Since its first release in 2008, the Home Normal label and stable mates Tokyo Droning and Nomadic Kids Republic have kept up an impressive schedule of releases. Their back-catalogues contain works of cinematic electronica, loosely minimal organic folk and stunning drones, all with a distinct purity of spirit both musically and in the handmade principles applied to design and packaging. Label boss, curator and creative engine behind the Home Normal stable, Ian Hawgood has consistently assessed, adjusted and reinvented the wheel in his own creative output including that under the monikers Apocomeno, Koen Park, Oh No Nuno! and that of his labels in order to bring together his vision of music and image, grounded, normalised and integrated as a whole. Ian and I caught up online to talk about the labels, creative control, his busy schedule and post-quake Japan. Although we’ve never met in person, in his responses to my questions Hawgood is reflexive and has a deep sense of respect for his craft. This subtlety and honesty is consistent between his music, label output and our emails.
Hawgood tells me that his inspiration has always come from the close interaction with friends and musicians whom he respects personally. Hawgood is based in Saitama (a couple of hours from Tokyo) and maintains daily contact with Ben Jones in the UK who handles the printing and distribution. He also serves as Ian’s sounding board for creative decisions relating to the label. Hawgood also works closely with web designer Christian Roth and Antony Harrison (aka. Konntinent), who works on the label’s live events. I ask about Home Normal’s team dynamic and recent expansion and in particular the issue of maintaining creative control. “Yes I control the evolution of the label and I’m not sure how I should relinquish control,” Hawgood says. “I wish I could but often it takes the obsessive behaviour of one to run these things in a pure way. Saying that I have actually relinquished control to demanding artists and it’s not something I have come to be particularly happy with, so call me a control freak, but it’s quite the opposite. I am in the process of regaining the spirit of the label back.”
That spirit relates to principles that are both visual and aural, and Hawgood strongly differentiates between Home Normal, Tokyo Droning and Nomadic Kids Republic. For Home Normal he says that “the only theme I really had was to present work in a very simple design, with the focus being on photography. This came about through access to my very good friend, Jeremy Bible’s work, as well as going through images I had taken over the years. These were to be the faces of the work I felt was heartfelt and personal as too often the art and music are very disparate”. Although I learn that maintaining purity in aesthetic principles has been one of the challenging aspects of running the label “… artists sometimes are far too rigid in the presentation of their work in my opinion. This has affected the overall art of the label in terms of how it appears as a complete series, or whole rather. Musically however, I have kept to the ideals by crossing styles and forms, focusing on music which I think has a unique voice and genuine spirit, and have never accepted a position within ‘the scene’ when it may have been easier to do so.”
“Presentation is far more important to me now than before, when I had much more of a pure belief that the music was all that mattered. It’s how I feel and have always felt but sadly, most artists are not of the same mindset. The artists who are of the same mindset are close friends of mine, and often people who have been around the block a few times before. So personal taste has become more enveloping I suppose, not only to be taste in the music but in the person presenting the work. When Ben and I talked about the schedule for Home Normal we said we would pair up one ‘larger’ release with a lesser-known artist’s work. By this means we felt that it would give attention and help support new or emerging artists. However, as time has gone on, I have gotten a little weary of working with people I don’t know on a personal level for a variety of important reasons. As such now, the ‘whole’ of each release is important – for example, the work itself, the artist’s personality and intentions or attitude, their approach to the ‘industry’ side of things and a bunch of other stuff.”
The Tokyo Droning imprint began as a sister project to Home Normal that ended up becoming quite distinct. Each release consists of a series of six works, the next due sometime between August and September 2011. Hawgood says it’s focused on his own ‘geekiness’ and his rules for governing it are that the base materials must be brought from within a ten minute cycle ride of anywhere he has lived in Japan. Each release is handmade using old hardback books where every part of the original book is recycled, spines are reconstructed using locally sourced materials and the inserts are made of rice paper from a shop in his old neighbourhood. Each release has a different stamp and photo/negative/Polaroid/Kodachrome that is not copied and thus totally unique, and packaging is pure origami, which means no glue or tape is used – only folding.
Nomadic Kids Republic covers some of the usual Home Normal ground but is more open to electronic works. The releases focus on over-exposed or very purely lit images. Hawgood tells me “the aim being to present the overall series as a collection of wild Polaroid style shots. In particular the photography is focused on quite stark images in ways, very simple but which say far more under the surface, as [is] the Japanese way I guess. It’s an aesthetic that failed in three or four of the releases due to my own weakness in not being stubborn enough with certain artists, and one I have remedied (bar one release) on Nomadic Kids Republic. Minimalism is very much a Japanese aesthetic, but so is a vibrancy and range of culture it absorbs into itself whilst keeping its identity. I think musically we have the latter and in design the former.”
Almost compulsively creative, Hawgood works hard running Home Normal, holding down a day job as a high school teacher and doing studio work when he can. This allows him to fund the labels and he’s thankful to have developed enough skills and connections to always have options to work both professionally and creatively. He tells me that a typical day looks something like: “Get up a bit before 5am, leave for work at 5:40am. Catch 6:03am train, take out iPad or laptop, catch up on email, work on some design or go through previous days’ photography and work, or listen and make headphone notes on a mastering job or music. Get to work (school) about 8am and teach until 3pm depending on the day. Leave school and take 2 hour commute home, again responding to the day’s emails and all of the above. My wife and I will walk our dog for about 30 minutes to an hour between 5pm and 6pm, after which we will cook up dinner. After dinner I will either get shop orders ready, do mastering work, work on music, do label, design, or exhibition work until about 2am, sometimes 1am at the earliest or 3am at the latest and then go to bed. That’s a typical weekday, and weekends are replaced with a bit more downtime or studio based work rather than going to school.”
The Home Normal HQ was badly damaged in the recent quake disaster and on reflection Hawgood says: “we were out luckily and our house was pretty badly trashed as we had just moved. Things hadn’t been placed properly and that week I had ordered a bunch of gear after saving up for a while and it was poorly positioned. My studio was trashed; drives, computers, outboard gear, instruments, and our lounge was badly hit. Thankfully we found our pets, scared beyond belief, surrounded by shelves, CDs, glass etc, but alive and safe. On a personal level it’s been hard. I’ll just say that insurance companies on the whole seem to lack any morals and leave it loosely at that, but needless to say we have been hit badly by it. Nonetheless we were so lucky and I am lucky in that I have been able to take on board extra studio-based work to support the labels and ourselves. Our community is doing OK but we live in an agricultural area, lots of old style houses where many of the roofs were damaged and the repairs are taking a long time. I think people need to be far more aware of helping in direct ways, small ways that show they truly care. This heals the spirit and I know there are many doing that. The healing of the spirit really is key which is something I had never truly understood on a communal level before this all happened.”
As a child Hawgood suffered severe bouts of hearing loss caused by recurrent ear infections which weren’t fully treated until he was ten years old. It is perhaps from these experiences of long periods of silence and associations of sound-memory to motion and visual cues that has allowed Hawgood to nurture the strong visual aspect to his creative process. “It may well be an influencing factor,” he says as if my suggestion has surprised him. “You might be interested to know that Ben Jones (who runs Home Normal with me) continues to have quite severe hearing issues now … hence he can only listen to very low volume ambient music and it’s one of the reasons why we started making minimal music without having any point of reference together at university.”
Continuing with the visuals theme, I’d read an interview with Hawgood where he’d been quoted as saying his work is like a “soundtrack to a film in my head which will never get made” and pressed him further on how images and the imaginary feature in his work and if he has any aspirations to soundtrack a film. “I have very strong impressions while I am making my music, sometimes before, and these dictate the direction I go in. ‘Wolfskin’ for example, was based on a series of dreams I had which I wrote about and then worked on the music the following day. ‘Snow Roads’ was about a constant image I had of a man walking down a road, everything dead in winter around him, gripped by isolation, but intense determination to keep down that path. In terms of other [people's] work, it’s very much the same too. For example, as soon as I listened to bvdub’s release Tribes at the Temple of Silence, I instantly had a vision of this kind of lost world and proceeded to go through photography I had done on Zamami Island, quite a deserted place a couple of hours by boat from Okinawa, during a typhoon. It was exactly where Brock’s head was for the release and visually this was very significant of course. I’ve written the soundtracks to a couple of short films already, as well as making music for some pretty big TV advertisements, exhibition pieces and websites, so this is not new to me really. However, my dream since I was at university was to write the music for some crazy Hong Kong martial arts films. That has changed of course, but yes, ideally I would love to just make music for film, and its still a dream I hold onto. If a great director came along and asked me to soundtrack their film, that would be all my dreams realised and I would have to go about making new dreams and ambitions. It’s not a bad place to be”.
And for the future?
“I want Home Normal to regain its identity and purity fully, but this takes time. Have the promotional machine become self-aware and allow me to be exempt from even having to think about it for a second. To be allowed to take my time with each release without constant pressure, and for artists to really understand they are part of something collaborative and we are not just a money tree/workhorse for them alone. The latter is easy and in the process as I cut things up to work with people I know more. The second is impossible right now and the first, well, it will over time in relation to the latter and perhaps if the second came true then my attention to the former would be clearer.”
The last of our email exchanges finds Hawgood about to jet off to Bali for a delayed honeymoon plus sneaking in a week of gamelan lessons – the results of which I’m looking forward to hearing on a forthcoming release.
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