‘Our Mission Was to Bring Great Australian Music to the World’: Chapter Music Calls Time After 33 Years

In the essay Notes on Camp, cultural critic Susan Sontag argues that nothing has a “more decisive” influence on the way we live our lives than taste.

Taste has been the driving force behind Melbourne indie label Chapter Music throughout its three-decade existence.

In this case, it’s the taste of two individuals: Guy Blackman, who founded the label in Perth in 1992, and Blackman’s partner, Ben O’Connor, who came on board when Chapter relocated to Melbourne in 1995.

The couple recently announced that Chapter will stop releasing new music after 33 years of championing Australia’s rock, pop and experimental underground.

Chapter’s first releases were cassette compilations documenting Perth’s shoegaze, grunge, and lo-fi pop scene. In the years since, they’ve put out everything from the pounding noise rock of Sea Scouts to the hypnotic drones of Fabulous Diamonds, the lo-fi house of Andras & Oscar and the jangly guitar pop of Twerps and Dick Diver.

The label’s signings have always reflected Blackman and O’Connor’s taste in interesting, non-mainstream Australian music. But it was never their goal to remain an underground concern.

“Our mission was always to try and bring great Australian music to the world,” Blackman says.

I’m speaking to Blackman and O’Connor at their Melbourne townhouse, which doubles as Chapter Music’s HQ. Along with introducing interesting Australian music to the world, Blackman and O’Connor were determined to show Australian listeners that the local scene is worth celebrating.

“When we started, there was this whole idea that Australian music wasn’t as interesting or as good as overseas music,” Blackman says. “The idea that bands in your own environment are as important as bands from overseas, we’ve always fought to make that idea really central to what we do.”

Chapter’s releases are distributed internationally through the US-based Secretly Distribution, part of the broader Secretly Group. But Melbourne has long been the label’s bedrock. “I think we’ve always put out music that reflects the world around us and reflects what’s going on where we live,” says O’Connor.

They’ve discovered most of their artists – including no-frills punk band CLAMM, avant-rap duo Teether & Kuya Neil, ’90s space pop act Minimum Chips, and 2000s baroque pop quartet Crayon Fields – at local gigs.

“We saw Pat [O’Neill] from Twerps the other day and he was saying, ‘I remember when you came to our second show and you were saying it was amazing and you wanted to work with us,’ and how bizarre that was for him,” O’Connor says.

There have been some exceptions, such as singer-songwriter Laura Jean, who’d released two albums before connecting with Chapter in the early 2010s. Jean’s three most recent, AMP-nominated albums, 2014’s Laura Jean, 2018’s Devotion and 2022’s Amateurs, are crown jewels in the Chapter catalogue.

“It’s been an amazing relationship, working with her,” says O’Connor. “When we first were talking about working with her, I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can, I’m so in awe of her.’”

With acclaimed acts like Jean, Twerps, indie trio The Goon Sax, and cult synth-punk band Primitive Calculators on the roster, one wonders if the majors ever tried to buy Chapter from Blackman and O’Connor. The short answer is no.

“All of our artists retain their own masters,” says O’Connor, meaning there’d be nothing much to buy. “Aside from the name and the aura,” laughs Blackman.

Chapter has doubled as a reissue label through much of its history, releasing albums by American folk singer Kath Bloom, LA gay leather rocker Smokey, Australian folk legend Margret RoadKnight, and the defining Australian post-punk compilation, Can’t Stop It!

The label will keep working on reissues even after it closes the curtains on new releases. So, why the decision to downsize? A dip in vinyl sales and a change in streaming habits has made the financial equation unmanageable, Blackman says.

“Support for Australian music in general has reduced since the pandemic,” he explains. O’Connor adds, “We’ve always worked outside of Chapter, but it’s got a lot harder to maintain the balance of doing things with Chapter at the scale we want to and having enough time to make money to live.”

They haven’t lost interest in new music. Earlier this year, Chapter released Teether & Kuya Neil’s debut album YEARN IV – the best Australian hip-hop album ever, according to Blackman – and the debut EP from industrial electronic trio Npcede.

Npcede

Npcede are on the lineup for Chapter’s End of an Era event on June 7th, part of Melbourne’s RISING festival. O’Connor describes witnessing Npcede’s first gig at the Thornbury Bowls Club in 2023 as a “jaw-dropping, incredibly overwhelming and exciting experience.”

“It’s always about our personal response to something,” he says, summing up what connects the more-than-two-hundred releases in the Chapter Music catalogue. “We can only put out something that we’re both really excited about.”

The label’s catalogue is varied, a reflection of Blackman and O’Connor’s diverse taste. There aren’t, for instance, many parallels between the neoclassical Butchulla songs of Yirinda, the wordy post-punk dispatches of The Native Cats, and the strange, messy improvisations of Bum Creek.

But there is a unifying sensibility, says Blackman. “We really like music that sounds like it could only be made by that particular person who made it. It has to feel like it’s really important to that person to make that music, that they’ve got something that’s really important for them to get off their chest.”

Chapter Music’s End of an Era party is happening at Max Watt’s, Melbourne, on Saturday, June 7th. Visit RISING Melbourne for more.

Billy Burgess is a writer living on Wurundjeri land. He has written for “The Age”, “Vice”, “Rolling Stone” and “The Big Issue”.