Wafer Face
Wafer Face was a record label begun in 1991 from my bedroom in Portland, Maine. Michael Townsend encouraged me to have a pressing made of 500 7" records of the live radio performance of a track we called Louisiana Cookin', edited from a radio show called The Plagiarist and featuring call-in voice-over star Mr. Clean (Jeff Plansker). The Plagiarist was an experimental radio show on WMPG from 1989-1992, featuring on air loop collage and musical/vocal experiments. The B-side for Louisiana Cookin became a remix of the Abba track Fernando, appropriately plundered. Wafer Face was related to other artists and labels working in the field of sampling and plunderphonia. We decided to issue a series of 7" records. Perhaps Wafer Face would still be publishing if we had stayed with the 7" record as our only product.
A second 7" vinyl record (or Slug) was released featuring work by Dad Slack (Michael Townsend also of WMPG) and Busyditch. These 7" discs were manufactured at United Records in Nashville. A third Slug was commisioned, featuring Your Host Bobby and Platzangst. All of the Wafer Face Slugs were designed as radio works. Copies of these singles are still available and Louisiana Cookin can be heard on the What Balcony CD.
At some point, we decided to finance and press a 12" vinyl album recorded by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and his OFFICIAL band, largely because no one else was showing any interest in publishing the audio work of tENT, who had been a constant figure in the cassette and film undergrounds for years. We proposed a 2 record arrangement and tENT began work on a retrospective LP of his audio work which became USIC MINUS THE SQUARE ROOT OF NEGATIVE ONE, called "the last collectible LP of the 20th century", a deluxe picture disc with multiple play grooves. One San Francisco distributor was happy to take 10 copies of each record and then never paid for them.
A set of 2 CDs by the Rascal reporters was also published by Wafer Face in the early 1990's: Purple Entrapment and We're God, both excellent examples of American prog keyboard based complex music. Unfortunately, the American progressive music distribution monopoly (Wayside Music) gave bad reviews and little notice to these releases and the records didn't sell.
We teamed up temporarily with ElectroMotive in Berkeley on the distribution project Smooth Stone, doing some large promo mailings.
While happy to have encouraged and been involved with these artists by releasing their work, the Wafer Face project must be considered a failure in its inability to gain distribution or make back enough cash to allow further records to be issued. An interesting experiment in record production. Hopefully some adventurous listeners still value their Wafer Face releases.
