Whitelabrecs + Covid 19 = Home Diaries

Postal announcement
Yesterday I saw an announcement by our trusty local post office, that they will no longer be open as of the 1st of April 2020. This is of course due to the outbreak of Covid 19 and completely sensible for the best interests of both workers and customers alike. I’d already made the decision that this weekend’s ‘Disconnect‘ by S.hel would be our last release for a little while and our visits to the post office would be infrequent.

Of course, now I will not go to the post office until they’re open again and therefore, any orders will be set aside for this duration. To anyone who has ordered up to 23:59 GMT on the 30th of March, I will be going to the post office tomorrow, so your order will be fulfilled.

If you decide to order, please bear this in mind. Be assured that I promise to fulfil every single order I receive and fully intend to keep everything running. But there will be a wait, until things settle down again. Whitelabrecs is a hobby, run alongside a full time job and has been built to be secure, so that we can adapt and not take too many risks. Of course I wasn’t ever planning for something like this! In fact, I had planned a wonderful discography for 2020 with some truly amazing artists! So I’m certainly disappointed as I’m sure they will be. But there can be no anger or blame, only adaptation and if we can, inspiration!

So, onto our idea…
Whilst at home (like many others I imagine), I had been recording downstairs in my house, as my 18 month year old daughter Isla played. I’d bring down some acoustic instruments and hit record – sometimes she’d join in. I found myself doing this for between 5 and 20 minutes every day and then processing and developing the tracks in the evening. I found it was really helpful in the current circumstances and sort of documented our time indoors, like a diary. And so ‘Home Diaries‘ was born – an album I am making, and an invitation to other artists to make one too!

I announced my idea on Facebook under a week ago and had over 50 emails or messages and currently, we have 3 albums ready to go! These albums of varying lengths will be digital only, released by both the artist and ourselves. It’ll hopefully raise a little money for us to help pay some of the bills associated with running a label, such as service subscriptions, mastering, website costs and the forthcoming tax bill. Nothing huge and I’m not looking to put out a big appeal; just give the albums a play if you have time and if you like what you hear and want to download, you can. If you want to check out the artist instead and support them, go for it! I guess I’m thinking of the bigger picture and as well as hopefully living through this and surviving it, there will be a collection of sonic diaries from an international line-up of artists to look back upon. Isla may be too young to remember much about the year 2020, but perhaps one day I can show her that simply playing with her puzzles, story books and soft toys helped inspire me to document the events of the world around us, from the perspective of many like-minded artists.

So watch this space – soon we hope we’ll be able to release CDs again but for the moment, we’re preparing the very first Home Diaries edition for release, both through our Bandcamp, the artist’s and Spotify. We hope to including a PDF interview of the artist as special bonus liner notes.