Diskonife

Diskonife is a recording label started by musicians Matt Moran and Peter Hess to document their music without commercial pressures, and to release work to the world to invigorate creative flow. “Matt and I wanted a platform to release these statements in sound, and partnered to give each other the push we needed,” Hess says. “The entire business of recorded music has been seismically disrupted, and keeps changing rapidly; we both had ever-growing catalogs of unreleased music that we stand behind fully, but that had no home.” A call from Moran instigated the effort: “doing it ourselves was the clear solution,” Moran says

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Diskonife is a recording label started by musicians Matt Moran and Peter Hess to document their music without commercial pressures, and to release work to the world to invigorate creative flow. “Matt and I wanted a platform to release these statements in sound, and partnered to give each other the push we needed,” Hess says. “The entire business of recorded music has been seismically disrupted, and keeps changing rapidly; we both had ever-growing catalogs of unreleased music that we stand behind fully, but that had no home.” A call from Moran instigated the effort: “doing it ourselves was the clear solution,” Moran says. Pronounced “disco knife,” the name draws from recording history: the lathe-cut vinyl LPs that defined the sounds of American jazz for most of the 20th century, and the various discs that created musical culture in their youth (LPs, 45s, and then CDs). Moran and Hess make music together, both in jazz-based settings and also in east European-influenced contexts, and the name resonates for them with history in both the US and Europe of recording imprints having quirky regional names that reference the medium (eg, Balkanton and Okka Disk). Moran says “we shared an experience years ago involving a groove and a knife” – “but it’s come to be kind of a metaphor for conflict resolution for us, and to unify our goals and approach,” Hess adds. “But fundamentally, it sounded right,” he says – and what better way is there for a musician to make decisions?

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