Interwebs Find of the Week: David Keenan's Volcanic Tongue label

In search of flamboyant avant-garde on a Sunday morning, I am scouring the pages at thewire.co.uk for their incredibly informative podcasts (look for Adventures in Modern Music). David Keenan seems the man about town in the world of The Wire. Free Folk, New Weird America, Hypnagogic pop: these are all his contributions to the practice of genre naming and getting to decide which artists get to be lumped into those categories.

David Keenan is the owner of the Glasgow label, record store, and distributor Volcanic Tongue, which Wikipedia says is concerned mostly with "free folk, psych, Japanese underground, noise, avant-garde, free jazz, blues, experimental, garage punk/DIY, minimal synth, drone, Industrial, sound poetry, prog, american primitive, private press, acid folk, classic 60s/70s rock, basement scum & assorted outsider modes". I imagine the shop being similar to our own Atom Heart on Serbrooke and Crescent, it seems to have the same lust for obscurity.

Onto their .com page, I adventured, and discovered where Mr. Keenan gets his inspiration for his genre-defining Wire articles. Oh the beauty of having a world of music at your fingertips and getting the job of sifting through it, naming what you hear, and then sending it out for the world to accept as unquestionably authoritative.

Who is to say that we can't all be our own genre-namers? It doesn't seem necessary for us to standardize labels while the existence of an online community that has the tendency to want to rename and reorganize the world in Twitter-speed. More marriages between this decade's crunk core, dubstep, hyphy, screamo will equal something like (insert name here)......