Following our end-of-year chart highlighting the Best Record Labels of 2014, there was one other London-based imprint that stood out. Closely aligned with R&S Records and quietly releasing a diverse catalogue of house music from producers around the world, Meda Fury quickly became a label worth paying attention to.
Meda Fury was distributed by R&S and run by Nick Williams. London readers may also have known Nick as the friendly face behind the counter at Phonica Records in Soho, where his day job placed him at the centre of London’s electronic music ecosystem. Tom Durston met up with Nick in Soho Square to discuss the origins of Meda Fury and how he envisions developing his label.
Interview by Tom Durston
"I got the name from an old piece of paper, the label I got from someone who gave it to me, tracks were sent to me, visuals from things I saw everyday…this haphazard method is something I can’t ignore, I love it!"
Hello Nick, first up what’s the story behind the name Meda Fury?
To put it in context, the label has been a complete accident and all of the decisions that have been made after I decided to go ahead all came about quite quickly. The name is always one of the most difficult things to come up with.
I came up with eight names, seven of them I wasn’t really sure about, but the eighth one was a name that I had since I was a teenager for a band that I was going to be in, but never happened. It’s a bit of a weird one – it doesn’t actually make sense – it’s made up and the words have multiple meanings.
When I was a teenager I though ‘Meda’ was a thousand, and ‘Fury’ was flowers…. thousands of flowers, but that’s not what it means in Latin, it’s just what I thought it meant. That was probably 20 years ago.
When I was in that creative period of my teenage years, I was writing down track listings for compilations and stuff like that, that I was never going to get time to do, so I just had all of these pieces of paper with scribbles of band names.
I sent over these over to Andy Whittaker and Sam Willis at R&S Records and they both said that it has to be Meda Fury, so that helped make my mind up. I guess that’s a trait for the record label…it has to be accidental or coincidental because Meda Fury is exactly that. I was never going to start a label, but R&S asked me to do it.
How did R&S Records invite you to setup the label?
They were looking at expanding the R&S team after some people left, they were looking for new A&R guys. They needed more people.
For a good year they wanted it to be done under R&S, but 80% of what I put forward they really liked, but they felt that it wasn’t R&S material and they were right. Andy had the idea that they should open up another sub-label.
However the way Renaat operates I thought it was a joke, the way he writes his emails, he said “Nick I’m going to give you a house label”…I was like, “yeah good one”, but he wasn’t joking. I’m still doing A&R work for R&S but I’m also now label manager of Meda Fury and they’ve given me free reign. They haven’t stepped in deciding for me what tracks to include or not.
How have you gone about selecting artists for the label?
Takuya Matsumato, he was someone that got tipped to me by Firecracker Recordings label boss Lindsay Todd (House Of Traps), he had no press and was just this unknown guy from Japan. Move D and Floating Points were playing his stuff. I can’t remember how I ended up talking to him, maybe through Soundcloud, he’s quite shy, but he agreed to send over some tracks.
That was the 2nd release – we’re on the fifth now. I’ve got the sixth EP ready for early 2015 and I’m working on the seventh release at the moment.
The records you’ve released so far are all very different to one another.
Yeah they are. A lot of the tracks had been sent to me before I founded the label, I guess that’s thanks to working at Phonica, meeting artists and producers and picking up a lot of contacts. There was already a little ball rolling!
The producer I was trying to promote to other labels was Hazylujah, I just turned around one day and signed him to the label. He uploaded incredible new tracks to Soundcloud and I got back to him and told him to take them down, as I wanted to release them myself and wanted to start with something that was interesting and quite strange. I didn’t want anything too straight forward. Things just started to spiral, everything about the label follows that haphazard approach.
Even with the artwork, I saw it everyday commuting on the tube, it’s just some graffiti done on anti-graffiti paint, which makes the paint melt, so I was seeing that everyday and always thought that it would look really nice, so I took some photos of it and used it. That’s what the grey background is on the record sleeves. Some people think the back cover is of a forest, but it’s not.
The logo I’m not sure where I saw it, somewhere on an electrical fitting inside a house, I kept on seeing it everyday, some old Bakelite fitting in my house from the 1960s or something.
So to wrap this up, I got the name from an old piece of paper, the label I got from someone who gave it to me, tracks were sent to me, visuals from things I saw everyday…this haphazard method is something I can’t ignore, I love it!
When I was at school all I did was art and painting, my style and methods were very labor intensive and exacting, I was a perfectionist and I spent so long deliberating and trying to make everything look extremely real. So for this new creative outlet it’s less controlled and chance is a key method to getting the right results.
Which producers on Meda Fury are currently based in the UK?
None yet! I’m working on it though. That’s another thing the first three came to me from different countries, there’s so much good music out there that needs to be released. Each release is from a different country, going forward.
There are 195 countries in the world…so you’re limited to that number. It’s a bit like 50Weapons, 50 records only.
I can’t wait for the first UK one. We will be revisiting countries, I’ve got plans for more releases from Japan and Italy, next year.
Do any of the upcoming artists joining the label work at Phonica?
No not at all, ones an older guy who used to do stuff on Warp, but hasn’t done stuff for a long time. There’s also a really young guy from London. Then there’s someone else in the middle. So I’m looking forward to confirming one of these guys – I hope!
What about the Germans?
Yeah I was talking to two German producers…who knows…but that’s got to happen surely!
Any Dutch getting involed?
Yeah the most recent EP is from Rotterdam’s D-Ribeiro, he’s incredible.
Each record is very different to one another. You said that Renaat emailed you saying that he has given you a house music record label…this doesn’t quite seem to be the case?
It is in my mind…again all the stuff that was being sent to me is very different but house music is very subjective. I do generally like house music a lot and I like the fact that you can do a lot of things with it. It’s really broad in that sense.
To me house has withstood the test of time a lot longer than a lot of other dance music; I can’t see it going away. It doesn’t know any boundaries. I can see a lot of close connections to rock music, they’re meant to be played loud, at night, sweaty evenings, cult followings, and there are so many different permutations of it. I’m looking to explore every shade.
What about albums and compilations? You’ve probably already worked out titles for them already!
Andy Whittaker, my right hand man at the label, does want to do that. I think it makes sense, after doing a load of singles, plus digital only tracks I think it makes sense to do an album or compilation, in fact there is going to be a digital comp – a round up of the best tracks from the first five EPs, now that we’re a year old.
I was really fussy on how I built up the track lists for each record. The thing is with an EP is that it’s a decent amount of time, a good half an hour; I try to stretch them out into a little story. Also I find that some of the music sent to me is so good that I struggle to fit all the tracks on.
Takura gave me 50 tracks, not even one of them was average, I liked them all, so next year I want to do an album with him. I’ve never met him in person and he’s never travelled outside of Japan. Hopefully we’ll meet in person in 2015. I want to do an album with Russian producer OL too; he’s got so much great material.
What’s the deal with R&S? Since they are so established, I assume they help you with the manufacturing, production, mastering and distribution of the record. How much experience do you have doing this?
Well that was one of the reasons why I immediately said yes to the prospect of having a label with R&S. It’s pretty rare to be asked if you want to run a sub-label for them, and you have their ‘machine’ already in place, deals with pressing plants, distributors and so forth.
It’s similar to what Fabric did when they advertised for a label manager role and employed Rob Booth of Electronic Explorations to manage and conceive their record label Houndstooth.
Yeah it’s kinda like that. I think it’s maybe even better being part of R&S because they’ve got 30 years of experience and they operate Apollo who release Aphex Twin’s ‘Selected Ambient Works Vol 1’, so they have many legendary records and stories to tell.
