Who is Tessa?

Photo by Marilis Cardinal

Tessa was our guinea pig for our photo shoot party.
She does much more than look pretty for the camera.
She works with me at Preloved and has her own record label and plays in a band.

Tessa is also one of those people who's brain I like to pick. I ask her endless questions about endless things and she always has a ton of ideas.

Let's pick her brain some more.

Here is an interview with Tessa...

What do you do?

I run a cd-r and cassette label called Fixture Records with my boyfriend. I also play with my band, Brave Radar and pay the bills as a shopgirl.

What inspires you to do what you do?

Playing shows, trading records with other bands, discovering great music that I never knew about, trolling the internet...People's horror stories about working with bigger labels. The slow death of the record industry. Friendly international customers who order our entire back catalog. Coffee. Other local labels like Psychic Handshake, Arbutus, Campaign For Infinity, Constellation. Out of town labels like Divorce, Siltbreeze...

How did you get started?

The label basically started when my boyfriend and I finished recording our band's first album and wanted to do something with it. We were making cases and burning cds at our apartment and then we started obsessively researching different cd templates and thinking about how to get music into record stores and played on the radio and stuff like that. Around the same time, a few of our friends were finishing up their own albums so it made sense to go in together on the printing and manufacturing.

We organized a shared release party on Valentine's Day 2008 for Brave Radar's first cd, Distracting Strangers, Dirty Beaches' Old Blood, and Postcards' self-titled cassette. That was the first show we put on under the name Fixture Records and since then we've released 11 albums on different formats and we have another 5 or so coming out before the fall. We're booking a tour for Brave Radar, Dirty Beaches, and Cresting, as well as putting on a series of shows in Montreal and working on some other stuff: a zine, our 2nd compilation cd, a book-on-tape.

What advice would you give to someone else trying to make their ideas a reality?

Don't wait for anyone to give you the go-ahead. Do your research. Talk to the people you admire. Invest in equipment that'll make your work self-sustaining and useful to other people. Work to simplify things and don't be afraid if your ideas change in order to actually happen.

http://fixture-records.com/
http://fixturerecords.blogspot.com/
http://www.myspace.com/braveradar
http://tessagoldsmith.tumblr.com/