Is Base Trip Records the Next Sub Pop?
Conor Loughman (CGS'08, COM'10) on launching an indie label
Click on the slide show above to listen to Conor Loughman (CGS’08, COM’10) talk about Base Trip, the record label he started this year. Click on the pics below to hear each of the musicians on the label talk about her music.
Talk about suffering for your art: to fund his start-up record label, Conor Loughman earned money last summer by dressing up in a giant cow costume, replete with pink dress, as part of a promo for Maggie Moo’s Ice Cream.
“Oh God,” Loughman (CGS’08, COM’10) says. “That sucked.”
But it helped him get the cash to start Base Trip Records last November, including the incorporation fee, payment for a sound engineer, fees for copyrighting songs, and other expenses. Fortunately for Loughman, he had plenty of friends and friends of friends who offered to help out for free with Web design, photography, promotional blogging, and access to recording spaces. And the talent he signed to the label didn’t cost a thing. Base Trip has three acts, all Boston University sophomores and friends of Loughman’s — singer-songwriters Katie Uva (CAS’10) and Stephanie Barrak (CAS’10) and hip-hop street poet Stephanie Domingo (SMG’10), known on stage as Spk Trth. The plan is for all three to release EPs this summer. “We’re mainly going to be gigging like crazy, playing a lot of shows and just getting our name out there,” Loughman says. “Because it’s all word-of-mouth.”
Loughman also won BU student radio station WTBU’s New Voices contest last fall with Alternative Baby-Making Music, which he now hosts on the station. And while he is a musician himself (guitar and occasionally ukelele), he says his real interest, and talent, is music production and promotion.
“Marketing is actually one of the most fun parts for me,” he says. As long as no cow costumes are involved.
Stephanie Domingo
Click to hear “Yep Yep” and “The American Dream”
Stephanie Barrak
Click to hear “Drift With It” and “Yellow Roses”
Katie Uva
Click to hear “Old Flannel Shirt” and “The Man at the Delicatessen”
Photos by Jon Towle (COM’09)
Chris Berdik can be reached at cberdik@bu.edu.
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