Nordic Trax rides the beat

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      If Nordic Trax label head Luke McKeehan had been asked to write a business plan for his flourishing electronic-music imprint when it began, he wouldn’t have been able to.

      “The idea never made sense on paper,” the company’s founder tells the Straight with a chuckle over a coffee. “For my whole career, I’ve always just gone with my gut—wherever that’s led us.”

      In 1997, Vancouver’s dance scene was small. Club nights like those at the Chameleon Lounge, Richard’s on Richards, and Sonar were some of the only outlets for those interested in electronic beats to strut their stuff. Few local labels were operating out of the city, and news of dance music events travelled by flyers or word of mouth.

      Of the regular nights that did gain traction, McKeehan had a hand in most. He launched an evening named Mo Funk with two other partners, and his acid-jazz-cum-house-music showcase soon developed into a compilation imprint—a venture that gave the DJ and promoter his first taste of managing a label.

      “We had a great time licensing music for re-release,” he says. “It was an awesome experience. But it wasn’t that close to what I was spinning at night, so while we had success with Mo Funk, I wanted to try and put out some singles. That was a whole different ball game—signing new tracks rather than getting the rights to music that already had some kind of cachet. But being a DJ, I bought a lot of 12-inch records, so I knew 90 percent of the labels that I would be comparing Nordic Trax to, or trying to become. It seemed like a natural extension for me to go for it, but I didn’t want to push it on the other guys if it didn’t excite them. In the end, I took the financial risk and got into it myself.”

      Although the label’s initial years were rocky—the first 10 releases, McKeehan recalls, never earned a cent—the DJ refused to be discouraged. Selecting house and downtempo tracks for their quality rather than for their sound’s popularity, his patient approach helped him build a catalogue that soon started to gain traction.

      Twenty years later, the label not only has one of the most recognizable names in the city, but commands worldwide respect.

      “We took Nordic Trax seriously, of course, but I don’t think any of us thought, ‘Okay, this is what we’ll be doing in two decades,’ ” McKeehan says, sipping his coffee. “But here we are.”

      That’s not to say that the company hasn’t faced challenges over its lengthy history. In its third year, not long after McKeehan had got the hang of shaking down manufacturers, securing distribution, and sweet-talking Canada Post cashiers into helping mail out 300 white-label promos, websites like Napster and LimeWire surfaced. Unleashing a wave of piracy that gutted the music industry, the Internet threatened to sink the fledgling label.

      "Rain City Blues", mixed by Luke McKeehan

      “We had to adapt or die,” he recalls. “For me, there were some thin years there for sure, where a distributor would just go down, or the big chain stores we would sell to would unexpectedly collapse. When those businesses fall, they take a whole lot of smaller companies with them. Dance music has always been a little bit insulated from that, because DJs have always paid for tracks in high quality—but that massive change meant that a lot of the younger labels were eaten by bigger fish.

      “Our joke is that if I see someone at a conference, or I bump into someone from the pre-Internet era who’s still in the business, it’s like seeing an old war friend,” he continues. “The music industry really was a different beast then, in terms of even how we would run a label in Vancouver. You had to have an office, you had to receive goods, and you had to ship them. You’re not thinking about what tracks are coming out, but rather how to fill the postage meter to send out another hundred records. The reality was paper cuts and Rolodexes. All of that’s changed now.”

      Emerging into the streaming age reasonably unscathed, McKeehan—a perennial optimist—sees the shift to digital as a positive for his business. Heralding the Internet as a tool that lowers the barrier to entry for those exploring electronic music, he celebrates its ability to bring Nordic Trax’s fresh releases and extensive back catalogue to a global audience.

      “We put out a track from Gavin Boyce called ‘Haboo’,” he recalls. “It didn’t do anything significant when it first came out, but in March this year I started to see a random spike on Soundcloud. It went from doing 20 plays a week to thousands. Usually, you can reverse-engineer it to figure out what the source was, but it was unclear. Eventually, I discovered that Dixon DJed all night at Ministry of Sound in London, and all these trainspotters went and made a list on Soundcloud of everything that he played. No matter how much people loved the track, though, we never would have seen the same uptick of interest if everything were still just on vinyl.”

      Gavin Boyce, "Haboo"

      Despite the label’s financial and cultural success, McKeehan has never lost touch with his origins: the club nights that gave him his first taste of the music business. Maintaining a hand in some of the city’s top parties, the label is currently gearing up for its 20th anniversary showcase, set to stage some of the imprint’s major players.

      “There’s a lot of things I’m looking forward to,” he says. “One is that Gavin Froome is coming out of retirement to do a live PA, which he hasn’t done in over 10 years. A lot of guys will just have some loops in their computer for that kind of show, but his set is all going to be played on outboard gear—stuff people can see. Then there’s Mark Farina, who’s a fan favourite and one of our longest supporters. On the road, he’ll wear a Nordic Trax shirt or play one of our releases, and he won’t say that he did it, but it goes a long way when people in that world clock it. The final highlight is Pete Moss, from Philadelphia. We’ve never been able to get him out to Vancouver before, but we’re huge supporters of his music—his releases on the label are some of my personal favourites.

      “Nordic Trax has always been a reflection of what I’m listening to or what I’m playing as a DJ,” McKeehan continues. “You’re not trying to necessarily say, ‘Is everyone going to get this?’ or ‘Do I care?’ You’re trying to contribute back into the DJ culture that you’re part of.”

      Gavin Froome feat. Golden Ears, "Don't Come Home" (Original Mix)

      20 Years of Nordic Trax is at the Imperial on Sunday (May 21).

      Follow Kate Wilson on Twitter @KateWilsonSays.

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