ACL 2025 - Label of the Year

A Closer Listen

The first Subtext release we received in 2025 was Sara Persico‘s Sphaîra.  We instantly knew that we were on the cusp of something remarkable; we just didn’t know how remarkable.  Over the course of the year, we would go on to review five Subtext releases, and (spoiler alert!), each of them made at least one of our year-end charts.  We were also impressed at the originality and diversity of sounds, as well as the female-fronted roster, a rarity in this day and age. Exzald S and Paul Jebanasam‘s late-year albums cemented our initial impression; not only was this Subtext’s finest year to date, but they also deserved the title of Label of the Year.  ACL’s Richard Allen sits down with label founder James Ginzburg for a look at the past, present and future of the label.

Congratulations James!  Last year was a banner year for Subtext, as it celebrated its 20th anniversary.  This year the label released what we believe is its best single-year slate to date.

We’ll start with the obvious questions.  Prior to co-founding Subtext, you were running Multiverse and recording as emptyset.  What inspired you to found the label, and how did you decide on the names of both Subtext Recordings and emptyset?  (Also props for using the name “Multiverse” before it broke big!)

I started Multiverse in 2004  with a couple Bristol university friends, one of which was Robert Ellis aka Pinch. I had just finished Uni and was trying to work out how to stay in the UK, as I had an American passport. My mum is Scottish, but only your father could pass on citizenship at that point. As luck would have it, there was a short-lived visa to stay in the UK called an “innovators visa”, with which Tony Blair’s government hoped to bring more intellectual property companies to the UK. For some bizarre reason unclear to me, they used me as a test case to pilot the visa and fluffed the understanding of what intellectual property they wanted to invite with this visa (probably medical engineering patents and the such) and allowed me to set up a music company in my flat when I was 23, having no idea what I was doing. The ideal thing about the visa was you didn’t need to have money invested in the company to get it, unlike in a standard business visa where you needed a large starting capital.  I had been reading a lot of popular science books at the time, and like any self respecting dilettante totally misunderstood physics, and conflated it with half baked drug inflected vaguely new age thinking, thus the name Multiverse.

At the time I was running a few little dance music labels, and Rob and I, having started going to FWD at plastic people in 2003, and having met Roly Porter and Jamie Teasdale (Kuedo) who were producing as Vex’d, decided to set up a Dubstep label to release their first two singles (I think the first dubstep label outside of London?). That became Subtext and Rob had a sister event series called Context. I think the names came simply from the fact that I had studied literature and Rob had studied sociology, and the word Sub was embedded in Subtext etc… After those two singles, we started another Dubstep label called Tectonic, which after the second release Rob took over sole curation of and I ran the business side of. Subtext sat dormant until Roly, who had moved to Bristol, and had quit music for years, played me the demos for his album Aftertime in 2010. I hadn’t heard anything like it, and I begged him to let me release it on Subtext. He agreed with the stipulation that we had to release the next emptyset album there first, which became Demiurge. That started the label again, ostensibly under my curation but in reality at that point it was just emptyset, Roly and Paul Jebanasam – who had moved to Bristol from Australia in 2007 to work with us at Multiverse.

The name emptyset, came out of a discussion in a pub around 2007. I had emptyset as a project name in my head since high school calculus (about the only thing I managed to successfully store in my brain from it), and when I suggested it to Paul he immediately said yes. I think for him he both connected with the idea of a solution to an equation with no solution, and also connected the name to Mika Vainio and Pansonic which were core influences for Paul etc… so it all lined up.

Subtext has been responsible for some of our favorite releases, including Continuum (ACL’s #9 album of 2016), Oratorio for the Underworld (#8 of 2019) and Limen (#6 of 2022).  You have a remarkable ear for curation.  One of the facets we admire about the roster is that each artist is distinctive.  What do you look for in the artists you sign?

As the label developed as a group of friends sharing ideas and connected via Multiverse’s studio in Bristol, it wasn’t until I moved to Berlin in 2013 when I started inviting new people into the label. Eric Holm had his first release with us in 2014, but he was also a close friend and Paul Jebanasam, him and I had lived together for a while years before. I met Yair Elazar Glotman, our first new artist, socially in Berlin in 2013 and we worked on his first album Etudes and finished it in Bristol. After that it was organic, rather than anything. For example, I met Ellen Arkbro through Yair, and Yair had played me her demo for “For Organ and Brass” while we mixed Etudes. Pyur (Sophie Schnell) I met through Fis, an artist from New Zealand who we released a few LPs from. Generally, it was mainly just the combination of liking someone’s work and liking them as people. The first demos I signed from unsolicited contact were Joshua Sabin and Aho Ssan. But both of them were following Subtext’s releases, their demos were fantastic, and when I spoke to them the first time, they were very sweet people, and so it made sense to involve them. More recently, Katarina Gryvul, also sent a demo in, and I had a chance to meet her soon after, and felt immediately that I would be really happy to work with her. I think the vast majority of the records on the label have come out of cultivating relationships with people that I connected with and respected their talent. Musically, for me the great thing about running a label has been getting inspired by other people’s talents, inspiration and enthusiasm, and the positive feedback loop of the whole thing. What I look for is music that in some ways extends the horizon of what I’ve heard or experienced. It’s not that everything needs to be novel, but I want to be surprised, or overwhelmed, or absorbed, in a way that feels singular.

Last year’s Cybernetics, or Ghosts? was a high point in your discography, featuring one of the widest arrays of original talent we’ve ever seen, along with a book of short stories.  What inspired you to go all-out on this project?  How do you feel about musicians using A.I., and what do you feel would be the most positive outcome?

I wanted to do something to mark the 20th Anniversary of the label, and by that to explore time and its relationship to technology. This moment in which cultural objects are being recursively fed into culture machines, represents something of a collapse of the lineage of ideas. Everything, including language, is decontextualised, and reconstituted in a kind of pseudo-context. This flattening of time, in terms of it being reflected in culture, had already been creeping for the last few decades, as the internet delocalised sub-culture and the access to the entire history and present of culture via the internet, re-sequenced everything from a kind of horizontal timeline receding into the past, into a vertical volcanic perpetual access point, in which all things exist at the same time. Bringing together both writers, via the editor of the project Michael Salu, and musicians to explore the present moment both verbally and non-verbally, created an interesting opportunity to both think through it and feel through it, as well as aestheticize it. “It” being whatever is happening to us at present.

In 2019 Paul Purgas and I made an emptyset record called Blossoms using an early GAN based AI system. It took months of compute. We fed it our back catalogue and a few days of studio recordings of various materials. At first it was interesting, as it would continually output batches of sounds as it was “thinking.” Within these were sounds that I had never heard before, from which we assembled the album, though by the end of the process, it was outputting material that sounded like slightly worse versions of the original inputs. At that moment, I understood, oh shit, this just needs to get faster, and someone needs to run it on Spotify and you have an infinite music reconstitution machine. I was quite alarmed at the time but forgot about my reaction amongst the malaise of the pandemic, until 5 years later when my little pocket nightmare was realized.

I don’t find anything really inspiring about generative AI in music. I find it forces me to ask a lot of questions about my relationship to creating work, and I guess it’s hard not to be disheartened by it. At the same time, I have faith that young people coming into culture at this moment will find interesting ways to express themselves through whatever is at hand, and I have to assume to some degree my deflation in the face of the present moment is a lack of imagination on my part as I am experiencing the decay of the systems and modes of creation I thrived within, whereas someone starting as a teenager is appearing in a world ripe with other possibilities. Again, it’s another reason why running the label is nourishing, as I get to work with people who are approaching everything from completely different places and history than me. As an older millennial, I’m still under the influence of the canon of references and ideas of the baby boomers, and it’s a handicap when approaching modernity in some ways, as inevitably I end up focused on the loss of something, rather than new possibilities. “In my day, we played records at the raves on technics 1210s that we made with samplers and our pictures were in magazines, made of paper!” “Ok Grandpa.” etc …

Going back to the Cybernetics, or Ghosts? anthology, I think using science fiction as a mode in which we are both able to simulate the future, and look back at the prescience or naivety of people who have simulated it in the past, gives us a way to try and balance our minds amongst the pendulum of projecting alternating dystopias and utopias.

This year, each album tackled a specific subject, from the abandoned Experimental Theatre in Tripoli to disinformation in Ukraine to “the transfer of consciousness from the human body to an electronic medium” to our relationship with deep time.  There’s more to these artists than music. 

All of the projects on Subtext have their own world and context. There is a cerebral element to that, but I think nevertheless it is a music/sound first process. Each record has to stand on its own merits, independent of its framing. Simultaneously, for a project to feel like a world unto itself, we really try and understand what the record is beyond the audio files. Sometimes this is something that artists conceive before or during production, sometimes it’s something that emerges ex post facto. I think for a narrative around a record to be meaningful, the set of ideas needs to be more than simply a curatorial framing, rather a reality around the production and conceptualisation of the record. Sometimes this is simply just the situation in which the record was made, whether it is the historical or political context, the particulars of the composition production or recording, or the particular fixations of the artists as they are creating their work. Sometimes it becomes clear after the fact, that the record was a process of exploring and giving form to non-verbal processes of trying to relate to various aspects of existing, and the contexts in which the artist exists. I think this all works best when no context is needed for the records, but when the context is added it somehow extends and supports what’s there.

Time and again, your label has proven that there are original ideas yet unexpressed, and new genres and sub-genres as yet unnamed.  How have you seen experimental music develop during your time in the industry, and where do you think it may be headed?

Experimental music (whatever the phrase means) has developed hugely over the years. Quite often I get demos and think, it’s interesting that this would have been ground breaking five ten years ago, and now it feels “just” contemporary. I think one of the more heartening developments is how international and diverse the scenes around experimental music have become. I think there have been many positive feedback loops in label curation, festival curation, and what left of press that has meant a broader openness and curiosity, not just in terms of sonic palette and musical possibilities, but in terms of where music is coming from, and who is making it. This has had the interesting effect of expanding what we mean by experimental music: It’s extremely blurry and encompasses the boundary tensions between a wide gamut of genres, and even temporalities. If I look back over what we’ve released this year, and what I worked on as a producer or engineer, and then I consider how narrow a sound Subtext represented when we started it again in earnest in 2011, it’s like a microcosm of how much has changed in terms of openness to and exposure to music. I think it’s the upside of the more troubling part of the story, which is the flattening of the cultural landscape via our atomisation, increasing screen time, inability to live affordably in urban centres which means forming irl sub-cultures, or movements has become and will become more difficult. The positive side effect is from the point of isolation and shift into online experience being the dominant aspect of human experience, is that it allows for experiencing things out of context, which oddly can lead to openness as it’s not “the music that those people listen to.” I know earlier I framed this loss of context as a problem, but as always, there is another side which has its own possibilities.

The “where do I see it headed” question is a little more difficult. I hope it’s headed to a place where the dominance of corporate social media and streaming platforms wain, and we somehow manage to figure out a new social contract around it all. I think that will determine how things form. What we are all doing in experimental music in general doesn’t lend itself to feeding the desires of the algorithmic systems we are now almost exclusively dependent on. The more we are forced in that direction, the more memetic music will become, whether in of itself or in the content around it.

Some of the artists on this year’s roster have approached old instruments and materials in unexpected ways, including Anima Hocine (foghorn organ and hardware store supplies) and Bridget Ferrill (acoustic and self-designed electric harp).  What is the most surprising sound you’ve ever heard on a Subtext release?

bela’s voice.

Many Subtext releases seem to have a spiritual undercurrent, from the call to prayer on Sara Persico’s Sphaîra to the raised hands on Paul Jebanasam’s mātr.  Even your own Dissever (released on Thrill Jockey) is described as “traversing the mystical and modern.”  Is the connection intentional?  Do you personally connect  the spiritual and the musical, and in reference to mātr, what responsibility (if any) do you feel humanity owes the rest of creation?

I think finding various frameworks to view the world through, or with which to interrogate one’s existence and context is important. Whether that’s science, metaphysics, poetry – each framework returns something particular when minds are applied through them. Obviously, it’s important to apply one’s frameworks skilfully. I wouldn’t draw for the poetic when dealing with tuberculosis, for example. In the end, I’m not sure what anyone actually means by spirituality as such. I think there are many ways to try and make sense of one’s existence, and I think perhaps there is something about thinking and feeling one’s way through all that with the tools at hand that is the connection between all the artists on the label. I think all that works best when handled with a light touch, particularly in terms of what becomes a part of the public communication of a project. Obviously, the music people write is deeply personal and important to them. It’s important to figure out how to communicate what these projects are without commodifying the core of people’s souls.

I wouldn’t personally think in terms of responsibility so much as compassion. I think cultivating sensitivity means humanising others, and humanising others means not being able to bear their suffering. At that point it isn’t a responsibility, it’s an urgency.

What’s next for Subtext, and can you tell us about any releases planned for 2026?

Next year (so far) we will have new music from bela, Rắn Cạp Đuôi, Aho Ssan, Joshua Sabin, as well as a few books. Beyond that, many projects are bubbling on the hob, and hopefully the conditions will be such that we can continue to do what we have been doing.

A Closer Listen thanks James Ginzburg for his time and dedication, and congratulates the label again on a stellar year!  Here is all the music Subtext released in 2025: