Courtesy of Gloss Records
For many casual listeners, record labels are little more than a semi-mysterious name and logo stamped on the back of a release. And sometimes that’s precisely what they are, or at least what they start as, such as when Harrison Colby of Milwaukee’s now sadly defunct The Delphines invented Gloss Records out of whole cloth simply so their superb 2014 swansong Hush would have some sort of official-looking home. Thanks to a fruitful partnership with like-minded fellow local musician Joseph Peterson, however, what started merely as an ad hoc imprint meant to be used for a single album has now blossomed into something far more interesting.
“It was out of necessity,” Colby says, describing Gloss’ inception. “We had a label but they dropped out at the last second, so we just came up with a name and a logo super quickly.” For a time, that was it, until about six months ago, when Colby began collaborating with local party monster Rio Turbo (aka Joseph Peterson), who, until recently, had run Organalog Records alongside Isaac Sherman. “We started working on the new Rio Turbo album together, and it came up, the idea of expanding on what he had started,” Peterson adds. “I had just finished up doing Organalog, so it made sense.”
For their first new physical release, Colby’s own post-Delphines project, NO/NO, was a no-brainer, having just dropped two excellent, digital-only EPs of dreamy new wave which were begging to be brought together. The choice to collect them on a cassette, however, was purely practical, and shouldn’t pigeonhole Gloss as a “tape label.” “It’s just the easiest way to get started, because we were getting impatient,” Peterson explains. “Turnaround time, price, you’re basically cutting everything in half.” Plus, tapes also offer other advantages. “It’s also easy with cassettes to spare no expense making the best-looking product,” Colby elaborates. “The sky’s really the limit with that.”
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You can see that almost whimsical attention to the details of package design with the label’s next slated release, Boys, an extended EP from local dance-pop sensation GGOOLLDD due out March 3, which comes in a run of cassettes housed in pink, perfume-style boxes. That may seem like a gimmick, but it’s actually a rather elegant complement to the music included, which, like its container, started out simple but became more elaborate. “It was originally supposed to be six songs, but then they just kept throwing these tracks at us,” Colby says admiringly. “So now it’s like this 45-minute, 11-track thing, which is great.”
Following just two short weeks after the GGOOLLDD EP is the new album from Rio Turbo, the sessions which not only gave new life to Gloss Records, but to Peterson’s longstanding alter ego as well. “I was kind of burnt out on the whole project when Harry came up to me with the idea of working on it together, so I was like, ‘Yeah, it can’t hurt,’” Peterson says. “Then I went down there and it was like a whole other monster, a different perspective on something I’ve been doing for a while. That’s when we realized that we could do the label together.”
With such an impressively strong, cohesive trio of releases heralding Gloss’s resurrection, it’s tempting to think that electronic-inflected pop is the whole of the pair’s aesthetic, but you’d be wise to expect the unexpected. “There’s that nice little first punch of that style,” Peterson admits, “but it’s important that that’s not confused with what we’re trying to do as far as being diverse.”
“There’s so many different bands that we would love to put something out by: Lorde Fredd33, Hello Death, Failed Mutation,” Colby adds. “At the end of the day it’s really just a name that all these really great acts can use.”
