FarFetched was created out of necessity.
Floating around the post-industrial city of St. Louis, Missouri, a large number of progressive artists found themselves hopelessly entangled within a musical ecosystem that provides little support to individuals working outside of well-established and tried genres. Recognizing this fundamental deficiency in a town divided between the mainstream and the outsiders, Damon Davis aka LooseScrewz sought to join together artists whose sounds poke and prod at familiar aesthetics as a way to create solidarity and draw attention to the wonderfully peculiar sounds emanating from the fringes of his city. Now with more than 15 artists united under the FarFetched banner, the uncanny collection tirelessly works to subvert the old order and re-draw the sonic map of the region.
As firm believers in the power of creative collaboration and conceptual aesthetics, FarFetched’s projects regularly expand within St. Louis to include multiple artists and many times even reach farther into the international community. A strong commitment to opening up new musical territories through collaboration traces all the way back to the seminal release, Prologue, a collection of eighteen diverse artists from across the globe with tracks ranging from neo-soul to minimal, Midwest hip-hop to 80’s synth-funk. Individually they may appear disparate in regard to genre or aesthetic, yet ultimately the tracks find commonality in a broader and genuine dedication to expanding, conflating and, at times, destroying established sonic boundaries.
This process of deconstructing and reconstructing genre and style through a network of artists involves not only inviting others to bring their own distinct sensibilities to bear, as seen on Adult Fur’s 100% collaborative effort RÁN. But also, going further, it invites the listener to participate in the creative process, a quality that manifests beautifully in 18andCounting’s newest release Unstrumentals, where the artist provokes the individual to construct their own melodies and rhythms by providing nothing but ready-made snippets of spoken word and lyrical verse.
With these projects making waves throughout the city, FarFetched label head Damon Davis has set his sights on further shifting the sonic grounds of St. Louis by hosting regular events that celebrate divergent strands of music. The flagship event, Louder Than Words, highlights the fertile grounds of non-vocal and instrumental/beat based music in order to deconstruct the precedence given to vocalists and word-based productions. By providing the physical space in which new music can thrive, the hope is that the psychic sphere of the city will follow suit and open itself up to receive the sounds for life in a new age.
Using these events and the gravity that the label has already produced, the future of FarFetched is bright to be sure. Attracting new talent locally and from outside the borders of The Gateway City, the label constantly has new projects in the works, ready to continually define and redefine the status of music both at home and beyond.
Follow FarFetched on Twitter: @fetchedfar
