More Than Human starts up with The Passenger

What made you want to start a label in the first place? Two things happened: I started hosting a radio show on local station CiTR to indulge my love of electronic music, specifically the odder broken-techno type stuff from labels like PAN and Blackest Ever Black. I also fell in love with the resurgence of a sort of nostalgic sleeve design aesthetic in labels like Trunk, Ghost Box and Finders Keepers. So I thought I'd combine the two to create a sort of future-nostalgia; contemporary electronic acts producing work for vinyl release housed in sleeves that suggest they are part of some future archive of music, inspired by the classic Smithsonian Folkways model of cataloguing. What's the musical landscape in Vancouver like right now, and do you feel good about starting up a label there? There seems to be something very interesting happening in Vancouver at the moment. It's not a "scene" as such, and it's quite disparate, but when you have the Passenger, Plays:four, Cloudface, No UFO's and Jeremy Schmidt all playing in the same city, I think it's healthy and exciting. It feels intelligent and experimental—that's a good reason to try and get this work out. But More Than Human will be releasing artists from all over. The music isn't geographically localized. Why these two artists first? I saw Plays:four supporting Oneohtrix Point Never in April 2012. They were very intriguing, with a sound that felt very fresh to me... they made more of an impression than the headliner. When I heard their EP as a digital release I thought the complexity and subtlety of their sound would be better served by vinyl. I got to know the work of Jesse Creed, AKA The Passenger, when I heard his debut LP last year. It was full of textures and stories and emotion—his music has a narrative aspect to it. The Negative Object EP is like a film of a party in reverse. Who else will you be releasing on More Than Human? The third release, coming out in the fall, is a new EP by Kemper Norton from the UK. He plays a sort of strange folk drone, full of depth and hidden melody—he describes it as "coastal slurtronic folk." His EP, called Lowermoor, is about the Camelford water poisoning of 1989, so the music marries the political and personal effects of that disaster with the use of samples, a sort of landscape drone and singing. It's extremely unusual and very brilliant. The packaging for the releases is quite lavish. Is this something that's important to you? Primarily, the packaging has to support the music contained within, but I've always felt sleeve design communicates the sincerity and commitment of the artist and label. I love lavish packaging as long as it doesn't overshadow the content. I want the More Than Human records to be desirable and collectable. The conceit that it's an archive from the future or alternative world means it should be fun to get each instalment as it comes out. It appeals to the little kid collector in me.