Iconic Chicago indie label Touch and Go Records has announced that they will be radically scaling down their operations. Effective immediately is the end to their distribution services, which look after a host of amazing labels, including: Merge, Jade Tree, Drag City, Kill Rock Stars, Suicide Squeeze, No Age's Post Present Medium imprint, and CocoRosie's Voodoo-EROS label.T&G will, for the time being, also stop issuing new releases; although they'll still go ahead with the much-anticipated forthcoming debut album for Long Beach pysch-rock outfit Crystal Antlers, Tentacles, due out April 7. And will continue to work the records they've just released: impressive debuts by post-Black Eyes percussivists Mi Ami and Deerhoof-endorsed Bay Area experimentalists Sholi.
Touch and Go was born in 1981 in East Lansing, Michigan, specifically to release a 7" by founder Corey Rusk's teenage hardcore band The Necros. After relocating to Chicago, the label grew from a bedroom enterprise into one of the biggest, most important independent labels in the land. Over the years, T&G has worked with an amazing array of artists, including but not limited to: the Butthole Surfers, Big Black, Slint, Dirty Three, Tara Jane ONeil, Calexico, Quasi, Don Caballero, CocoRosie, !!!, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and TV on the Radio.
In August, Touch and Go will reissue the Jesus Lizard back-catalogue, and, after that, the hope is that they can return to releasing new records. "Touch and Go will be returning to its roots and focusing solely on being an independent record label," said Rusk, in a written statement. "We'll be busy for a few months working closely with the departing labels and scaling our company to an appropriate smaller size after their departure. It is the end of a grand chapter in Touch and Go's history, but we also know that good things can come from new beginnings."
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