MUSIC

the Empty Bottle. So the audience was literally just our parents and their friends.

I was a music director at our college radio station and I booked this band called Volcano! from Chicago, and Sam Scranton—he’s a good friend of mine now and a composer—he was the drummer in the band. He told me about Access Contemporary Music (ACM), who do a lot of composer-advocacy stuff for contemporary classical music. That was my first gig that let me go back to Chicago. I moved back in with my parents and I started interning at ACM, and then I just started going to all these contemporary classical concerts.

and Lia Kohl (who are also in Mocrep), and we did a record-release party on the Experimental Sound Studio’s Twitch series. We all decided to create prerecorded video. We wanted to create a series of demos, like “Here’s an instructional on how you might listen to the album.”

I don’t think we think of ourselves as a classical-music label anymore, but we’re still in that realm no matter what, just because those are a lot of our friends. All of us who are in Parlour Tapes joined Mocrep, and the Mocrep vibe is also very much like that. Mocrep started out as a contemporary classical-music ensemble, and then they were performing in ways that were further from just a concert where you sit down and play your instrument. It felt very much like a merger when they asked us to join the group.