Swim ~
| swim ~ | |
|---|---|
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| Founded | 1993 |
| Founder | Malka Spigel, Colin Newman |
| Genre | Ambient music, electronic music |
| Country of origin | UK |
| Location | London |
| Official website | http://www.swimhq.com/ |
swim ~ (the tilde "~" is part of the written name, but is not pronounced) is a record label founded in 1993, and jointly run, by Wire guitarist and singer Colin Newman, and Minimal Compact bass player and singer Malka Spigel. The label has published various solo projects and collaborations by Spigel and Newman, most notably Githead, a group formed on the occasion of the label's tenth anniversary, as well as music by a number of indie bands such as Ronnie and Clyde, Lobe and Silo.
Spigel and Newman met when Newman produced a record by Spigel's band Minimal Compact. They launched the swim ~ label after they married and started a family: "We have a young child. We had a stark choice when he was born, as we were both in touring bands, between being absentee parents or finding a way to work together while bringing up a child. We chose the latter." Abandoning conventional song formats, they found that ambient music and techno lent themselves to working from their home studio. "In the beginning, we tried to make some song/electronic hybrid", they told CMJ New Music. "We felt tied down by the song structure, and broke free of that with Immersion" – a "Spigel/Newman instrumental electronic collaboration" which released an album titled Oscillating as well as a series of remixes by a number of techno artists.
swim ~ began by publishing "understated, neo-minimalist electronic music", its first two releases being Rosh Ballata by Spigel and Tree by Oracle. Billing itself as a "post-everything" label it boasted what Dusted Magazine described as "a diverse group of musicians working primarily at the atmospheric, melodic end of the electronic spectrum [...], often operating at the interface of digital and organic musics, bringing traces of a rock sensibility – as well as traditional rock instrumentation – to bear on their electronica"; their musical output ran "the stylistic gamut from beatless soundscapes to relatively conventional song-based pop to beat-heavy grooves". The label published several samplers of its work, beginning with Water Communication in 1997, which was followed by Swim Team #1 in 2000 and Swim Team #2 in 2003. These featured swim ~ acts such as Symptoms (Klaus Ammitzbøll), Ronnie and Clyde, Lobe, and Danish trio Silo in addition to Newman and Spigel and their son Ben a.k.a. "Bumpy".
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