“While I am interested in the research I am doing, I wanted to seriously pursue music and knew that a student life would be better for that than a professional job,” Marx says.
Under the name “Marxy,” Marx wrote, performed, and produced all of the songs on his debut album, titled Kyoshu Nostalgia (“Kyoshu” means nostalgia in Japanese).
“I don’t consider myself much more than a songwriter,” Marx says. “Although I’m always getting better at production and engineering, I first self-produced my tracks out of necessity more than confidence.”
Marx describes the unique, retrospective sounds of his album as “the experimentation of late ’60s pop music updated for the 21st century listener.” He finds it “lacking genre or static ideas of nationality or outdated notions of time and structure,” and refers to it as, “The Return of Melody. A Catchy Critique of Pop Music.” The January release was Beekeeper Records’ first.
After turning down two offers from Japanese record labels because he didn’t think that they really “got” his music, Marx now feels comfortable entrusting his album with Sylvester and LeMay.
“From the start, I’ve been confident that Beekeeper understands my album,” Marx says. “All three of us have jobs writing about music for magazines or websites, so we share that common bond as well. When I got the offer from Beekeeper, I went online and read a lot of Nick and Matt’s record reviews and realized that we have very similar taste.”
Furthermore, Marx is suspicious of individuals who use music as their primary source of income.
“The media conditions of our time have wrecked the traditional music economic model…and so I feel that we should seize this opportunity to drop pecuniary motives from our musical outlook,” Marx says.
“I’m not interested in making money as much as getting the record out to people who’ll like it. On this level, I couldn’t imagine a better fit than Beekeeper,” Marx says. “That’s not to say Beekeeper won’t make money, but I do think their primary motives are in line with mine.”
INTO THE FUTURE
Sylvester and LeMay are planning to release further albums under the Beekeeper label, and are open to a wide range of musical styles and genres.
“The only rule is that we both have to like it,” Sylvester says. “We’re doing this for the music, and it has to be something that’s interesting and exciting to us.”
LeMay, in addition to being a student and co-founder of the label, is also part of a band that recently recorded its first album and will be touring this summer.
“Neither of us sleeps that much,” Sylvester says.
“We’re just a bunch of dudes who are very willing to go bankrupt for something we love,” Sylvester says. “It’s really all about the record.”