WHEEL ME OUT - Permanent Records

Permanent Records started out in 2006 as a record shop in Chicago’s Ukrainian Village; one of the city’s DIY music scene hotspots. Founders and nice Midwesterners Lance Barresi and Liz Tooley decided they wanted to stock a hand-picked collection of mostly new releases, though it wasn’t long before they started to work with unsigned bands, helping them to record, release and distribute their records internationally: and the Permanent label was born. With their second store opening in LA this past year, we spoke to Tooley about how she and Barresi came to be at the helm of an unequivocal label that’s bringing original, underground, and often very loud music to the world (including the three bands featured in this WMO special: Cacaw, Running and Cheveu).

By Ananda Pellerin

How did Permanent Records get going? Lance and I both worked at record stores for a long time in Missouri and we wanted to do something ourselves. Chicago had such a bitchin’ music scene at the time—lots of DIY spaces, really good underground bands, a group of really nice, good people who weren’t about being aggressive but played aggressive music that was also experimental—it seemed perfect for us.

So we set up shop in Chicago and things were going good but we weren’t expecting to have a record label so early on. We started with Warhammer 48K in early 2007 because we wanted that record to be on vinyl. Many of the bands that we wanted to have on vinyl in the shop just had CD-Rs and hadn’t found a label, because a lot of the music is really heavy, and very different.

Did it seem crazy to open an independent record store in 2006? Yeah it really did. At the time Tower and Virgin Megastores were going out of business, but what was totally rad was that people were coming to us like crazy. We had about 30 articles written about us in our first year so suddenly there was all this free advertising. The story would always start out doom and gloom like, why would this couple be opening this store now? And we would put a positive spin on it, explain that we’re a niche market, we’re not gonna have huge back catalogues of complete shit; we move stuff in and out so that it’s fresh stock all the time and we try to find more obscure stuff, contact bands directly to get a lot of releases from all over the world. I think we got everybody to believe us.

It seems like it’s not only vinyl but cassettes are enjoying a bit of a revival as well. We get tapes from all over the country – I think it’s the way to go. Most of our friends have switched from CD-R to cassette because it’s a cheap way to do it and it’s a more interesting package that people are going to hang onto. Also a lot of people who didn’t grow up with cassettes are getting into them.

Left: Liz Tooley and Lance Barresi; Right: Permanent Records' store cat

What kinds of bands do you sign? A lot of the bands have a good rhythmic sound that’s constantly driving. Repetition. That’s totally the kind of stuff we’re into, like The Stooges. But there are definitely no boundaries as far as the label goes, we’re not looking for a specific genre and we’re definitely open to anything and everything. We love each one of our releases as much as the other. When you’re curating something like this it’s very personal.

Do you get a lot of international attention? We do a lot of trade with labels all over the world. We send records every day to Greece, Australia, everywhere. It’s amazing where music can end up, and great to be a part of it - like sending a Running record to Brazil or something is so cool. It helps having a shop too because if someone else has a label then we can swap 20 of theirs for 20 of ours. Also since we’ve taken over our own distribution the label’s done a thousand times better than ever and it shows that sometimes the DIY ethos is the way to go. WMO

Permanent Records

www.permanentrecords.com