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Search for alienation
Among connoisseurs of fucked up, intoxicating sounds, the record label Blackest Ever Black was appreciated like no other. At the end of the year 2019 it was suddenly closed. We look back on a label that musically determined the 2010s like few others.
Caution is mandatory when a label dwells on claims of otherness and original release policy. More often than not, those claims remain what they are without actual brave, new, unconventional releases substantiating them – true trailblazers rarely appoint themselves. When Kiran Sande founded Blackest Ever Black almost exactly ten years ago, his motives therefore were as modest as they were honest: »Guilt, envy, revenge. Those aren’t the sustaining forces of the label, of course, but they were certainly what brought it into being. There were other factors too: I mean, Blackest Ever Black is nothing if not the sound of one man’s struggle to give up smoking«, the ex-editor-in-chief at FACT Magazine remembers in an interview with Resident Advisor. Central for the formation and development of the label were, besides Sande himself, two London-based producers named Joe Andrews and Tom Halstead, whose mystically distorted dark ambient as Raime made a lasting impact on the BEB founder – and thus influenced the curation of the imprint.
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