About Feral Media
Feral Media is a record label based in Australia's largest city, Sydney. It is owned and operated by me, Danny Jumpertz and my wife, Caroline Chisholm.
We've been operating as a record label for nearly three years, I measure our starting point when we released the Plankton 'Undertone' album and Comatone 'One Into One Out' in September 2003. That's also when we organised 'proper' distribution with MGM, rather than dealing with stores on consignment basis. So really we haven't been around that long at all.
Beyond being a record label, releasing, distributing and promoting recordings we are also involved in the recording process, producing, mixing and mastering many of our own releases. But Feral Media has been around longer than its life as a record label.
Feral Media as a company began in 1995 as one of the first web design companies in Australia. At that time Feral Media had just one client (my previous employer), a backpacker's magazine, and one employee, me. I was able to start Feral Media because they gave me a buch of cash to build them a web site.
Well, the website was a bit of a write off - I had twelve months to do it, and never really gave them a completed site. It was, as they say, under construction.
I had always played in bands and jammed with friends throughout my teenage years and twenties. Actually, most of the time I should have been learning how to build websites, I was making four track recordings in my home office. The first twelve months of Feral Media allowed me to immerse myself in music and recording. I made hundreds of four track tapes. Because I was on such good money, I decided to head to the UK and see heaps of bands. It was over there in 1996 that I had a real breakthrough with my music. I started to really believe that I had something to offer. I also realised that without self-belief you just cannot find your own sound.
As a web design company, Feral Media was a great failure, basically because I didn't really know what I was doing, or more accurately I wasn't particularly into what I was doing. Like many others, I was swept up in the excitement of this 'new media'. The web, email and all that stuff completely blew me away. I can remember the first time I saw a web page, I can remember buying the first issue of Wired Magazine and thinking, "something completely new is happening here". In those days, web design was really confusing, there were no courses, no good guidebooks, and most of the time no one knew what you were talking about.
But it did allow me to go out on my own, start my own company and become independent, instead of working for others. I got out of making websites just as the whole industry was really taking off, but my heart just wasn't in it. Where my heart was, was in music.
When music is such an important part in your life it's really important to find the right people to play with. For a very long time I moved too often to establish any roots or get together good quality gear. So it was down to an old drum machine, an acoustic guitar and the four track. Music was such an important part of my life, but the sad fact was that I'd gradually become a music consumer and not a creator.
I watched lots of bands in London from 1989 - 1992, really inspiring exciting sounds from bands like The Pixies, Nirvana, Ed Kuepper, Julian Cope, Definition Of Sound but it was just too hard to survive in London let alone make music too. As many people could attest life can be very hard for a young Aussie in the UK capital! In many ways my self-confidence dropped to an all time low during this time, far from home; I only dreamed of recording and writing songs.
I struggled to find people to play with upon arriving back in Australia, but things were getting better. I was jamming reasonably often with friends and living in a creative house in inner Sydney. Working in community radio (Radio Skid Row) put me in touch with Sydney's underground music scene, but as a radio dj and gig goer, I was still on the wrong side of the music fence. I admired those people who seemed to be able to get together bands and organise gigs. Then in my 30s, a lot of friends I had played with in the past had moved on, moved away, lost interest in music, gotten proper jobs, proper relationships, and didn't maintain those crazy rock n roll dreams I thought we had all shared.
But I so much wanted to write and record, be creative, and ultimately to communicate with people through music. Pop music, indie music, whatever been so important to me in my life, without it I don't think I would have made it through some tough times. It provided a soundtrack to the peaks and troughs of my day to day and made me feel connected spiritually and politically to people all over the world. Music was very important to me and I wasn't going to let go!
Through various radio jobs I had during the 80s and 90s I was exposed to lots of bands - doing interviews and this provided lots of food for thought. I've seen first hand how people playing in bands can be arrogant pricks, as well as charming and thoughtful. I remember just before my 30th birthday interviewing new Perth band Jebediah for Sydney community radio. I'd been doing this sort of thing for about ten years off and on (much of it unpaid), and was starting to get a little, well, jaded by the hype. Here I was almost 30, helping to publicise the next thing, maintaining an endless crusade to promote Australian music I had started at my first radio job in 1983. I think it was because Jebediah were so young, I don't think they were even 18! They were nice enough as people, but musically they were quite flat and unexciting. What was I doing here? I should have a real crack at creating a career of making music rather that being a cog in the ultimately unsatisfying music / media industry wheel.
I had this realisation many more times before the planets aligned and I decided to have a crack at making music a full time thing.
I decided to put Feral Media to sleep for a few years and completely immerse myself in music full-time. This involved enrolling at Southern Cross University in Lismore in northern New South Wales. It was a hot, isolated, redneck town. But the Uni was well equipped with studio gear and it gave me the opportunity to hook up with some like-minded souls. Many of Feral Media's recording artists are people I met while studying. I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in the multitrack suites at the uni, getting up to date with recording technology, just when the digital revolution was starting to really hit. The timing was really good. Many musicians of my vintage were initially caught out by the computer recording phenomenon; they were sort of stuck in a no man's land between cheap four track tape recorders and daunting digital technology.
Today's Feral Media wouldn't have been possible twenty years ago; we are reliant on technology to get the job done. Whether it's our website, propagating information and distributing music to a worldwide audience, or the digital recording workstations and sequencers we use to record, there's no escaping technology. To many of the artists involved in Feral Media, the technology available today has been a positive and liberating force. It has enabled us to be independent producers in control of our destiny.
Upon leaving University at the end of 2000 I moved to Melbourne and got involved in community radio (3RRR) and playing in bands. In the next couple of years I played live regularly with my primary outfit Plankton, but also other Melbourne bands like Catnip and La Chambre. This was good practical music experience - getting out of the studio and in front of an audience.
The last time I had played live in a band (Tuna Fish Wreck) was in the early 80s, and in those days I had never really felt comfortable playing live. I've since discovered it's all about finding your niche within a band, within the band's sound. As a guitarist in my teens I enjoyed jamming with friends but usually everything fell apart when we played live. I know I was scared stiff, trying to hide behind the PA, certain we were going to stuff up. We often did. As a band we were under-rehearsed and sloppy, and I was relieved in some ways when work took me away from Melbourne in 1982.
Eventually I left radio and after a stint in publishing as editor of a backpackers magazine, I started Feral Media with the help of a New Enterprise Incentive Scheme (NEIS) grant.
It seems to have taken 100 years to get where we are now, but in reality it's only been 40 (years).
And here we are now. 2006 . . .
