Our Man in Madrid
(scroll down to read a feature on Munster records)

In foreign countries you're often likely to experience a weird sense of timewarp: Movies that premiered months or years back in your own country are only just now coming out, the biggist artists will be someone you never heard of - who the fuck is that Bebe that is everywhere, and is it a boy or a girl? - bars will play weird pop music you didn't know you remembered (Reel2Reel's "I Like to Move It", anyone? Or "It Must Have Been Love" by Roxette?), and in the underground people will be raving about bands you thought dead with your teenage years. Ratos de Porão, the Brazilian hardcore band that tagged along on Sepultura's rise in the very early 90's still play fairly regurlarly in Madrid and release their records on the local Beat Generation label, complete with Spanish translations and cover notes. Stroll down the outdoor market El Rastro in Madrid on a Sunday - a bit like London's Camden; "a good place to have your wallet stolen", according to Munster Records' Iñigo - and you'll come across stands vending patches with Stryper, OverKill, Krokus, and Venom; browse through a punk distribution's stall at shows and you'll find collector's item 7"s with Rövsvett, General Surgery, and other Swedish crust bands I used to get demo tapes from in '91, and in the hallway someone will hand you a flyer for a festival this January with Dismember, Repulsion, Pungent Stench, Macabre, Extreme Noise Terror playing - no Norwegian Black Metal, this is truly underground and that one year older-school. You have the Up Beat! record store with ska, northern soul, and scooter parafernalia. You have a well-assorted vinyl hiphop-store in a mall. You have the Malasaña neighbourhood packed with punkrock bars and punks drinking in the street from the obligatory 1-liter beer bottles. You have dozens and dozens of labels working in the underground and even more bands.

Over the next year, at least, LowCut will be covering corners of this weird,
wonderful place with our own correspondent in Madrid. Bands that don't suck, record labels, club bookers, and other sorts of entrepeneurs are invited to send relevant material and info in the direction of:

Jon Albjerg Ravnholt
Calle Rodrigues San Pedro, 41 - 4B
28015 Madrid

or write: jon@lowcut.dk

Feature

Munsters Rule Madrid! - A portrait of Munster Records, one of Europe's finest & oldest independent r'n'r labels.

by Jon A

The office of Munster Records may not look like much else than your regular small business independent record label: A bunch of beardy, longhaired guys with glasses hanging on the telephone over desks flowing over with press sheets, concert flyers, schedules, and promo cds with a few efficient women taking care of business; the walls covered with collector's item posters for Black Panther rallys, 50's horror movies, Elvis, and black metal goat's heads in flames; and the stock room is a labyrinth of of sacking shelves with vinyl and boxes of cds in every corner. There's also baby in there somewhere in a leopard suit, the mascot of the label. But going on 20 years now since its meagre beginning as a xeroxed fanzine in '84, named La Herencia de los Munster ["Munster's Heritage"] after the American tv-show and made in Bilbao by the brothers Iñigo and Gorka, Munster Records today form an epicenter for the going-ons in Madrid's r'n'r scene thanks to a slew of releases by both national artists like Pussycats, Safety Pins, Atom Rhumba and exclusive releases and re-issues by Stooges, MC-5, New York Dolls and loads more. So much an epicenter, that when I went to see Brazilian hardcore band Ratos de Porão recently, I met Enano from Munster who was organizing the European tour, and when I came to the office the next day it turned he had also been putting out their last few albums on his label Beat Generation, run out of the Munster office and distributed through Munster. As for the flyer someone stuck in my hand for an extreme metal festival taking place in January with old school acts like Repulsion, Extreme Noise Terror, Pungent Stench, and Dismember, that's put together by the longhaired guy Raul who works in stock and runs his own Acoustic Trauma label. I met the very friendly and helpful people at their office and walked away with a broad selection of their 450+ title backcatalogue which is a big Munster's mash of snotty garage r'n'r like The Cavemanish Boys and Pussycats, amphetamine & sangria fuelled punkrock like Safety Pins and Muletrain, onto the obscure pastures of Portuguese The Legendary Tiger Man's swampy punk blues, English The Embrooks retro-psychedelic mod rock, or the avantgarde noise terror of Enano's Piolines. I talked to Ulla, the Finnish woman who does international promotion and in true Nordic spirit insists on riding her bicycle in Madrid's non-bicycle-compatible traffic hell, and Fransisco, a small guy with glasses and a haircut identical to my own was last winter, who's been working with Iñigo and Munster for the last 10-12 years while running his own label, Rock'n'Roll Inc. on the side, just as most of the Munster staff have their own thing going on the side.

Fransisco: "The basic idea behind Munster was to release the music we liked ourselves, because no one else in Spain was doing it at the time. Iñigo had been making the fanzine, La Herencia de los Munster, with his brother Gorka back in Bilbao, and after a while they started including 7"s with the magazine, and that grew into Munster Records once Iñigo moved to Madrid to study there some 15 years ago. Today we're releasing fewer records than we were before, it's more re-issues and vinyl licensing, stuff that's out of print on the major labels but that we feel ought to be available still, and then just a handful of our own groups. Plus we handle distribution through Forever Changes, named after the Love album, for other Spanish labels in the rest of the world and distribute foreign labels like Get Back, Crypt, Sweet Nothing here in Spain, while Gorka takes care of the mailorder, Munsterama, which is a whole other business again.

Ulla: "What Munster has to offer other labels is experience, because we've been doing this for so long and have this big network. And we do vinyl, which a lot of other labels can't handle themselves."

LowCut: What do you think of the scene here in Madrid and Spain in general?

Ulla: "It's very good, very active, lots of things going on. There's so much rock here! Here in Madrid there's the whole scene around the Malasaña neighbourhood, where it seems like the big 80's underground scene kept on while a bunch of new people came into it and kept it alive."

Fransisco: "There's nothing in the world like that place: 20 bars within 50 meters, all rock'n'roll and punkrock with dj's running between them and the streets filled with kids drinking. It's something quite unique to Madrid. What Madrid lacks is good venues for concerts, that's always been a problem, and people are always talking about doing something about it, but nothing ever happens. It's a great place to go out and have a drink, but we lack venues in the center of Madrid. But then there are plenty of new groups coming up all the time, almost too many, it's hard to keep track."

Ulla: "The thing is, though, that the really good bands here are all more or less unknown in the rest of the world."

Fransisco: "I think it's something geographic: Bands from Germany, Belgium, Netherland all have better oportunities for playing in other countries because they are that much closer to each other. Also, it's a problem that a lot of Spanish bands don't speak very well English, I think that sets them back some. But we have loads of things going on for ourselves here, lots of labels apart from Munster and our own labels on the side, there's Bang!, H-Records, No Tomorrow, Pennyman in Barcelona, lots and lots. Only, most of them don't have distribution in the rest of Europe, which is where Munster steps in to help."

LowCut: But is there a red thread through the stuff you release and distribute?

Fransisco: "Basically, Munster is an eclectic label, it's very open. Munster is not one of those labels where you can dig out the records in a shop and know immidiately what style the music is. It's for people like ourselves who love music, different kinds of music, people that are open to things like 70's pop, garage, punk. Though I guess overall we're rock'n'roll. It's for people who don't want to just listen to one specific kind of music, people who just want to listen to something good. That's why we can release 7"s with both The Soundtrack Of Our Lives and Nico within short time. We're even doing blues at the moment with The Legendary Tiger Man, this Portuguese one-man-band that does a kind of Delta blues. And we have Embrooks, an English band playing mod rock and psychedelic 60's freak beat. Atom Rhumba from Bilbao who play a bluesy, jazzy rock in a Jon Spencer style. And then a lot of punk like Safety Pins, also from Bilbao, as well as all the re-issues, like we're releasing this 7" of an obscure old Rod Stewart track with a heavy organ. Munster is para gente sin prejuicios - for people who aren't prejudiced."

Munster records ought to be available from your better eclectic local record dealer, atleast he or she should be able to get them for you. In Scandinavia they're distributed through Sound Pollution. Recommended are Safety Pins, especially their seminal 26-track "Shake & Spew" on Empty Records (distributed through Munster) with tracks like "Let's Fuck", "I Hate Society", and "White Scum Rising", the female r'n'r trio Pussycats' "Playin Dirty", complete with a photo of the band posing in silk stockings and corsets in front of a wall of Pol Pot photos, Brazilian hardcore diehards Ratos de Porão who are released on Beat Generation, and brutal punkrock band Muletrain's "Demolition Preaching" debut album out on Beat Generation. For more info on the full Munster catalogue, go to:

http://www.munster-records.com