Lexington, KY - Though his isn't a face you'll often see onstage, the contributions from Lexington arts organizer Ross Compton to the local music scene are seemingly endless. In addition to being the force behind such community projects as the Lexington Action Arts Collective and the bygone local events e-newsletter and website "The Lexington Project," Compton has organized more than 130 local concerts since 2002 through a series he founded called Outside the Spotlight. In late 2009, he joined forces with local musician James Friley to launch Hop Hop Records, a music label headquartered in Compton's living room, which has issued five releases (vinyl and digital) of local bands.
Compton's most recent brainchild is a new iteration of a project he helped spearhead in 2002: a series of free local music compilations called Know Your Own, designed to educate the community about local bands. Starting this month, Hop Hop will offer a free e-mail download of a local song each week, in contrast to KYO's traditional CD format. Anyone interested can sign up to receive the free weekly downloads at www.ihearthophop.com/knowyourown; artists interested in having their music featured should send an e-mail and music file to hophoprecords@gmail.com.
RossCompton
We recently caught up with Ross for a few minutes to discuss the new endeavor, as well as his history with and perspective on the Lexington music community.
How would you describe your relationship with music?
I boil it down to a really simple thing - music has made my life a lot happier or more livable, and if it can do that for me, maybe it can do that for other folks. So, putting together shows or releasing records has just been a way of believing that and hoping that other people might get something good out of it.
What is Outside the Spotlight, and how did it come about?
I refer to OTS as a "jazz and improvised music series," but I don't have any interest in being dogmatic about that definition. While the series has been predominantly all the different shapes of abstract jazz, it has also included freak-folk artists like Josephine Foster, American-primitive guitarists such as Jack Rose and Glenn Jones, and noise artists such as the Norwegian group Jazzkammer. The intention is never to be self-consciously "weird" - it's just to present interesting music that I love and that I think can take people's heads to a new space.
Sometime soon after becoming a DJ at WRFL (the University of Kentucky's student radio station), I started paying attention to the weirder music that found its way into the station's playbox. The forays away from the indie pop and rock that I loved led me to abstract noise and the out sounds of free jazz. When I saw the music performed live for the first time, I was hooked.
At the same time, UK had a long-running jazz series called Spotlight Jazz - one of the most acclaimed jazz series in the country. Spotlight always featured top-notch artists, but the programming was a little tamer than my tastes, so I had the idea to pitch a sister-series featuring newer and more adventurous artists. The Spotlight organizers were very supportive, and that's how Outside the Spotlight was born. (A lot of folks mistakenly took the name as a dis to the Spotlight series, but it was never meant to be an "anti-"thing - I always envisioned it as a complement to the original series.)
Hop Hop Records has put out releases from local groups Idiot Glee, Matt Duncan, The Butchers and Attempt since the fall of 2009. What's the process of choosing your projects and producing the records?
Our process is all informal. Friley and I tend to sit around and get excited talking about all the stuff happening locally, and then get to a point of saying: "Wow - this is special. We really need to put this out, help people hear this."
We've pressed all our vinyl so far at Palomino Records Pressing in Shepherdsville, Ky., just south of Louisville. They're wonderful folks, who, up until recently, specialized in pressing square dancing records.
You have put out three Know Your Own local music compilations since in 2002. Discuss the project and the new change in format that it is pursuing.
The project was designed to encourage the local music audience to inform themselves about all that was going on around them - to put a sound to band names they saw on flyers and in show listings.
When I started thinking about putting together a new volume, I got frustrated with the CD format. There's only so much music you can fit on a disc, and outside of that, almost as soon as you've composed this portrait of Lexington music, the scene shifts and the compilation is obsolete as a reference guide.
The basic tenet still remains - become informed, get out and support these sounds, and realize how good we have it. One of the fun things that's come up while inviting artists to participate in Know Your Own is that multiple people have responded with: "Yeah, I'd love to be a part of this. I'm excited that more folks might hear my music, but I really can't wait to hear what other folks are doing."
What are your thoughts on Lexington's music scene and how it has changed or evolved since you first started becoming involved with it?
People are staying. In my first years in Lexington, I fell into the generally held feeling of anyone who was interested in anything different - "I gotta get out of here." For me, something just clicked one day and I came to appreciate the choose-your-own-adventure freedom that existed in Lexington. I love this town, and I believe a lot of creative folks have had a similar realization over the past decade: we don't have to move away to some established scene, we can create whatever we want right here - we can be happy right here.