Gainsbourg bar owner JJ Wandler and Brandon Bay of Clone Press are starting a record label called Sinister Torch. It will specialize in reissuing obscure punk- and hard-rock releases, and so far the schedule looks ike it will get hardcore fans of these styles salivating. Sinister Torch, whose catalog will be distributed by burgeoning Seattle reissue gods Light in the Attic, has ambitious plans. I interviewed Wandler to find out what his and Bay’s agenda is.

Is this your first excursion in the record business?
It is. I've been friends with the Light in the Attic guys for a long time. I've actually packaged records for them on a couple of their big releases (the PiL record, for one), but never from a record-producing standpoint.

What was the impetus to start a label now, when record sales are, to put it mildly, anemic?
I'm a record collector. I've been collecting records for a very long time. My friend Brandon came to me last year and said he was thinking about starting a reissue label. I thought, “Why not?” I like the way LITA do it, but I'm more of a punk-rock guy, so we were more interested in tracking down some punk-rock rarities. I might already own it, but it's a very expensive punk-rock record that I think other people would benefit from hearing.

Would you say that’s the guiding philosophy behind Sinister Torch?
More or less. I wish we had a mission statement. But the truth is, Brandon and I have really varied tastes, and I don't even know if it will be punk-rock records all the way along. There's a Philip Glass concerto (Concerto for Violin in D Minor, or something like that) I really like that's only ever been on CD; if I could put that out on vinyl, I'd be all over it. [Wandler heard it while on top of mountain in the midst of a bad relationship while working construction. He was loading wood onto a truck in a snowstorm and listening to NPR in central Washington. "Snowflakes were falling and I hated my life and it spoke to me."]

We want to release music that moves us viscerally. Some of it is opportunity. I don't know that the Fluid's first record, Punch and Judy, necessarily moves me this early, but I'm friends with those guys and the talk has been going around for a long time about putting that album out. Jello Biafra has been bugging them to do it, but they actually went with us over Alternative Tentacles, even though we're just a start-up. Which is kind of cool.

It's not just about putting the record out. We don't want to do just a standard record. We're working on doing heavyweight vinyl, thick jackets, getting archival photos and liner notes, and putting together a really nice package. So you're not only getting a rare record, you're getting some background on it.
For our first release, Do You Feel Safe? [out on CD and download Oct. 7] by LA hardcore band SIN 34, fortunately their drummer was David Markey, who directed Desperate Teenage Lovedolls and 1991: The Year Punk Broke. He just did Bob Mould's and the Black Lips' videos most recently. He's really well connected in the music biz. He's been around a long time. He was instrumental in getting Thurston Moore to write a blurb for our release. He knows Tobi Vail, probably because she was dating Kurt at the time they were doing 1991. He helped us to score some great people to do the liner notes for SIN 34.

I met a lot of folks through Hannah Levin [a former Stranger writer whom he used to date]. I've been in the right place at the right time with a lot of things. Our second release is by this amazing band out of Australia called the Dagoes. We hope to find knowledgeable people to write liner notes for each of our records.

What's the story behind Glenn Mercer's Wheels in Motion album?
I'm a huge Feelies fan. He came out with a solo album in 2007 on Pravda Records. I contacted his manager about doing reissues of Only Life and Time for a Witness. The manager said Bar/None is already doing those reissues, so he asked, “How about the solo album?” It took four months of back and forth to put anything in place. Things work at a different pace in Feeliesland. [Feelies manager] Bob Torsello said that Glenn wrote all the songs with the idea that it was going to be the Feelies' reunion record. So all the primary Feelies members except Bill Million play on it: Brenda Sauter, Dave Weckerman, Anton Fier. It's basically a lost Feelies record, but without one of the founders. Glenn didn't tour behind it, Pravda didn't give it the time of day. So it went under the radar for a lot of people. We might also put out a retrospective of Mercer's '90s band, Wake Ooloo.

What formats will you be releasing in?
CD and vinyl and downloads. SIN 34's album was vinyl only and it's been out of print since 1983. It never made it onto CD. There's never been a digital version of it. As much as I feel CDs are becoming a dead format, I've talked to friends who work at record stores and I'm pretty good friends with Jason Hughes at Sonic Boom and they say CDs still account for a very large amount of sales. They are dying, but it's a slow death. The main thing about putting out CDs is to send promos to radio stations. That's still the best way to do it. We figured we might as well run enough so we can sell them to the people who are interested. We're putting digital download cards in with the SIN 34 release. 500 CDs, 1000 LPs is our basic plan.

My friend Jon Treneff's little label [Luxury Products] that put out that 39 Clocks record... Before we even got going, we had a meeting with those guys. We have options to press more with the artists we've signed. Those people are overjoyed to get that stuff back in print. Most of them have day jobs now and this is just a bonus.

[There ensues a long discussion about possible signings, all off the record. But trust me, you're going to be damned excited about a lot of these projects, if they come to fruition. We also talked about how hard it is to license or reissue anything on SST Records. Conclusion: Hire a tenacious, competent lawyer.]

Talk a bit more about what's in the pipeline.
We've got five releases that are locked down. We're going to do another EP with some rarities by SIN 34. We have probably a couple more records with Glenn Mercer. We’re doing one record with Steel Pole Bathtub (Tulip, coming out in April) and we hope to continue reissue more of their stuff. They have a very thick catalog. Tulip's a very thick, dense record, lots of sound layering. Their guitarist Mike Morasky did a pre-remaster. Then we're sending it off to Bob Weston, who's going to do the full remaster. They got Casey Burns to draw this amazing picture that's going inside the gatefold and they didn't like the original cover art so [bassist] Dale Flattum, who does all their artwork, redid the artwork and we got an eight-page booklet with art and write-ups from Tom Flynn who started Boner Records and Henry Owings of Chunklet and one of the guys from Neurosis wrote up stuff for their booklet. They put tons of work into it. They wanted complete creative control and we were like, sure thing, you do whatever you want. We're hoping to that type of thing with the rest of Steel Pole's records. But we've only signed the one for now.

We want to have a deep roster of more artists, but the way it looks now, we've got two years' worth of material with just the five people we've got. We don't want to get pigeonholed as the label that only does those five artists. When you think about it, LITA could've just been the Free Design label. We're gonna do what we need to do to get it off the ground and it's great to have five artists with name recognition right off the bat.

This is a dream come true for me. 25 years ago I was listening to all this music, just a young drunk punk, and now I'm working with all these artists and putting their records back into print. It's really exciting. Some people who think it's lame to reissue records, but it's a great opportunity to bring this stuff back into print for a new group of fans.

One of our criteria for reissuing something has been what does the record sell for on the secondary market? If there are 30 copies for sale on the secondary market for $6, it's not going to make sense to sink a bunch of money into something. We're looking for stuff with some relative rarity. It doesn't have to have complete relative rarity as much as the artist has to have some obscurity. There may be secondary copies available for a lower price, but with some of these artists, we just want their music to be made available again.

We signed up with Sandy Wilson of Dimension Seven, who licenses music for commercials, TV, and film. We signed up with him to get more exposure for our artists. We're hoping to land some other great artists. Superior Viaduct got the Flesheaters before we could. There's a lot of competition going on in the reissue game. It's not really about making money. Some of it's just bragging rights and getting to work with our heroes. It's nice to make money, but in this biz it's even better to put out something you're proud of.