LIVER PARTY RECORDS MONTHLY NEWSLETTER 04/10/26
THE PAST, THE FUTURE
Liver Party is going to be different now. It will still be as egalitarian, as eclectic, as free as possible. But it will not be as exclusive, as closed off from the world of the rest of DIY: it will no longer exist in opposition to those other labels and collectives, but rather, alongside, in direct support of, et cetera. This will no longer be "The thing for weirdos and outsiders ONLY". I want to foster an actual community. I want to help young people. I want to be a force of good and positivity in the world in general.
When I was 12 years old I met someone named Tyler Rafferty (Age 17). Like me, they were on the (autism) spectrum, and we would often discuss our experiences about the difficult social situations we find ourselves in. Those conversations made me feel heard and understood in a way I had never truly felt before. I indulged some art of theirs they had posted at the time -- collaborations with other artists but also things they did all by their lonesome: trailers for video games, animations for music they had made, all of it. And it was all directly up my alley, and it was stuff all about the sorts of experiences we would discuss extensively. From that moment I understood Tyler as like an interdisciplinary genius who somehow managed to teach themselves how to do all of that stuff and express themselves... I was in awe. This is when I developed my biggest mental malfunction yet:
#THE FUNDAMENTAL NEED TO EXPRESS MY SELF AND MY EXPERIENCES AND MY THOUGHTS.
I knew I HAD to be an artist. It was the beginning of my true, sincere interest in art as something I had to totally dedicate myself to. I had been an artist as a child and had to use creative ways to cope with my living situation my entire life up to that point, but this is when it clicked. This was going to be my life now, and I had to be just like Tyler.
The years went on, I stay friends with Tyler and they take me in under a sort of mentorship, and they are also one of my closest friends who I admire deeply. I make visual art, then I get into music around the time I'm 14. I get the intense desire to focus in on that as my main medium then -- and it comes more to fruition when I'm 15 when I released my first album, "Solskan Songs". Then, after much more grueling effort, at 16, I achieved what up to then had been one of my ultimate goals: Making something Tyler really truly liked and respected.
Now what? Well, now there's really nothing else for me to do but to try to make a complete project with Tyler now that we were on similar artistic levels. Tyler agreed. This was "Liver Party!!". I was enthusiastic about it, they were enthusiastic about it, it was a lot of fun, and it might have also completely ruined Tyler's life. I was so excited and manic when it came to this project, that it kind of destroyed Tyler's motivation or ability to work on this thing with me anymore and we had to part ways. The "band" lasted all of about 66 days. The resultant album was released several months later (ironically) as "Resurrecting Tyler Rafferty".
Well, now I was 17 and I thought I'd seen it all. I'd been ostracized before, mocked, picked on all my life, and now I was especially bitter about this whole Tyler situation. In my mind, every single musician and artist in our internet scene was a poser except for ME. I was the one who had the duty of making things REAL and HONEST, I ALONE had to keep pure and true music away from being poisoned by the masses, who just didn't understand me because I was so much more clever than them.
This self-aggrandizing, holier than thou attitude is precisely where my head was when I founded "Liver Party Records" on this day 2 years ago, April 10th 2024. Now began the long process of reaping what I had to sow from that attitude.
The next year or so was both exciting and also deeply tragic. It was possibly the most difficult and exhausting and mistake-filled year of my life. Yes, a small community was rounded up in that first year of existence, and it did sincerely profoundly effect maybe 2 or 3 peoples' lives for the better, but there were a lot of sincerely tragic and very upsetting things that happened within that community that made me realize by the end of that first year that maybe this isn't what it was all cracked up to be in my head.
Going on into the next year of the label's existence, a lot of good music was produced and put onto the website, our efforts expanded, more people became enthusiastic about the project, etc. But I started feeling really uneasy and unfulfilled in a lot of ways...
You see, when you brand yourself and your community as being for "weirdos and outsiders only", you start to get a lot of the types of people who maybe were ostracized from all the other communities for a reason. Who have no interest in changing, and just want to revel in how much of an outsider they are to the rest of the world. This was precisely why some of those tragic and upsetting things I talked about earlier actually happened, because I paved the way for those things to happen.
I was beginning to realize how a lot of the time the general atmosphere of the community was kind of cynical, how we stopped being open to change and new things, how we didn't really listen to new artists or music that much that was within the same basic general "scene" we were in (the internet DIY rock/punk based music thing). It started making me very lonely and feeling isolated, because we couldn't really open up the community to the public otherwise we risked more of those actual weirdos and bad people into this space (which was entirely my fault for branding the place as being FOR "weirdos").
This led to me doing a lot of stuff with a whole different scene; the punk / experimental scene in Southern California. I had already known quite a few people there, but now we were really beginning to do things together and that stuff was really exciting, and none of them were really cynical or closed-off. We ended up getting some bands from SoCal to be part of this "label" as it were. It was something I was very excited about but also something kind of difficult:
Because now there were these two totally different sides of the "label" that I was the only real connection between. The online space was a bit younger and more cynical, whereas that SoCal side could be more open minded and were a bit older, and as such had been around the block a bit more. It's a balancing act I'm still in the middle of and don't know how to solve... but in the future what I'd really like is to expand upon that idea of a real-life space to build the community around while still holding onto that online part of it. Just to be as generally open as possible.
Now, around the turn of this past year going back the last few months, my attitude towards all of this music making business has changed. I no longer want to be exclusive and closed-off, and don't wanna foster this community online of cynicism and of ego and being holier than thou. I want this label to exist alongside all my other friends' labels, and ultimately I want to be a good connector of people and ideas. I want people to get along. I don't wanna be fuckin' lonely and frustrated anymore!
What I want this thing to be has changed a bit. I don't want to really be this totally radical political exclusive space where only weirdos and the politically high-minded can pass. I want as many people who are interested in our music and our mission of egalitarianism to be a part of this. I want, truly, to not be that different from DIY labels online of the past and present like BSDJ, or Friends' House Records, or any of the more recent ones. The only real difference is our influences, our eclectic interests, our angle at music.
Basically, where BSDJ's thing was 5th wave emo, Friends' House thing is Noise Pop/Indie Rock, I want our thing to be anything, but especially just the more experimental and avant-garde sides of rock or pop music, alongside Jazz, Modern Classical, et cetera. To be defined by what we love and are rather than what we hate and aren't.
I want to inspire in others what Tyler and all those friends I had and all these other internet labels I like inspired in me. To just create and do things and be the best possible artist and person I can be.