Interview: Jaxon and Zeb of Garden Seat and Static Open
Garden Seat is an Australian record label run by Jaxon Bailey-Banks and Zeb Olsen who also host gigs in their event space Static Open in Footscray. The pair met while hosting shows on Castlemaine’s community radio station 94.9 MAINfm, and have combined Zeb’s archive of unreleased recordings with Jaxon’s ear for new local underground happenings into an eclectic and ever expanding collaborative enterprise.
Static Open not only hosts gigs but also has a small store which distributes music and zines Jaxon is passionate about. I visited Static Open to hear what they’ve both been up to and get some music recommendations.
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So how did the label start?
Zeb: I think we talked about the label very early on, shortly after we met. I’ve actually been a bit involved with labels many years ago, but I’ve always wanted to do my own, and for many years I had been looking out for that perfect person that was going to complement what I wanted to do for a label. I can do things on my own, but it’s so much easier, more fun and productive I think if I do things with other people who love it.
What about formats, did you start digital?
Jaxon: We started with digital stuff and then went straight to cassette. They’re cheap to make and cheap to buy. I think $10 for a cassette is a steal.
Zeb: Yeah, and it’s a nice little package. They’re easy to do your own artwork, as handmade as you like, or not, and we like doing really short runs, because it’s like ‘Go, go, go! Oh it sold out! Yay! Onto the next thing’.
Jaxon: This is a run of 15 cassettes, We Grit Our Teeth We Bite Your Lip [by Dead]. There were five on pink, five on teal, five on orange, and hand numbered.
Zed: That’s the best band in Castlemaine, Dead. They’re mates of ours. It’s totally amazing. They have a record label called We Empty Rooms and they do hand printed things. One of them’s a visual artist running it from his house in our town, so that was inspiring.
Jaxon: And they’re pretty well known with a following in the States too. They’ve worked with Toshi Kasai, who has recorded Tool and the Melvins.
So they have their own label but you released this one?
Zeb: It was actually a project of We Empty Rooms where they did this wholly improvised ambient kind of version of Dead. They made all the copies and offered them to little labels and said, ‘You can buy 15 off us and we’ll give you the digital artwork and do what you want with it.’ So I spray painted ours, and we sold these out pretty quick because people were like, ‘It’s a Dead thing. I need it.’
Jaxon: And it’s a split release with another band called Solar Tongue. So it’s two bands on one.
What are some other releases you’re working on?
Jaxon: We’re putting out a comp with about 15 or 20 different various artists that we resonate with, but we’ve got half a dozen or a dozen projects that are sitting here and getting caked in dust. We haven’t finished them, but we’ve got components of them. So this one is the solo snare drum player Ryosuke Kiyasu that we’ve got cassettes of, but the artwork that I’ve done hasn’t been pumped out yet.
Zeb: The whole label is a bit all over the shop because we have so many ideas, and we get really enthusiastic about things, and we want to do it all. Which means some things take a while to get done, but it’s all happening.
What are some of the other tapes you’ve got here?
Jaxon: So I also buy music products off labels or bands at wholesale, and I sell them like a record store. So it’s just a mini record store at Static Open, because I want the stuff and the cheapest way to get it is to buy it at wholesale and then I can sell it too. So it’s stuff I’m interested in owning myself, because I always try to take note of small labels, and I want to add that to our label to make it more of a community thing, that we can buy and sell other people’s stuff and keep it interesting. Because we’re probably not going to get around to doing everything, like we’ve got our own things.
Zeb: Jaxon listens to a lot of music all the time and is always finding new things and getting excited about new things. So that’s kind of his department. And the distro really feeds that hunger for him and it really benefits the label because it builds those connections and networks. And hopefully these people will be interested in what we’re doing as well.
Jaxon: This group, P Wits, they’re from New Zealand on a label called No Label which releases mainly noise and improv rock. But if they wanted to tour then they can play here. So it all feeds in. Basically, I’ve been talking to lots of Australian bands and lots of Australian record labels, trying to get their stuff because I want to network. There’s this lathe a musician who played here gifted me, Schkeuditzer Kreuz. He’s a dude from New South Wales and he plays industrial db music. It’s on Wintergarden records, a sick label, and it’s Low Life from Sydney and him split on lathe and this just blew me away when I heard it. Also, we were talking to Sex Tourists, a band from Sydney. We’re gonna reissue a tape of theirs. This album is superb. They don’t have enough recognition, but people know about them, like if they played a show here they’d sell it out.
Are they mostly known in NSW?
Jaxon: And Melbourne. They’re probably more appreciated here. But I would love to find out more about Sex Tourists. You should write about them because I want to know more. They’re unreal.
It sounds like you guys should do a zine.
Zeb: We’d love to do that. But we’d love to do a lot of stuff. We spend a day together each week just talking about ideas, and it’s all just meant to be fun. The label’s really important to us, but if we weren’t having a good time, we’d stop doing it. Because we just want to really enjoy it.
I was at Sticky [zine store in Melbourne] the other week and there was a 7” with a zine in it. Do you think that could be the next thing for labels, because a lot have been doing booklets lately?
Jaxon: I’ve been wanting to have zines with most gigs here so you can go home with a zine that folds out into a poster and the other side is writing. I’m working on that for a project. But we’ve got Rango Tango here, which is a Brisbane rock and roll zine, which is pretty solid, and Hex Induction from Seattle, and yours. So we’re big into the zine culture.
How did you get in contact with Hex Induction?
Jaxon: They released a book of Jensen Tjhung. He’s from Deaf Wish, which was a Melbourne band that got on Sub Pop and they went to went to the States did tours and all the rest. I think they broke up, but he released his book of poems that he wrote while on tour in the US while the band was falling apart, and they’re just good poems. Hex Induction released that and I really liked it. I met Jensen pretty recently and we’ve been in contact, and now I’m the distributor for Hex Induction.
So there’s two sides of the label?
Zeb: Two sides of the coin. And in so many ways, we really complement each other. The way we work, the way we think, where we’re at in our lives, what we’re into. I mean, I could do this on my own, but it would only be one half of it, it wouldn’t be as good.
What about the back catalogue stuff you’re releasing like your band Mothra?
Zeb: I’m pretty focused on releasing my back catalogue because I’ve got heaps of great stuff that was never released back in the day. We recorded it but then I didn’t know what to do next. So I’m kind of catching up with that. But that stuff doesn’t matter timewise because the band’s been waiting 15 years for that to be released. They don’t care if it takes another two, and people don’t seem to care when something was made. If it’s good, they want to listen to it and that’s it. So I’m doing that stuff and then Jaxon’s going out into the now, in the future, and getting stuff so I think that makes a good balance.
Jaxon: Yeah, it’s more just us feeling good about it. It’s chaos. Whatever falls into our hands, to an extent.
Garden Seat can be found on Bandcamp and Instagram, and Static Open is on Instagram.
Jaxon and Zeb’s 94.9 MAINfm programs can heard each Saturday. Zeb hosts No Agenda between 12–2pm, later followed by Jaxon’s Saturdaze at 3pm. More information at mainfm.net
This article was originally published in The Shadow Knows Issue #3, July 2022. Buy the fanzine here or read more at our website.
