Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Old as new


Via Daily Swarm: A Rational Conversation: Light in the Attic's Matt Sullivan on Making Undiscovered Music Relevant Today... "Light in the Attic founder and co-owner Matt Sullivan discuss how to best make undiscovered, sometimes forgotten music from another time relevant to today’s tastes and economy."

.Light In The Attic celebrated its tenth anniversary earlier this month with a special live show out in Los Angeles, with Rodriguez, Michael Chapman, and Shin Joong Hyun, and another to follow in Seattle. A fascinating read on how do you make a reissue label relevant to contemporary audiences, and also talks about Rodriguez and the movie Searching for Sugarman...

... Did it take the Searching for Sugar Man documentary to really make those Rodriguez reissues take off?
Matt Sullivan: Those reissues actually did really well – Cold Fact had sold 20,000 copies since our August 2008 reissue before the movie even came out. In the reissue world, that’s a really good amount of records, but Rodriguez is reaching a whole other audience from that movie: now my 81-year-old aunt in San Diego is going to see him play. I think I first heard Rodriguez in the early 2000s.

We went to Detroit and met him around 2005 or 2006, but we didn’t know there was a documentary in the works; that came later. I think Rodriguez first told us about the documentary in 2007 or 2008, when we were putting together the reissues.

When I met Malik Bendjelloul, the film’s director, at a show at Joe’s Pub in New York, I had no idea the documentary would be as good as it was. It’s so hard to make a good film, especially a good music doc. He sent me rough cuts of the film for years, and it turned out so spectacular.

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