I thought of a good way of posting up all our old webreleases – rather than just dump a big list of ‘em on here, i thought i’d post them one at a time with a little writeup about the artist, the release, and some background context to it.

So starting from the first one, we have DoF’s ‘Words For A Musical EP’…

DoF – “Lock”

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Our first HPLL release, the “Tired Of Standing Still” compilation, came out around august 2001. Shortly after that me and my then wife moved to London from San Francisco – we had started up a new label between us called Tsk! Tsk! records, and we were releasing the first Erase Errata record “Other Animals” plus arranging their first European tour. Due to the work involved in that record, plus the financial commitments, i couldn’t afford to also put out another HPLL record at the time. I had started work at a small music industry technology company in London called state51, and all their sites were built on perl and backend sql databases. I thought it would be fun to build a little test site founded on similar technology, and from that i started a small netlabel called 8bitrecs.com. At that time i had never heard of a netlabel, but quickly found out there were a lot around and had been since before my little effort. It’s been offline for many years now, but thanks to the wonders of the Way Back machine, you can still see how it looked:
8bitrecs.com. Archive.org also host most of the old content from there which if you’re interested, you can find here.

Anyhoo, the point to the story is that, after the first HPLL release, i ended up not being able to finance another release for over year, due to working on other projects – so i got stuck into 8bitrecs – it was a nice way i could contact people and put out some good
music. It was through 8bitrecs that i met a lot of artists who went on to release on Highpoint Lowlife – DoF, Fisk Industries, The Marcia Blaine School For Girls, Tigrics, Motion/Recon, Si-cut.db.

Brian Hulick, the lad behind the DoF moniker was one of the first that i met via 8bitrecs – he sent me over some stuff which i was very impressed by, quite an extreme mix of broken electronic beats and textures, with acoustic guitar fingerpicking, which led to releasing his album “If More Than Twenty People Laugh, It Wasn’t Funny”

DoF – “2 Times 2 makes 5 Is A Most Charming Thing” (From ‘If More than..’ album)

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If memory serves correctly, the album came out first, around march 2003, and i think this first web Highpoint Lowlife web EP came shortly afterwards. The material on this web EP is quite different from the album in that it cuts out the rhythmic electronics, focussing more on the melodic acoustic guitar, and more obviously including the use of vocal – readings of some of Brian’s favorite poets, from the likes of Cummings, Kunitz and Sexton (i don’t have a note of the actual poets, i took those names from someone’s review on archive.org – if you can identify the poets, do leave a comment..)

You can download the full five track EP from:
http://www.mediafire.com/?zmvejdcxk1x

and if you like the sound of the album, its available here