You know the feeling. You’ve been travelling for days looking for shelter from the wasteland. All you encounter are insipid landscapes and billboards advertising shit you don’t need. They tell you it’s good but you’re no fool: you know what you’re looking for. Almost running out of gas you keep going deep into the night. At first you think it’s a trick of the light and adjust your tired eyes; a second later you truly embrace it. A faint neon engulfs in red the corner of your eye. When you approach the eerie, out of the road Motel you instantly feel safe: you’ve found your place. You park your car and with a heartfelt warmth are welcomed by the last survivors of the ultimate truth: Real Music. Welcome to the party.
Heartbreak Motel is a label dedicated to bringing music outside the boundaries of the twitter-ready, copy-pasted and tumblr-reblogged genres of today’s incredibly boring “do-it-yourself” independent music panorama.
By fusing an acute sense of design and carefully thought releases, Heartbreak Motel’s music is free, freely downloadable, free of hypes and free of the music blogger community aggressiveness.
That means that every digital release from Heartbreak Motel will be forever free, pay what you want, always awesome and always unexpected.
We don’t want to stick to an electronic music spectrum, we don’t want badly compressed and shitty EQ of the bedroom producers hype of today. Every release is thoroughly made, as if we were crafting a physical copy.
Why? Because there’s no point in selling music with total honesty in this age of music war. Making sacrifices isn’t enough, you have to pull the strings, polish the shoes of those “in command” just to get your five seconds of sharing fame. We don’t believe in that. We believe that music should be free to listen, free to like and free to hate.
But why hate if you can only dislike it?
So repeat with us, tattoo it if you want, but mostly just believe in our mantra:
If you don’t like it, don’t hate it.
A Brief History
Heartbreak Motel was born out of a cry for transparency but mostly was crafted out of a problem. John Holmes couldn’t release his music (at least without owing some favours, you know how it is). Five years making tunes that most people wouldn’t hear was the boiling point.
He never thought he’d have a music label this early in his career, but here it is. There was an album that needed to get out of his studio, needed to be heard, needed to be felt.
“The End” was Heartbreak Motel’s first release, and what a curious one. It sets the mood for the emotional, raw, honest electronic music the label will be known for. And here is where you take note, his ambition is also a carefully thought one. By launching a project with no fees, no friends, no blog, no hype, he had to put himself on the line. Instead of asking a few friends for a compilation with no hopes of surviving the label wars, he put himself there first, threw himself to the lions.
Months after the first release (and a couple of singles), the truth was out there. With no huge amount of money to spend on promotion, the releases were beautiful, but nobody cared.
That’s why he decided that Heartbreak Motel will be forever free.
Actually, we don’t care. Just listen to the music, be transformed, feel it. That’s the way it should be.
There’s no filler here, and that’s the story of Heartbreak Motel. We don’t ask for favours, we don’t need your pity, we don’t need friends in high places. We are free to release what we like, and if it fails at least we’re doing something: we are believing in our hearts and there can be no more beautiful thing than sticking to your guts and your love.