Hardpan Records

A foot under the Salt River Valley the soil sets into caliche — a cemented layer a shovel will not go through. You break it with a pick or you plant nothing. Teddy Almanza's father laid irrigation line across Maricopa County for thirty-one years and told his son that breaking hardpan was the only honest work in the valley, because it was the only work where you could see at the end of the day how far you had got.

Hardpan Records has been in Tempe, Arizona since 2007, financed originally by nineteen months of publishing money from one alternative radio single by a band that ended badly. It has moved office twice, both times about four hundred yards. There has never been a Los Angeles branch and we mention this more than we need to.

What gets signed here is rock and alternative, defined loosely on purpose. The working definition is an argument, at volume, that the person making it cannot get out of. Instruments are not part of the test. What is: a live room with a person in it, drums gridded loosely or not at all, guitars recorded loud in small buildings in serious heat, bass you feel in the floor, and a voice that has not been asked to lose its accent. Songs about work, distance, debt, heat, and driving. Endings that stop rather than resolve.

We do not sign development deals. We have turned down more records for sounding expensive than for sounding cheap. We have never made a band photograph themselves looking wistfully away from the camera.

For sixteen years none of that was principle so much as arithmetic — it is easy to refuse a compromise you could not have afforded to take. That changed recently, and we are still finding out what we are. Somebody in this building once told a twenty-year-old that her anger was a branding problem. He does not work here any more. She does.

Records are pressed at a union shop, which costs about nine percent more, and there is a spreadsheet that says so.

Catalogue numbers run HPN-### from 2007. They are assigned when a contract is signed rather than when a record ships, which is why there are gaps. One of them is HPN-100, and we are not going to pretend we do not know what it is.