I've always gravitated toward small, independent labels, the kind where you get a direct read on the owner's taste rather than a corporate roster. I ran with that instinct for years as a fan before doing anything about it myself, one earlier attempt to rebuild a defunct LA label with a friend never got off the ground. What actually launched Valley Electroniks was a body of my own work: a four-volume solo series called Valley Electronics, each volume a different corner of what I make, heavy techno, harsh noise, somber electronics, straight power noise. When the series ended, the name was already sitting there, proven, mine. I swapped the C for a K, a small nod to Elektron, the synth company, and to the machines most of this music comes out of. One letter, a new identity built on an old one.
Curation
Three artists on the label so far: myself, Hex Wolves, and Nootropic. Neither came from a submissions inbox. Hex Wolves and I have played together for years, duo sets, festivals across the country, the kind of friendship that also happens to include album art I've made for him. Nootropic came through a direct referral, a producer Hex Wolves knew from his Seattle days, running a handful of aliases depending on genre, this one his cyberpunk-leaning techno moniker. I liked the music. That was the whole decision. I run the label more like a gallerist than a traditional label manager, everything in service to the music and the artist's own vision, not a formula the artist has to fit.
Visual Process
I travel constantly, for shows, for work, for nothing in particular, and I'm always shooting, a proper camera or just my phone. A Banksy in Shoreditch, a mural in Roswell, the collision of a multimillion-dollar house next to real poverty a few blocks from where I live in LA. None of it's shot for a specific release. It just accumulates, filed away by feeling as much as subject.
When a record comes in, I go back into that archive and listen while I look, no formula, no brief from the artist about what the art should be. Hex Wolves' "Crisis Mismanagement" cover is a photo I took standing on a cliff on the east side of Maui. Nootropic's came from a walk through my own neighborhood in the days right after a George Floyd protest passed through it. Two records, two entirely different starting points, landscape and lived history, both filtered through the same process: does this image work in lockstep with the sound, or does it work precisely because it doesn't.
What It's Actually For
Genesis P-Orridge said industrial music for industrial people. I first heard that line long before I understood it. It clicked properly in an outsider art course in college, work made entirely outside any market's expectations. Outsider techno for outsider people is that same idea, aimed at a genre increasingly run by influencers whose gear walls exist to be content, not instruments, where craft comes second to persona. Every release carries the label's mark in the same place, upper right, no typography beyond that, just one image doing all the work. You can put any Valley Electroniks release next to a shelf of techno du jour and it won't blend in. That's not an accident. That's the entire design brief.
