The experimental music scene in Memphis is an elusive thing. It’s certainly out there, as evidenced by the Memphis Concrète music festivals, but a newcomer may find it hard to discover. That was certainly the case 12 years ago, when an electronic artist and co-manager of an experimental music label in Lisbon, Portugal, found himself in the Bluff City. Luís Seixas recalls those days, after his wife’s new position at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital brought them both here, living in America for the first time.
“It was tough to find the people here,” he recalls now. “It took me a while to understand how things move in Memphis. I didn’t find the scene I was expecting to find in a city of this size. Then I came across Mike Honeycutt.” Honeycutt, an electronic musician who releases his work primarily on cassettes, had collected tapes that Seixas’ label partner, Fernando Cerqueira, had released decades before. “I was like, ‘He has tapes going back to the late 1980s! A Memphian with a radio show on WEVL!’” Seixas continues. “But he told me, ‘No, there’s not a scene. We’re struggling, it’s hard.’ And it was. Not finding a scene here was the strangest thing. I expected Memphis to be an epicenter, that would attract people, but regarding electronic music, I saw the opposite: People who were born and raised in Memphis then left for other parts of the United States.”
Seixas in turn may have become one of the scene’s best-kept secrets. Ever since he arrived here, he’s been helping to make that scene bigger, plugging Memphis artists directly into a network, centered in Lisbon, that reaches across Europe. Thanks to Seixas, Thisco (pronounced “disco”), the label that he and Cerqueira founded in 2000, has become a presence in the Mid-South. “We were about to leave Lisbon,” Seixas recalls of his pre-Memphis days, “and Fernando suggested I operate Thisco only in Memphis. But I said, ‘No, we’re going to have two headquarters, one in Lisbon and one in Memphis.’ Why not?”
By now, many local knob-twiddlers (including myself) have collaborated with Seixas, who creates his own music under the name Sci Fi Industries. And still more have benefited from the breath of fresh air he brought to that elusive experimental music scene. In 2012, when he was working for the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (in the capacity of his trade as an art conservator), Seixas curated The Paik Sessions I – Music for the Vide-O-belisk, a collection of ambient pieces that paired well with Nam June Paik’s sculpture Vide-O-belisk (2002), then located in the rotunda of the museum. The following year, he compiled The Paik Sessions 2.
Since then, he’s become increasingly more active in local electronic music. “We released the compilation for Memphis Concrète, On Triangles, and that was totally supported and paid for by Thisco,” Seixas notes. “We gave carte blanche to [Memphis Concrète founder] Robert Traxler to pick the lineup, and of course we sent copies to Europe. We’ve also released albums by Robert, The Pop Ritual, Ihcilon (Paul Randall), and we’re still waiting on a few more to join us. The label just turned 20, and we’re still getting new artists.”
Alas, Seixas’ Memphis chapter is now coming to a close, as his art conservation work will soon take him to Florida. Yet it doesn’t appear that his labors in music will cease anytime soon. “I started Thisco partly because I’m kind of a librarian,” Seixas muses. “I want to preserve these things. I want to see what people are doing and put it out there. If I can document what was happening at this moment in time, I’ll do that. I guess that’s why I became an art conservator. I’m preserving something, and Thisco comes directly on the same path. It’s a way to capture what was going on in a moment. I know anyone can put their music on the web now, but sometimes they need that push. Someone saying, ‘This is good!’ There’s always this self-criticism. ‘I’m not good enough! Should I put this out?’ Or the opposite: They just put everything out without a filter. Sometimes you need a friend to tell you, ‘Well, maybe work a bit more on that one.’ So I think there’s still a role for people like me. Someone to say, ‘Do it this way, do it that way. But do it.’”
For more information, visit thisco.bandcamp.com.