Barry Smolin Phthalo Records, Los Angeles, CA, Green Galactic, 2006
"The danger is in the neatness of identifications" -Samuel Beckett
"In the world of electronic music there are few record labels more experimentally extreme than Phthalo.
"But Phthalo is more than a record label. Phthalo is a vehicle for expression, in music, of the only reality we live in and too often fail to recognize as such.
"Phthalo artists are stylistically diverse and unclassifiable, yet they share in common this full-throttle, all-inclusive, fearless vision of the way things really are.
"Phthalo music is music that demands to be met on its own terms, music that lives in defiance of all category, music that deconstructs every presumption and opinion, music that calls into question the preconceived notions listeners inevitably bring to the experience of listening, music that dismisses such tired concepts as "old" and "new" and operates exclusively in the "now."
"The brainchild of artist/composer Dimitri Fergadis (AKA Phthalocyanine), Phthalo officially embarked in 1997 in order to launch the adventurous Phthalocyanine project Navy Warship. Like a warning shot across the mainstream's quarter-deck, Fergadis' original intention was "to create a new idiom, or at least a new type of comment on idiom." Steering clear of both the narrow strictures of academic music and the dance-happy inanity of the club/rave scene, Fergadis seeks music that is relevant only outside the consensus aesthetic, or what he calls "herd dynamics," that tendency to like what we've been told to like, living in a kind of "magnetized state," drawn primarily to what is familiar.
"Contrary to this habitual behavior, Phthalo artists must be technicians of timelessness, pointers, sayers, engaged in an absolutely faithful relationship with the truth, working with, as Fergadis puts it, "no settlement for the next best or for the halfway. This is the abandonment of halfway."
"Many of todays's fastest rising artists began their recording careers on the Phthalo label. Phthalo was the first label to release DNTEL, whose reputation is currently in a huge crescendo. Phthalo was also one of the first labels to receive demo recordings from Vladislav Delay, and his "Sistol" project was one of the first, if not THE first release of his publicly available, another significant world premiere brought to you by Phthalo. In addition, Phthalo issued the debut recording of Daedelus who is now on his way to Plug Research fame and fortune. And Phthalo acts Eight Frozen Modules, Jason Potratz, and Terminal1 are all on the verge of breaking through to wider audiences as well. Phthalo is always out in front, mining the future and reporting back, making accessible these field recordings of nature in all her digital ubiquity."