A few years ago, we acquired a strange bit of gear called a vibratone. It's an extra amplifier cabinet with a large, rotating wheel inside; the basic idea is that you kick the thing on, and it spits the sound into the wheel, flinging it around the room. It creates a wonderfully organic doppler-effecty warble as the sound reaches your ears in imperfect waves. It’s like firing a sound into an active helicopter blade. It’s designed with guitar in mind, but you can run anything through it to get the effect: vocals, drums, synth, organ, whatever. 


The problem is, the effect is dependent on a physical process--an actual mechanical happening--a motor has to spin a large object for an extended period of time. You can hear this process as it takes place in the background when you use it in the studio. It unapologetically makes itself known; the slow rotation of our model produces a barely-perceptible grind-squeak. But on faster speeds, it sounds a little like this:


“ShHhHhHhHhHhHhHhHhH”


or maybe it’s more like:


“shukshukshukshukshukshuk” 


The point is, the thing is loud. It’s incredibly heavy and bulky. Most modern studios replace this with a chorus pedal or vibrato pedal the size of the Nokia brickphone you had in 8th grade [editor’s note: questionable reference point, but ok]. The vibratone has very little place in a fully-up-to-date recording environment. 


We love this piece of equipment. 


As a label, we’re fascinated by subtle imperfections; the indelible remnants of the hands and equipment which shaped a work. Our favorite records possess a delicately-blended patina of polish and tarnish. We’re not alone in that; there’s clearly a resurgence of interest in lo-fi aesthetics in graphic design and art across the board. There has been a great deal of praise (and writing in general) on this humanizing quality of analog equipment. However, the charming flaws and occasional “perfection” of the digital universe have been a bit more overlooked. We find ourselves equally drawn to the peculiarities of digital equipment from various eras: the uncomfortable precision of digital artifacting and pixelation, or the spectral presence of hardware/software malfunction. We love fuzz, tape saturation, and tube overdrive as much as the next analog nerd, but extend that affection to bitcrushing, stretching, inaccurate emulation, and the bevy of strange effects that exist only in the digital world. 


We, along with our releases, live at this intersection. It’s a little out of the way, but look for a crumbling ruin of an apartment building on the corner of Tape Hiss Drive and SP404 Boulevard. Just outside the front door, a large, fluorescent blue LED continuously scrolls and flashes: SPACE FOR RENT. To be honest, that sign is actually sort of oppressively bright and we might move out soon. 


We consider the intentional blending of hi-fi and lo-fi aesthetics to be the most intriguing and most characteristic sound of the current moment. 



Or maybe all of that is bullshit and we're just taking all of this too seriously. Could go either way, really.

Email us at:

reptiliansnackrecords@gmail.com