ag i appreciate you taking some time out to do this, very cool. now let's go back to before you actually started not not fun, what was your main intent, initially, with it?

bb actually, my then-girlfriend-now-wife manda started NNF with a mutual friend back in....about february of 2004. the original intent was just to put out stuff by the band i was in, and some friends' bands. she used to run a very K/Kill Rock Stars style label (pre-internet too!) back when she was in college, but it gradually lapsed into inactivity due to school & life things. so she had talked for a while about starting up a new label, but doing it better, and finally she did. the goals at the beginning weren't very specific at all, other than to create a label that was like a family i guess...

ag it seems like even in the onset, the artistic aspect of the releases was always a forethought, do you guys have any background in visual art?

bb yes, that's true...even though musical genre/style wasn't really an articulated goal early on, we had always had conversations ranting about how gross so many of the initial underground bands we came across presented their music. we'd meet bands who'd give us their demo/album and it'd be an awful photoshopped computer-printed cover, in a jewel case, with the band name written in plain sharpie handwriting on an Office Depot cdr. we'd always laugh and be like "so is your main deal that you're REALLY into Office Depot?" we just saw so little effort being put into the packaging/presentation, we definitely wanted to be the antithesis of that...to be as hand-made as possible. too many objects in life are mass produced, and that's inevitable, but for something artful, it rules to be able to tell for certain that a human's hands crafted it.

also, manda actually minored in sculpture at Mass Art in Boston, so she's always been incredibly inventive & crafty at physical construction tasks. she used to make elaborate sculpture creations with mechanical working parts, and...i dont even know. pretty involved stuff. so when it comes to beading weird twine to lace around a cassette case, her hands FLY at stuff like that! it's one of NNF's art secrets, for sure.

ag ha, so that must be her handiwork on the robedoor/loopool tape. okay, so if manda's taking care of the art and packaging, what's your role in nnf?

bb i mainly pick the music we put out, and handle the email/mailorder tasks. in truth, every aspect of the label is ultimately a shared decision, but on a day-to-day basis, i'd say she's mainly the art director, and i do more of the nuts-and-bolts tasks (filling out pressing plant forms, ordering supplies/blank tapes, writing checks, asking bands to do releases, etc). it works pretty well, most of the time.

ag in regards to the choices of music, i'd have to say that you guys are one of the more diverse smaller labels. noise, experimental, psych-folk, spazzy/weird/art-damaged no-wavey inspired rock, math rock, noise rock, lo-fi, acoustic, drone to everything in between. who else is putting out albums by nihilistic bastards burmese alongside stuff like the golden hours? i can't think of anyone. how much of that is your hand-picking vs. artists sending you demos?

bb this is one of the things about the underground music community that i find most confusing. i never used to think it was weird when i was growing up to be just as obsessed with nirvana as i was about archers of loaf as i was about angry samoans as i was about rudimentary peni as i was about kraftwerk as i was about geto boys as i was about spacemen 3. i've always been of the opinion that every genre of music has shit in it that RULES (just as they all have bands/artists that SUCK). it all comes down to personal taste of course, but i always thought the most beautiful freedom of running yr own label would be that you WOULDN'T have to pander to commercial expectations (no one at our level -- and higher even! -- is making any money, of course), you could put out anything you wanted. but ever since i first started to encounter the micro/underground scene, i've always been surprised how rigidly narrow a cross-section of music most labels limit their output to. the vast majority seem to just pick one basic thing they're into -- whether it's harsh noise, metal, psychedelic drone, hippie folk, whatever -- and then exclude everything else. which is of course totally fine. that's just not how i see/appreciate music. to me, burmese are amazing. but i don't like ALL bands that sound like burmese. in fact, i DON'T like most of them. same with golden hours. i don't like a TON of fey bedroom pop stuff. but i think they do it awesomely. and since it's our label, we can do what we want. hopefully other people appreciate the diversity. we of course have fans who ONLY buy our drone/noise stuff, and then we have fans who ONLY buy our punker stuff, and we have people who only buy the folk/soft stuff. and then there's some diehards who like it all!

ag wow, very well said. you definitely hit the nail on the head with the close-mindedness. to disregard other genres outside of what you're involved with is to show how little you care about music as a form of art and expression. i certainly appreciate nnf's willingness to bring different forms of music together in the same place. hopefully, in turn people will think to themselves, hey, it's okay to like impregnable as well as endearingly quirky rock music.

bb exactly. jeff/impregnable is fucking amazing. but not every harsh freak who photocopies a bondage photo and names their 16 minute track of violent feedback, "sorrow" (or whatever), is amazing to me. though there's infinite dudes who do that.

ag one of the more surprising, and awesome, releases of last year came by way of spain's loosers and their "bumba meu boi" tape. how did you come to put that out?

bb glad you like that loosers tape! i first heard about them through jelle crama, who did the artwork for an early self-released LP of theirs. i wrote them asking to buy a copy of it, but they were just like "give us yr address, we'll send you one for free!" we fell in love with it & asked them to do something, but they were busy for a long time. finally they sent us the master, and it was even better than i was expecting it to be. we had talked for a long time about getting a "real" tape manufactured, so we did it for the loosers album. we're actually doing a 10" of theirs too, that's gonna be a co-release with Woodsist.

ag i'll have to keep an eye out for that 10". the tape's great, but i've been real surprised by the lack of press for it, outside of label sites and distros. lots of people missing out.

it's funny that jelle had something to do with all of that since he emailed me just last week asking if he could send some stuff from zeikzak and puik for review, spooky.

bb yeah, well, press is pretty much a non-thing for most underground labels of our size. outside of a few brave blogs and SUPER sporadic columns, there just aren't any legitimate avenues of press/writing/whatever for small-run music culture. that's just the state of things. word of mouth (and the internet) is all there is.

ag what was the idea behind the bored fortress 7" club?

bb the bored fortress 7" club was, not surprisingly, manda's idea. she was a big supporter/subscriber to all the singles clubs that K & Kill Rock Stars used to do in the early 90s, and she always wanted to do a Not Not Fun club of some sort. when we saw how (relatively) smoothly Brian (Miller) did the first year of the Deathbomb Arc tape club, she was finally prompted to birth our own subscription series.

BF year one was received way better than we thought it would be, and right away people wrote us urging us to do a 2nd year of it. so we did. assuming this year's rules too, i guess we'll probably do a year 3 as well. logistically, it's kind of a headache to organize, and there's a million deadlines to hurdle, but all the music & art we've been given this year has been amazing, so that's made it more than worth it.

ag the first year of the dba tape club was awesome, except for the fact that i left all of my cassettes out of their plastic sleeves and now all of the tapes are tied together by that damned fishing line, ha.

year two of bf looks outstanding as well. lots of very nice names there.

bb yes, a lot of folks had problems with that fishing line shit. and the "no tape case" factor!

ag yeah, if i ever decide to waste an afternoon by untangling that mess, buying some cases will be the next step...

seeing as how not not fun is seemingly in the thick of the underground revitalization that's going on in los angeles right now, i was wondering if you could shed some light onto the whole thing. awesome bands don't just sprout up out of the blue all at once, yet that really seems to be the case. everyone knew about san diego, oakland and san francisco's music scenes, but within the past few years la has stepped up in a big way. are there any main factors that can be attributed to it's visibility? also are there any acts in particular we should look out for?

bb our relationship with LA as a focus/inspiration has been pretty back-and-forth. i mean, no doubt, there's a lot of awesome people here, that's definitely my favorite thing about living in LA. but like any scene, it has ups & downs. when we first started meeting the larger underground local community, we were pretty blown away at the crazy number of diverse & awesome bands. nearly every time we went to the smell we'd see something new & insane. but shit's changed a lot, and our tastes have evolved too, and a lot of the bands we loved either broke up, or altered their aesthetic, or moved away, or transformed in some way, and now it's a pretty different landscape. what propels LA most -- in my opinion -- is 1) the fact that there's at any given time, at least 2 or 3 really open-minded venues for bands w/zero draw to play at, and 2) the fact that the population of the greater LA metroplex is literally like nine million people!! that makes for a LOT of teen punks with cheap cars looking to stay up late and watch weird bands (and then start their own weird bands). i think overall though LA's pretty forever-bonded to its punk roots, so the main kind of shows that draw a lot of siked kids are punk shows (duh), or harsh noise shows (which basically functions as punk, energy-wise). oh, and i guess there's a lot of bands that do jokey electronic rave stuff, but that's never been something i've been able to get into.

so, it varies. like, when MV+EE come through town, maybe 35 people show up. but when mika miko plays, the smell sells out.

i really like trying to support a local aesthetic as much as possible, but these days it's so easy to communicate with far-away bands & musicians, we're inevitably influenced by non-LA people and art just as equally.

ag alright, speaking of people changing their aesthetic, what did you think of abe vigoda's new one? people were creaming themselves over these guys when the nnf lp/cd first dropped.

bb i love the abe vigoda kids a ton, so i'll always be biased in their favor. but for me, what i most loved about them when i first heard them was how weirdly 90s they sounded! that's always something manda & i get siked on, shit that reminds us of rad unwound 7 inches or something. it was especially cool since none of those kids even seemed to like -- or know shit about -- the claustrophobic post-punk they were playing! i always remember juan being like "my musical evolution was basically that i liked the smashing pumpkins, and then we started abe vigoda." that's hilarious. "kid city" sounds way more like a modern art-punk album to me though. it sounds like something that kids who go to lots of XBXRX shows would make. which is cool, it just sounds more 2007. whereas "sky route/star roof" sounded really 1994. to me, at least.

ag haha, that's great. yeah, i loved the vocal style of sky route. musically i liked what they were doing with kid city, but the lazily slurred and mumbled singing was the rad part.

i know that you keep yourself pretty busy with a couple of different projects, but what's the full scope of your musical activity?

bb right now the main band i'm in is Robedoor, which is just me & my friend Alex. bands with multiple people are tricky to keep running, just cause it's hard to accomodate everybody's different schedules. but i'm also in Knit Witch, Quintana Roo, Barrabarracuda, and Insaniacs. these all are way more sporadic, but we do stuff as/when time allows. lately the label's been too busy & time-consuming to allow for a million different practice/recording sessions anyway...

ag ah, awesome, i didn't know you were involved in knit witch.

alright Britt, i think that just about does it for me. is there anything you'd like to add?

bb no, i guess that's all. i appreciate you taking the time to do it. and keep up the rad work on yr SA blog, the world needs more open-minded review places, people that care & write for no $$!

ag my pleasure man, thanks a lot!