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Best Kept Secret is the brainchild of a solitary music and reading geek hailing from the deep (and miserable) heart of Northeastern Italy.
Being a hopeless computer illiterate, owning no pc at the time and thus having no idea cd-burners had been taking over the planet for quite some time already back then, in the Spring of 1998 he started releasing music on the good old cassette format, to try and spread the word about home-recorded, d.i.y. pop music.
It did not take him long to realize that tapes were rather outdated and old-fashioned, but, over the next eight and a half years, Best Kept Secret ended up releasing over one hundred cassettes nonetheless and is still going today.
None of this would have happened were it not for the consideration and support from many open-minded bands/artists, who proved that there are still people who are in it just for the music, and the help from two invaluable friends, Silvia Pasquariello (Studio Pasquariello), who most of the time takes care of the artwork for Best Kept Secret cassettes, and Chris McFarlane (IndiePages), who got us started by providing the songs for the first BKS release ever and kept us going with all the technical web-related support, filling the void of our extreme incompetence.
To all of them, and to anyone out there who over the years has picked up a copy of a Best Kept Secret tape and/or written about the music on the label or the label itself or has otherwise expressed interest in what we do, goes my deepest and most sincere gratitude.
Latest News:
October 2009: Fall is here and so are we with a couple of new tapes out that reflect the somewhat meditative mood we have fallen into lately.
We start with The Dandelion Council, the solo project of Pip Craighead's, a Californian musician (also active in the field of visual arts) who has thus far relased music on such fine labels as Awkward Silence, Archaic Horizon and Vu-Us.
His music is inspired by a close relationship with the natural world and the observation of changes occurring in the landscape with the passing of the seasons and is a spiritually challenging reflection on the process of natural and human aging within the flow of time and on the entropic nature of our own selves and the world we live in.
Combining moments of meditative ambience and uplifting beat-driven cheerfulness, Dandelion Council 's music is about our struggle to ultimately deal with mortality and make some sense of the finiteness of our existence.
The second releaseis a six-song cassette by Finglebone, behind which is Adam Varney (from Southwestern England), occasionally joined by friends.
Mixing electronic ambience and noises and acoustic folk, Finglebone blends the technological and the pastoral, the contemporary and the traditional, the nostalgia for the past and the longing for certainties in the face of the insanely fast-paced and constantly changing present times and all the doubts and fears as to what the future holds for us and the generations to come.
With their fragile acoustic guitars, Finglebone's songs seem to remind us that the peace and serenity we all seek, though not (yet) out of reach, are being kept farther and farther away from us by the chaos and decay that pervade our world and that the inner path that leads to them is being increasingly threatened by the angst that is taking over our lives.
August 2009: as the Summer's end approaches, we have three new releases we thought we should let you know of.
The first is a collection of tunes by Debt Collector, a one-man project hailing from the heart of Southwestern England, which is the brainchild of Phil Russell, a multi-instrumentalist who writes and records everything on his own at home, in a true and rigorous lo-fi fashion, singing about dead end jobs, life in a tiny community and being a frustrated musician.
Dewdrop Fountain is our buddy Charlie from the Philippines, who uses an untuned acoustic guitar, casiotone and loops to shape soft-spoken, shy bedroom pop songs that bring to mind the likes of The Filed Mice, Harvey William's Another Sunny Day or Julian Henry's The Hit Parade.
Finally, we hail the return of Italy's favourite spectacled popsters, also known as Les Man Avec Le Lunettes, who are back on Best Kept Secret with the cassette version of their 2008 album 'Plaskaplaskabombeblibon' (no clue as to whatever this is supposed to mean).
By speeding songs' pace up a bit and adding female vocals and a cornucopia of exhilarating zigzagging keyboards, the band has moved a giant leap forward in forging their sound and is quickly getting recognition across the continent thanks to the great deal of touring and festival apearances (the most recent of which being the one at the young yet fast-growing Indietracks Festival in Derbyshire, England) at home and abroad over the past couple of years.
A few more tapes are slated for release before year's end, so stay tuned and keep checking back.
July 2009: this month sees the release of The Three Potato 4 'Album savant',
a collection of quirky and somewhat baroque home-recorded pop songs, played
with a lot of different instruments by Ryan Kittleman, a former New Yorker
now residing in the Bay Area.
As complex, multi-layered and carefully crafted as it is, Ryan 's music is a
remarkable example of lo-fi depth, beauty and elegance and we hope to hear
more (a lot more) of it in the future.
June 2009: a quick update to let you know about Paper Tiger, the first Dutch act to release an individual tape on our label.
We found out about them last year and fell in love right away with their eclectic pop, which switches from downbeat to upbeat, from mellow to tense, from smooth to rough, but never loses balance and coherence as whole.
Not only did the band kindly license to Best Kept Secret all the songs from their debut album, but also added some additonal tracks, two of which are previously unreleased and elsewhere unavailable, for a limited extended cassette edition.
May 2009: things have been quiet over the past few months, but behind the scenes we have been busy working on a number of new releases, some of which are now starting to surface.
The first two tapes to see the light of day this year are by Anton Barbeau and The Eyeshades.
Anton Barbeau is a singer/songwriter from Sacramento, California (though now residing in Cambridge, United Kingdom) who has been making music for quite some time now and has grown to be a veteran of the U.S. indie scene, collaborating with Scott Miller (of Game Theory/Loud Family), Kimberly Rew (of The Soft Boys and Katrina And The Waves) and The Bevis Frond and sharing the bill with, amongst others, Weezer, Robyn Hitchcock and Mono. His numerous albums have been released on both sides of the Atlantic on such labels as Bongo Beat, Shifty Disco, Pink Hedgehog and 125 Records.
The Eyeshades is a band from Sweden, whose music blends such elements as dancey electronica, jazz, lounge, a Motown-esque feel, sometimes some crunchy guitars and a little bit of pop, to create a warm and embracing sound that is at the same time contemporary and retro.
More tapes will be out before the end of the Spring, so stay tuned and pay us a visit when you get the chance.
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