Building Blocks
BY Alex Mlynek
Blocks Recording Club is not your typical record-releasing outfit. “The word ‘club’ suggests people working together in a way that a label does not,” says Blocks co-founder Steven Kado. He and former partner Mark McLean started the club in the summer of 2003. “I think of it primarily as supporting a music community that I thought was really great, but wouldn’t get any representation,” says Kado. The goal wasn’t to make money, but simply to “make things happen.” But Toronto-based Blocks goes further than semantics. With 30 titles under the Blocks banner—including releases by the Phonemes and former Blue Rodeo keyboardist Bob Wiseman—Kado has taken steps to legally incorporate as a workers’ co-op.
McLean, who coined Blocks’ “Don’t try, do!” slogan, bowed out early to focus on his now-defunct band, the Sick Lipstick. That left Kado in charge. “The less democratic, more Steve-centered structure we used to have represented a failure on our part to do what we should be doing,” he says. As a co-op, though, “everyone owns Blocks. Everyone involved works for Blocks.” The co-op model allows—or, more accurately, requires—each Blocks member to share resources. “If you want to put your record out on Blocks, you have to help everyone else out,” says Kado. So far, the bands within the Blocks community have most of the skills—accounting and graphic design, as well as video, recording and mastering experience—you need to put out an album. “Lots of the records are generated entirely within,” says Kado.
That means Blocks is a firmly Toronto-centric project. Kado even laments the fact that one of the latest Blocks bands, the Diskettes, is from Montreal. “It’s really a shame that they’re from Not Toronto,” he says. “I feel it weakens our mandate to try and tackle a larger geographic territory. It’s hard to talk about a community of people working together when they’re all over the place.”
Kado, who’s in nine bands himself, echoes the do-it-yourself mentality championed by Olympia, Washington-based indie darling K Records, and its founder Calvin Johnson’s band, Beat Happening, “the punkest band available,” according to Kado. “You can easily put out your own record. It’s not hard at all,” he says. “But that information can be consolidated, shared and used in a more effective way.”
