About Us

The Atomic Family Records.

It's kind of odd sitting here and writing an "About Us" page for the Family. I mean, I never expected to still be writing these sorts of things. I never really expected the Family to go anywhere. In its infancy, the Family was an optimistic dream between two broke and nearly homeless kids who relied on stolen pizzas and 99 cent burritos to keep them from starving. That sort of beginning isn't exactly filled with promises of success and prosperity.

For a good while after I met Erik Grieco, we were more acquaintances than friends. We knew each other because we hung out at the same places and knew the same people. Despite the fact that I didn't really know him as anything more than a friend of a friend, I had come to really admire the amount of effort that he had put into building a following for Resent, his band at the time. I respected the hell out of him before we even got to be friends. Some people talk a good game, it was clear from day one that Erik actually follows through.

I was still focused on working on my monstrosity of a pet project at the time, The Grand Devious. I spent a lot of time dicking around with synthesizers and drum machines and computers and tried to make something innovative that people would actually listen to. For the most part, I failed to accomplish that. However, Erik called me up out of the blue one day while I was in the middle of a drunken game of billiards and asked me to make some contributions to the Resent record he was working on at the time, which would eventually become "Missed My Wrist." He wanted the record to be more than just a collection of songs, but rather a cohesive work of art from beginning to end. For reasons still unknown to me, he decided to take a chance and give me a whack at accomplishing that goal.

I ended up spending an ungodly amount of time with Erik after this phone call. I'd come over and we'd just work on the record, sometimes around the clock, for what seemed like months. The humorous part to this whole thing is that the record was already recorded by the time I touched it. All we were doing at this point was trying to fit the tracks together in a way that made the thing flow from beginning to end in a rather natural feeling manner. We spent weeks on this. I would estimate that I had 12 different versions of the record on my iPod before we finally made one that just worked.

Once that was done, Erik found that the pressing company needed artwork made to spec. I had a pretty basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator at the time, so I told him that we should just give it a shot and do it ourselves. In all honesty, the front cover artwork could have come out better. I think at that point in our relationship, Erik and I hadn't gotten quite comfortable enough to tell each other things like "we're doing this all wrong" and instead spent too much time trying not to insult each other and not enough time mocking each others' bad decisions. Lessons were learned, and I think that we've come to make pretty great artwork since this happened.

At some point in this whole process, we came to this realization that putting out records isn't necessarily hard if you know what you're doing. The problem is that your options typically are limited to either learning it yourself or paying somebody who already learned it. I mean, Erik and I were lucky in that between the two of us, we were able to learn all of the production aspects of sending a disc off to press, a process that normally bankrupts people. Some people just aren't lucky enough to be around people who know what they are doing.

Erik, realizing this, told me that he wanted to start a record label. I told him this was a bad idea.

"We're never going to make any money off of it, and we're going to end up hating ourselves for turning our fun hobbies into not fun jobs." I told him.

"Of course not," he replied. "Instead of focusing on making money, we just help out people we like."

I was skeptical, but intrigued. This plan could go well. This plan could also fail miserably. In the meantime, we put The Atomic Family logo on the Resent record, assigned it the catalog number TAF001, and only time would tell if there would be any more numbers assigned to records.

Time passed. Eventually there was a second TAF record released, albeit in small quantity, the self-titled Urbane Decay record. I don't even really remember where it was recorded or how it sounded. Urbane Decay was a band of our friends, including our good friend and eventual roommate Lars, our friend Brian, and if memory serves I think Erik played the drums on that thing. That record never really went anywhere and the band broke up shortly after it was released. However, the record's designation of TAF002 was a success for the family in that we made it to that ever-elusive stage of record label development where you have more than one non-compilation album. We were pretty geeked. More time passed.

Eventually, I came to live with Erik for about a year. We spent more time dicking around in our home studio than we should have, especially considering the fact that we were both effectively broke. Instead of being a responsible citizen who paid their bills on time and went to school, I spent a lot of money on booze and recording equipment. I'd love to say that this is a great way to live your life, but let's face it. It's not. On the other hand, Erik and I got a whole lot of completely unprofitable yet artistically credible work done. It was nice.

While we lived together, we met The Smut Project. Some kid hanging out at their house had ruined their day by accidentally breaking their bottle of vodka and their computer's sound card at a time when all they wanted to do was drink vodka and record. Erik, with his new shiny recording setup and nobody to record, volunteered himself and our house to record The Smut Project. I brought the vodka. We had a bit of a conversation beforehand along the lines that, should this recording project go well with The Smut Project, we'd probably keep on going. Luckily for both us and The Atomic Family as a whole, The Smut Project are the greatest people to work with on the planet. They're a bit weird, as they seem to prefer warm, cheap vodka, but they are excellent to work with. If that wasn't true, Erik and I would probably have given up by now and the family would have stopped at TAF002.

It went well. The Smut Project recordings never ended up being released until just recently, but the experience went well. Around this time Erik was also working with our good friends at Unarmed to get their record recorded in the studio of Jim Hufnagel (a damn fine person, to be certain.) Unarmed put together a really great record and soon we were up to TAF003.

By this time, we were living a rather irresponsible rock and roll lifestyle, but it was hard to hold it against us since the Family was coming along so well. Erik got a lot of our friends together and we put together the label's first comp, TAF004.

Four releases, not a goddamned dollar to show for it, and we were smiling like pigs in shit.

More releases followed. Eskimoses. Northern Aggression, shit even Zevidence put out a record with the Family. Today, we're up to 19 releases, and getting here has been amazing. We're still not making any money to speak of, but art isn't really an industry that should be entered by anybody looking to make a profit. It is, in all of its corniness, a labor of love.

As I mentioned earlier, it feels really odd that I'm still talking about the Family. It feels odd that I'm still putting together blurbs like this one to describe to people what we're all about. It seems that a label like ours, (which feels more like a loose-knit collective of people pushing in the same direction than it does a business,) has lasted this long without losing its optimistic dedication to putting quality before profit. Hell, I think all of us have sunk thousands into this thing and I'm pretty sure none of us have made anywhere close to that. We're not expecting it.

That's who we are.

-Christopher