Cached.Out 2026 ✌️ 💿 ✌️

An open letter on why I am done running a record label.

Here is an open letter about why I am done running a “record label” and how that is ok.

I got shoulder surgery almost a month ago and had a lot of time to sit and think about stuff during recovery. Plenty to think about… but, one of the things I thought about a lot was “running a record label.” What a practice! A thing I have done for 20 years now…

I can’t quite explain how or why running a record label became such a commanding part of my identity, but it has been a pillar of who I am since I was about 17 or 18. My high school friends and I kicked around in bands and looked up to early 2000s DIY juggernauts like threeoneg, constellation, thrill jockey, saddle creek, DFA, so having our own label felt like a due course of action. I always had a crew of buds around, but I was always the one who made the (geocities) websites and blogspots and myspace pages. That has kind of been how things have gone for me for 20 years now.

The first label was “Healthy Horse Records” and was short lived. We didn’t ever really release anything, but my first three bands made microscopic runs of CDrs and wrote “healthy horse” on there. That was followed by “Vice Versa Records” which felt less goofy and more serious, and was mostly what I put on stuff I was self releasing or passing around to friends.

In 2005 or 2006 it evolved into Fir Traders Union. Influenced by a burgeoning community in Fort Collins youth music culture, and Act So Big Forest, this was when I got more into the packaging of things. Releases became more professional-looking, though very scrappy still. Complicated cardboard cases, lots of hand-made inserts, cutting and folding and gluing. This was when I started actually working with people that I didn’t really know. Most of my stuff from the FTU days isn’t online, which is fine by me. But, this release by Molly Shannon Molly Shannon from that era is one of my hallmark favorite things I’ve been a part of helping put into the world.

I moved around a bit in the first few years of college and after returning to my hometown and reuniting with old friends and starting a band and a house venue, it felt like it was time for another label. That was when Patient Sounds started. 2009 or so. We started the label as a kind of household project, but it ended up still just being me. We worked hard dubbing tapes as a crew for the first few releases, but as the label grew, people moved away, and things changed as they do, and eventually it was just me getting stoned and watching Star Trek TNG and doing everything. And it was the center of my life and world and arts practice for 10 years. Things really blossomed when I moved to Chicago in 2014. Eventually I looked around and was kind of shocked. More than 100 titles, hundreds of demo submissions, shows and showcases and everything that makes a small DIY label fun. I started my career as a professor in 2016 and by 2019 I had burned out on doing Patient Sounds at the scale I had been while also teaching.

Some of you may be having deja vu. To be frank, I sort of am too. That choice to shut PS down was mostly met with understanding. I am super proud of Patient Sounds; how it started, everything between, and also how it ended.

Read that reader article here if you want to!

Cached came after PS, and sort of because of covid. It was different and special right away. Smaller and also somehow bigger. More tender, more playful, and also a little more stubborn. More experimental. Less hungry and more refined. Mostly, Cached was the thing that made Fuubutsushi form. And now I am realizing that I would rather pull my focus away from running a label and spend more time… not running a label.

Do I have other plans? Absolutely. Tons. They just don’t include being a “label guy^.” I will probably create a tiny little imprint to self-release and reissue some of my older titles, and maybe some art objects and printed matter and other intermedia confusions here or there.

For now, I just don’t have the bandwidth to manage a catalog apart from my own, and also a full publisher’s inventory, a website, a bandcamp, artist relations, design, mail room, promotion and social media… all while also being a parent, an artist, a gardener, a partner, a tender.

No, I am not quitting music lololol. I have new things cooking with RVNG, collaborations with friends, and Fuubutsushi has new stuff in the oven… I think it is going to be a really thrilling experince to be able to divorce some of my practice of being a musician with the practice of also putting out other peoples’ music.

I am so thankful for that time I had to spend on this grand strange adventure, and all the tapes and CDs and records and books and shirts and bumper stickers I have been able to touch, to make, to ship, to help create. All the transferred digital files. All the email blasts. All the instagram posts. All of it was an honor.

I could ramble here about the state of the industry, the looming threats of AI and streaming inequity, the general algorithmic systems that dictate taste now and how fans and listeners have to trespass across a parasocial chasm in order to feel genuine artistic community. But I will stop there. Because its too messy for me to neatly address, but definitely part of why I am done.

But, more than anything, I am honoring this; being true to myself means being true to the fact that things change. I changed, am changing, becoming different particles and ideas every day, and I don’t think I should run a label just because it is what I’ve done since I was 18. “That’s how its always been” isn’t a reason to persist.

For now, please explore the Cached archives, purchase downloads, CDs, LPs, and Books from the shop, and stream as much as you want from our site for free. Artists that have done titles will Cached will be sharing their titles on Bandcamp or through other platforms as they see fit. Fuubutsushi has put our entire catalog on bandcamp, with a few titles showing up there for the first time ever!

Also, I bet you could find everything for free download on soulseek ;)

Thanks for reading this open letter, and thanks to every artist I have worked with during this 20 year long journey I’ve had the good fortune of sharing with you all.

For now, from the tall grass.

-Matt