Ivor's is most associated with contemporaneous new wave artists, his approach his songwriting has been compared to that of Irving Berlin and the great American songbooks. And they say you learn how without me? So okay, I told you to forget about me by there's not another girl amused me. I told you to go. Peter sense of songcraft was not necessarily like old fashioned, but it did kind of have

a sensibility tucked away in some history of songbooks. One thing I do know she where isisy to keep as simple but unstep the actual sonics, especially from the collection that we put together, they kind of have a feel of the day, but then you stripped back the ornamental rock and roll instrumentation and get down to a very intimate sensibility. The night it didn't come, I had so many questions. I didn't know where, and I don't know where.

I checked the clock to talking my memory, and then I checked my Peter with a Fender Rhodes drum machine and harmonica doubling his vocal takes to me is just as profound as Peter with an orchestra behind him on the night, on the night, on the night, on the night, on the night it didn't come, on the night, on the night, on the night, on the night, on the night didn't come. One of the things that I just wish I could hear now is where would he have ended up? What kind of music would he have written?

And how would he have placed that songwriting approach to new movements in music or to new genres. It's a tremendous responsibility to curate what's essentially the summation of a life's work. How do you capture that magic and something that is consumable by the public. I've waited so long. Girls, set yourself and take your chances. One of the things I was constantly reckoning with was my super fandom and the fact that most people have no idea who Peter is.

So how do you present a case for Peter? How do you make his music approachable? A good song amazing to go? You can't expect a girl like I Want You when she doesn't know you want her to. You gravitate toward the hits first, but even then, the most successible music is not that accessible. Then you gravitate towards the intimate moments, the human moments that everyone could possibly relate to. Why don't you let yourself go so she can let herself come to? Fortunately we had that in spades.

There were just all these incredible demos of stripped back Peter Ivor's songs that took away the brass, that took away the production and kind of left spare and these amazing songs started my song sweet Melody come On and singing in Peter's printed material. The Revenge team came across the document with a particularly telling quote, demos are often better than records, more energy, more soul, more guts. That

was another Eureka moment for us. We're clearly focusing on a lot of his demo material, and he said it here in this broader context. It was just kind of like the invitation from Peter to keep going along the path that we're going beautiful Conference Conference. The context that that appears from is actually a proposal that he was writing too Warner Brothers, which was called the Peter Iver's Plan. We fade to black and we come up once more

on avan of Beach Party. He was interested in starting an arm of Warner Brothers that dealt in music videos before there were music videos, And this time the images from the song become the set. You see a blue diamond moon cresting the horizon and a timeless island floating in the distance. A version of MTV. This is the way we want to do it, a video feature using film and video, highly designed, energized, and hot. Part of that proposal was looking at the everyday life of musicians.

Does that mean lick the microphone? Yeah, lick the microphone and being able to document the process of how different musicians creates. These accomplishments are written in a memorial somewhere in someone's mind. I don't think about video. It lives here without you. After six years of work, becoming Peter Ivor's was released in twenty nineteen. Once we'd landed on

that selection and sequence, we hesitantly. I think I remember just like putting this off for so long, sending the final tracks to Lucy Fisher and to Steve Martin's our gatekeepers for the project, being two of the closest people to Peter. We just wanted nothing more than to make them happy. Eventually getting that selection and sequence over and from both of them, receiving one of the most positive responses possible and the green light to go ahead with

those selections. Then it became a us us of There were so many other obstacles after that. We had to license a few tracks from Warner Brothers. As I mentioned, we ended up remixing a few of the tracks because we had multitrack versions transferred and just needed a little

bit more life out of the music. We had to re transfer some of the cassettes because the fidelity was not necessarily the best on our audition transfer, and then we had to master the entire thing while simultaneously writing the liner notes, compiling the artwork, and starting the early conversations with press and our distributor and stuff. That's really music, a real fabulous billion. It's been really heartwarming. Making Lucy

and Steve happy was the biggest battle one. From there, seeing other people that had been a part of Peter's life embrace the collection and participate in interviews What's the meaning of life? And show up at the release parties. That was the peripheral reward, and then the further reward is just seeing all sorts of new people come to Peter's music, which is happening in very different ways, from amazing press to one of Peter's songs is going to

close this Friday's episode of High Maintenance. Oh yeah, you're You're my favorite customer. So we also learned that Peter is huge in Japan. We shipped so many records and CDs over there and received such a positive response from Japanese man. So there's a new appreciation around Peter. In the narrative that built up posthumously around Peter Ivor's, the artist himself was often overshadowed by the tragedy of his murder. One of the efforts underpinning this project was to avoid

falling into that trap. Having known the Cold Case story for so long, and especially for the people that surrounded and new Peter. It happened. It's tragic, and it's tragic that it's not been solved, But it's the past, beyond sensational tabloid true crime narratives, which you know that there was so much more to Peter's life. There was such a curiosity in his creativity. There was clearly such admiration amongst his peers, amongst collaborators, honoring this incredible history of

Peter's creativity. That's what compelled us the entire time. Having the opportunity to reactivate his music and to see how it works. Now, that wasn't even so much an experiments, just providing a little platform for it. We knew it would find its audience. It's not a super immediate process, but neither was the process when Peter was alive in making music. It was a kind of gradual accumulation of fans. It's become so much a part of me. I can't

help but continue evangelizing and advocating that story. I'm in the Peter business. I'm in Peter's life for the rest of my life. Can't just stay with me to can't you whole lack of la You've always got some place to go with stars are putting on a show, but I don't watch it to I want to can't stay with need no be to Why can't you hold me like a like? I wan't a chance to turn you one, but when I turn around your gun, I don't want to do I want to be Peter? Why can't you

stay with me? Tonight? We're gonna have to talk, touch or too much, but stay with me tonight. Ephemeral is written and assembled by Alexis and produced by Any Reese, Matt Frederick, and Tristan McNeil, with additional mixing from Josh Thing and special thanks this episode to Matt Worth and Sammy Joe Concilia. Learn more about becoming Peter Ivor's and all of Revenge is other releases at I get r

VN dot com. Next week, Matt will be back, along with three more artists from Revenge's archival catalog, Michelle Mercure, Pauline and a Strong and Anna Hommler, a k A bread Woman, go O Got back Room. Until then, you can find us online at Ephemeral dot Show You and Tiny Last and Tea and a Dreaming m m